This issue of The New Leam brings with it the fragrance of festivity. It brings with it a time when splendid colors scatter in the air and life becomes beautiful. It’s a time when the sun shines with a golden hue and the skies are refreshingly blue. This is a time when the song of togetherness is sung by the blowing wind. We are indeed celebrating the beauty of colors. I feel and assume that you would agree that festivals and celebrations are nothing except metaphors that time uses, they remind us that despite the hardships and challenges that life brings, despite the ordinariness of our everyday work and schedule- moments of collective happiness are like an ocean to replenish and rejuvenate ourselves. They arrive in our lives like the spectacular moon that displays itself in full glory on a dark, lonely night. In other words, in a way it is these festivals that help us step back and celebrate the beauty of life and rediscover togetherness, interrelatedness and collective harmony. It is on this note that we wish our readers a meaningful season of happiness, celebration and togetherness. Perhaps it is in such moments that one is able to understand the meaning of the collective, the beauty of finding oneself as a fragment of the whole. This realization then helps us to understand that whatever one does, thinks and feels is interrelated to the whole, and this is the cosmic truth! As the entire team of The New Leam comes together to make this endeavor reach out to more and more minds and arouse a creative consciousness on life, education, culture and politics, it is you our readers who help us gain the strength to believe that possibilities are like the first rays of the sun that strike on the sacred Nanda Devi at the break of dawn. And that no matter how tough the path may be, walking is our ultimate dharma. Many great minds throughout the centuries have said that there are some paths on which it is easier to walk because those have already been explored but there are some paths that are more challenging, as these have not been taken by many people. Yes, we are on such a path and as we see this endeavor evolve, we only feel immense gratitude to all those people who have helped us to enrich ourselves with their creative insights and valuable feedback. It is with our intense labor and hard work that we present before you the April issue of The New Leam. Like all the issues in the past we hope that you would enjoy reading this one too. To incorporate variety and diversity in the magazine we have articles from a wide range of themes and styles. Where on one hand there is an interview with a leading educationist on his idea of pedagogic creativity amid constraints, there is an interesting piece on the increasing load of school bags and the decreasing happiness that children feel at schools, moreover there is an elaborate piece on how textbooks can be more inclusive and why they fail to be so today; for the interest of our readers we have also included two interesting articles on creative work that is being done in remote corners to make a difference in the way that knowledge is transmitted to children. Thus, in totality there is much for you to read and explore in this issue. With variety in the content and a diverse range of themes we hope that the ideas and hope that this venture symbolizes reaches out to more and more people. We hope that you would remain a constant companion of The New Leam and help us spread the colors of creativity, innovation and ideas to the remotest corners.
– Vikash Sharma
