Skip to main content

Bright strokes to pink health!

A recently held poster-making competition organized by HOPE Initiative (www.hope.org.in) on 22nd September in which 170 artistically-inclined school students representing 36 schools took part, once again drove home the point that perceptions and emotions, rather than dry bits of medical information, often shape our attitudes towards health and its hazards.



Pix 1: Students pouring imagination and colours on to their posters.
The Governor of UP Shri BL Joshi, who graced the ceremony in Lalit Kala academy as chief guest, expressed appreciation and intrigue at the imaginative and creative ways in which students from class 6 to 12 had depicted topics ranging from “Life Style Diseases” to “Road Traffic Accidents”.



Pix 2 : Shri BL Joshi surveying the posters
“Health” can be as boring a topic, if students are lectured on the virtue of eating apples, to an as amazingly exciting one if they are encouraged to research and present issues as they see through their own eyes. Sample this poster on “Life Style Diseases” by Arindam Aggarwal of Jaipuria School, which was unanimously judged the best.



Pix 3: Poster on Life Style Diseases
One of the reasons behind HOPE Initiative’s success to transform the topic of “health” that sounds remote to students to one that engages them, has been its innovative methods through which it has touched the lives of around 500,000 students and their families through 2500 programmes in 1200 schools of UP over 7 years.



Pix 4. : Award winning poster on hepatitis
What added icing to the cake were the glittering ceremony and the rare honour of receiving the prize from as important a person as the Governor, and getting their pictures with him clicked and saved for posterity.  “Health” got the boost among students it deserves. Cheers!


Pix 5 and 6: Awardees with Shri BL Joshi 

As published in HT City( Hindustan Times) dated 9 October, 2011.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching and Learning – is there a trick?

One of the big mistakes that we as parents and teachers often make, and that could stifle the mental development of our children, is to treat them as just small adults! In fact, it is this attitude of grown-ups that could be leading our next generation to become stereotyped conformists rather than original thinkers and innovators. And if we intend to drive home health messages and inculcate healthy habits we need to tailor our efforts to their cognitive potential. That children indeed think and discover the world differently was first noticed by a Swiss scientist Jean Piaget in the early 20th century. He studied his own three children grow and was intrigued by how they behaved, played games and learnt at different ages. With further observations and experiments, he propounded the theory of ‘cognitive development’, placed great importance on the education of children and is hailed even today, 30 years after his death, as a pioneer of the constructive theory of knowing.  He...

The Doctor’s Dress

The familiar white coat worn by physicians as their distinctive dress for over 100 years, has started generating  murmurs  of controversy. It is not uncommon to find the blood pressure to be higher when measured by a white-coat-wearing-doctor in the hospital or clinic than the readings obtained at home by relatives.  This is due to the anxiety that the white coat and the hospital setting evokes in patients, and has been termed “White Coat Hypertension”. Mature clinicians often routinely subtract a few points from these measurements when entering records in case charts or calculating the dose of anti-hypertensive medications to be prescribed. The white coat scares children too.  Kids often express their dislike for this dress by crying and screaming and by denying access to their bellies or chest for examination by paediatricians in this attire. Many pediatricians across the world have folded up their white coats and taken to informal colourful dressing to...

Questions from a Doctor’s Life

There is hardly any person in Uttar Pradesh who has not heard of Dr D K Chhabra, a senior neurosurgeon, who died recently. Over the decades his expertise, pragmatic advice and popularity had broken the shackles of his narrow surgical field coming to be known as a “brain-specialist”and a genuine adviser for all health problems. I got to know him in 1987 when I joined the upcoming Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGI) in Lucknow as a young member of the faculty in Gastroenterology. He had moved from his alma mater the KG Medical College where he is still regarded as a legend. An omnipresent bachelor doctor living in the duty room readily available to help anybody anytime.He was tasked to heading and developing Neurosciences at SGPGI. He had an eye for detail and was tasked additionally by the director to set up not just his department, but the whole hospital, the building, equipment and the campus. DKC was a tall and handsome man who spoke little. But when he did inl...