WSJ: “Lew Wilcox and Bobby Rohrbach Jr. met in the summer of 1962, riding their bikes together in a small southern Ohio town. These days, every Saturday, one picks the other up and they go out for breakfast, run errands and talk about families, home repairs and how the world is changing. If one can’t remember a place or name, the other can fill in because they so often lived the same story. They didn’t outgrow the other or leave the other behind and still live within about 5 miles of their childhood homes. “I have a lot of friends but there’s something special about our friendship,” says Lew, 75, of his friend, Bobby, 73. Lew Wilcox and Bobby Rohrbach have been best friends for the past 60 years. Good friends are good for us. They help us get through bad times, listen when we need them and offer advice. A lack of someone you can confide in can lead to loneliness and isolation, which have been labeled a public health threat, on par with smoking and obesity. Yet as important as they are, people have fewer close friendships than they once did.”
Ajit Ranade: “Kota has a majority of students from states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Behind each suicide, there may be hundreds or thousands of other disheartened souls that didn’t end in suicide. Yet, enrolment in Kota has doubled in the last three years. More than 200,000 aspirants clock up to 18 gruelling hours of study, seven days a week. Such is the power of the lure of the lottery that are these entrance exams…In India, high quality and affordable institutions are too few; they are oases amid much mediocrity. To make matters worse, the salaries of IIT graduates are shooting sky-high. We thus have the paradox of a vast number of half-empty engineering colleges even as a mad scramble ensues for IITs, where the chance of getting in is less than 1%. In recent years, the budgetary allocation to higher education has increased, leading to the setting up of new IITs and AIIMS. But compared to peers, our share of expenditure on higher education is pathetically low. For a country aiming for high and inclusive growth, which is impossible without a large stock of high-quality human capital, this neglect of education is scandalous. We also need to examine the quality of spending, and the governance model. Public school teachers need to be accountable to parents who are the real stakeholders in early education.”
Jonathan Malesic: “College is a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do. Capacities like an ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry or a keen moral imagination may not pay off financially (though you never know), but they are part of who you are. That makes them worth cultivating. Doing so requires a community of teachers and fellow learners. Above all, it requires time — time to allow your mind to branch out, grow and blossom.”
WSJ: “A mistake people often make when they’re trying to rejigger their sleep schedule is to start by hopping into bed earlier. Beginning with an early bedtime can backfire and cause other problems, like insomnia, Martin says. “We don’t want people getting into bed if they’re not sleepy,” she says. Instead, set a consistent wake-up time first: Stick to the same time every day, even on weekends. If you need to shift your wake-up time earlier, do it gradually, moving it about one-half hour every two or three days, says Dr. Fariha Abbasi-Feinberg, medical director of sleep medicine at Millennium Physician Group in Fort Myers, Fla.”
