Shakespeare Time

It is said that that the fundamental vices of the mind of man are  Kama (lust, desire), Krodha (anger, hatred), Lobha (greed, narrow mindedness), Mada (pride), Moha (delusion, emotional attachment) and Matsarya (envy, jealously). These are universal ideas present since time immemorial, irrespective of theology and philosophy. This makes Shakespeare relevant even today, as he explores these very values in man and the duality that exists in man, such as love and betrayal, jealously and friendship, bravery and cowardice, indecision and ambition, dishonor and morality.

Shakespearean characters have also become synonymous with certain characteristics eg: a couple in love on a tragic path are Romeo and Juliet. The current world around us and even our history is filled with such themes and such flaws. For example, we witness unscrupulous real-life dictators just like Macbeth (eg: Gadaffi, Sadaam). 

In addition to the universality of themes and characters, his works have provided a rich addition to the modern English vocabulary eg: words like assassination, outbreak, upstairs, bloodstained etc.  All these aspects make Shakespeare's plays timeless and relevant even for the modern reader.

This year we got to do Macbeth - filled with cauldron-stirring witches,  Scottish Generals, runaway ambition and a veritable blood-bath. Whew!

The Making of a Research Paper - Dopamine

Your teacher springs a research paper on you. What do you do? This is the Language course but the research topic was to be science-related. I could hear the virtual sighs of my classmates. Not everyone is a fan of science!!!

Choosing a research topic is probably the hardest thing in starting a research paper. There are just so many topics - the environment, the medical sciences, space.... Where do you start and where do you end? Your paper demands a tight thesis statement, especially if it is limited to 2400 words.

The process was interesting though. Lessons on plagiarism, and correct formatting of cited works. Putting citations in the correct MLA format just got a lot easier with sites like easybib.com. Put in all the information about your source and voila, out comes the nicely formatted output with all the italics and commas in place. It is not just a case of citing sources at the end but correcting referencing them during the course of your paper.

There were lessons on our interests and motivations, writing the thesis statement and outline. Our initial draft had to be turned into turnitin.com (checks for plagiarism) before it was submitted to the teacher for grading. And the best part was that if you got above 90 % in the first draft, you did not have to do a final draft and got full credit. 

So here's my research paper on the neurotransmitter Dopamine

Link to Paper

- Hari Srinivasan

Anonymous said...

Great Research!

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