“I may be the first woman in this office but won’t be the last… Every little girl watching tonight sees that this is a country of possibilities. And to the children of our country, regardless of your gender, our country has sent you a clear message: Dream with ambition, lead with conviction and see yourself in a way that others might not see you, simply because they’ve never seen it before, and we will applaud you every step of the way.”– Kamala Harris, vice-president elect of the US (November 8) “In school education we will have a focused intervention in early childhood education. The silos we have built – arts, commerce and science – will slowly wither away.” – Amit Khare, secretary, Union education secretary, on the National Education Policy 2020 (India Today, November 23) “Close the bars and keep the schools open. Obviously, you don’t have one size fits all. But as I said in the past, the default position should be to try as best as possible within reason to keep the children in school, or to get them back to school.” – Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, USA, on why schools should reopen (ABC TV, November 29) “There should be a national debate on the kind of an agriculture we want 20-30 years from now. Do we want a corporate-driven agriculture or a community-owned agriculture which is the basis of Indian existence? Do you want a chemical-driven agriculture, an agriculture which is indifferent to climate change or do you want an agriculture based on agro-ecological principle and practice? They have to get the victims of the agrarian crisis to stand in the central hall of Parliament for three days and explain to the nation what the agrarian crisis actually means and what it has done to them.” – P. Sainath, founder-editor of the People’s Archive of Rural India, on the farmers protests against the agriculture laws passed recently by Parliament (Indian Express, November 30)
