EduSat - Education Initiative by the Indian Govt.

Today's experience at Vigyan Prashar's office was rather different. I am now used to speaking on health related matters to gatherings of hundreds of people. My smallest audience till now was probably a group of seven ladies at a private gathering at a close friend's residence.

Today I was speaking from a virtual classroom inside Vigyan Prashar's studio. I was connected to the students through India's education satellite, EduSat.

The topic was the same...'Breast Self Examination -Why? When? How?' What was different was the audience. I was not seeing my audience who, I am told, were viewing the program in their schools and offices across India. There were schools, colleges and offices in UP, Kashmir, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Arunachal Pradesh, etc from where students had logged in to attend the health tutorial. It was strange having to talk into a camera, with not much reaction on the face of the camera person. I was wondering if she really bothered what I was speaking about! But she was prompt to focus on my hands when I demonstrated the examination on the mannequin.

After the lecture, came the questions and it was a nice experience speaking to girls in schools from different states and clearing their queries. A new experience for me altogether.

EduSat, the world's first dedicated satellite for distance education, has made virtual classrooms a revolution in Indian education. Kerala was the first state to start virtual classes through EduSat in 2005. Today, as I spoke, a school in Kashmir was launching its virtual classes with my program.

Preventing Major Non-Communicable Diseases

International World Health Day... I was one of the judges for a poster making competition at a management institute in Ghaziabad.

There was overwhelming response from the students. There were over 90 students who had participated in the poster making competition. Some of the posters were very well designed. There were innovative ideas too.

Many of the students had listed out 10-20 harmful substances found in cigarette smoke. There were some posters that depicted the many ways in which tobacco acts on the different systems of the body. I was really impressed with the amount of homework the undergraduate students had done. Awareness is probably the first step towards abstinence from smoking.

After the competitions, there was a 2 hr lecture session on health awareness. Dr Agarwal introduced the term 'non-communicable diseases' and discussed the signs and symptoms of common non-communicable diseases (heart disease, diabetes, cancer etc). I spoke on the preventing measures common to these three  diseases...tobacco control, eating right and exercising.

Tobacco Awareness Workshop

Last afternoon, I was speaking to a group of students at ABES Engineering College, Ghaziabad on the topic "Tobacco & Your Health: Make an Informed Choice". It was a new experience for me to talk about tobacco and that too to a group of youngsters who had 'heard too much about tobacco' and did not want to receive any new gyaan. Our preworkshop assessment showed that though 93% of the students answered over 50% of the questions about tobacco correctly, they actually needed to know a lot more. Of the 214 respondents, only 8 had answered all the questions correctly. That's less than 4%.

My book titled "Things You Always Wanted to Know About Tobacco" is almost done. It's a book targeted at school goers. Hope it clicks well with them. There's already lots of information about tobacco all around. I am just trying to collate these together.