"The relation between a teacher and a student is not that of guru-shishya. It has become more of a client and service provider relationship."
Veteran film-maker Prakash Jha, whose feature film Aarakshan based on caste reservations in education, is due for release this month (Deccan Herald, July 6)
"Educators abroad focus at all levels of education, on developing knowledge (recall), comprehension (understanding), application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation abilities of students, while in India the emphasis is on developing the recall ability."
Prof. Parvez Ahmed, head of the computer science department, Sharda University, on what ails Indian education (India Today, July 4)
"Unless you have the question ‘what can I do?’ (for the people) in your mind, your education won’t even be worth the value of the paper on which your degrees are printed."
N.R. Narayana Murthy, chief mentor Infosys, at the 11th convocation ceremony of the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (July 10)
"This is the most humble day of my life."
News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch at a public hearing before a committee of British MPs investigating the role of News of the World in a phone-hacking scandal (July 18)
"The middle class… does not want to be reminded that the vast majority of Indians live in squalor; a squalor so deep that few places on earth... can match it. It is not that middle class Indians do not know this. They just do not want to be reminded of it. And the challenges of removing this squalor seem so massive and unsettling to their lifestyles that they would rather focus on something more tractable. Corruption fits the agenda of what seems controllable."
Kanti Bajpai, professor at Oxford University, in the Times of India (July 23)
"The compromise where I live is to privately pay the municipal cleaner to do the job for which the municipality already pays him out of what we pay the municipality."
Well-known journalist Sunanda Datta-Ray writing in the Business Standard (July 30)