March 9, 2014

On March 9th, the class was immersed in polishing the ideas for our presentation of 9th grade Balavihar. As an unorthodox group of intelligent children, we have decided to make a short movie portraying guunas and how our actions affect us. At the beginning of class, Amit Uncle came in to critique our ideas for the presentation. Using the suggestions from him, along with the class, a small group of play writers revised the movie to be more coherent and easier to understand. Luckily, our intelligent group of students have strong opinions and voice them to better the movie. It is "crunch time" and our class is Just focused on finishing this ambitious plan of a movie for the presentation.

- Rahul Pemmaraju

March 2, 2014

In class on Sunday March 2nd, the students reflected on any questions that they had come across. These questions were pertaining to doing the right thing and choosing between dharma and adharma  Since many students might face big decisions to make in their high school lives. One student asked Radha aunty why God would listen to her prayers and help her, when there were more people suffering from more serious things such as leukemia or other types of cancers. Radha aunty answered saying that maybe God had given her those thoughts, telling the student that maybe she could do something to help those people suffering. Then the students talked of any doubts that they might have had or roadblocks they might have hit about their beliefs during the course of their lives. The difference between faith and belief was debated. Finally an agreement was reached that  our beliefs are things that we are thoroughly convinced of. Usually (but not always) they are ideas, concepts that we gather through acquiring information and experience. Because of that, our beliefs can change over time as we gain more knowledge and experience more things throughout our lives. However faith includes our beliefs, but it is bigger than that. Faith is defined as BELIEF qualified by Knowledge. Faith requires action. If it doesn’t move us to do something or say something – actually take some kind of action – it’s not really faith.

- Disha Hegde