Today is an important day for me.
According to Hindu calender, `Vyaasa Puja' is performed on this day every year. Vyaasa Maharishi was a great teacher. I'll write more about him when I find time.
Today is the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Dickens, the famous English writer. I had the pleasure of reading his works as a school boy. I continued my interest in his books well through my college days and during my 30 years long career. I have used his writings (particularly `Oliver Twist' and other such novels) not only when teaching English literature to my students but also in teacher development programmes when handling contemporary issues such as `quality classrooms' and `equity in education'.
On the other side of the Atlantic lived Mark Twain, whose works were also very popular among children in those days. I don't think that children can easily forget characters such as Tom Sawyer. I liked his novels very much as they were like travellogues (with incidents spun around river Mississippi and the Southern States in the US). His writings had a profound influence in my own career as a freelance writer (which formally began when I wrote `Racial Discrimination', an article in memory of Rev Dr Martin Luther King, in the college magazine, during my student days in the late '60s).
Both Charles Dickens and Mark Twain made a mark by writing value based stories for children.
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