More and more college students are showing up to campus with something soft tucked into their luggage i.e.  a stuffed animal. Not for decoration, not for nostalgia and memories, but for comfort. For a generation raised amid constant global crises and personal pressures, little sources of comfort matters. Stuffed animals, for many Gen Z students, aren’t childish holdovers,they’re survival tools.

Colleges are overwhelming in today’s era. The freedom, the expectations, the loneliness that sneaks in between classes,it’s a lot, even for the most excited fresher. Being away from home doesn’t just mean missing family or familiar places; it means losing the quiet routines and objects that once made one feel okay. So when someone packs a teddy bear or a squishy dinosaur into their suitcase, they’re not regressing. They’re preparing. Comfort toys offer something the phone or planner can't, that is something nonverbal, steady, and calming.

Mental health challenges are nothing new on college campuses, but the conversation around them has changed. Gen Z is more open about anxiety, more familiar with the language of self-regulation, and more willing to seek out what helps,even if it looks a little unconventional. And honestly, there’s nothing irrational about clinging to a plush toy when the world feels unpredictable. It’s tactile, grounding, and deeply personal. You don’t have to explain yourself to a stuffed cow.

The association between soft textures and safety is backed by psychology. Sensory comfort matters, especially during moments of stress or panic. Weighted blankets, fidget cubes, cozy sweaters all part of the same impulse. Stuffed animals combine this sensory element with emotional resonance. They’re familiar. They’re usually associated with a version of you that felt safe, cared for, loved. Holding onto that isn't a weakness; it's a strategy.

This isn’t just an individual choice either. It’s cultural. Scroll through social media and you’ll see plushies sitting on dorm shelves, tucked into backpacks, or even riding shotgun in cars. There’s an aesthetic dimension here too, but that doesn’t make it any less serious. Gen Z doesn’t draw a hard line between function and form. They don’t think comfort has to be hidden to be valid. Making mental health tools visible cute, even is part of how they take ownership of them.

Older generations might see this as immaturity. That’s fine. But Gen Z isn’t asking for permission. They’re building new norms around care. The logic is simple: if something helps, use it. If something brings comfort during a panic attack or makes it easier to sleep, don’t overthink it. Don’t apologize for it.

A comfort toy doesn’t erase the pressure of deadlines or homesickness or figuring out who you are. But it can sit quietly next to you while you try. And sometimes that’s enough.

So yes, Gen Z is bringing stuffed animals to college. Not because they haven’t grown up, but because they’re learning how to grow up differently,softly, intentionally, and on their own terms.

By Aditi Sawarkar

Rest isn’t what it used to be. You can spend a whole day in bed, phone in hand, watching reels and still feel like you haven’t taken a single breath. You haven’t gone anywhere. You haven’t done anything. But somehow, you’re tired. Not just a little drained, wired, scattered and heavy all at once.

This isn’t laziness; it’s not even “too much screen time,” What’s happening is rooted deeper than that. For a lot of Gen Z, it’s become a constant occurrence. Scroll fatigue is that strange mental exhaustion that builds when your main form of unwinding is also a steady drip of stimulation.

We’ve confused stillness with rest. They’re not the same. You can lie still and be flooded with content ,fast cuts, loud opinions, beautiful people doing better than you, strangers fighting in the comments, algorithms guessing what will hook you next. And they’re not bad, exactly. Most of it is harmless on the surface. But the pace, the noise, the constant flicker,it adds up.

It’s like your brain is always half-on. Never quite present, never fully off-duty. And because so much of this scrolling happens during our “free time,” it wears a mask of leisure. You tell yourself you’re relaxing, but your nervous system isn’t buying it.

Here’s what makes it worse- scrolling feels passive. You’re not running errands. You’re just there. But behind the screen, everything is moving. Every second, a new idea, image, or microdose of drama. And your brain, trying to keep up, doesn’t get a break. It switches context a hundred times in an hour I.e from envy to amusement, from politics to a cat, from a horror show to fashion inspo. That constant flip, even when it feels mild, is taxing.

And the fatigue isn’t just mental. There’s a weird bodily tension too. The forward hunch,The subtle anxiety. The way your eyes blur after hours of motion that isn’t your own. Gen Z, more than any generation before, has grown up with this as the default. Phones aren’t a break from life now,they are the place where life seems to be  the most happening.

So when it’s time to rest, what’s the alternative? Silence feels boring. Reading takes effort. Meditation is hard. Even going for a walk without a podcast feels like wasted time.We are afraid of being with our own thoughts,And it’s not because Gen Z is incapable of slowing down. It’s because the systems we’ve built around ‘rest’ don’t allow for slowness. The pause button is missing. Everything wants to fill the gap.

The result? We end up chasing rest by overconsuming the very thing that’s making us tired. We scroll to relax and end up overstimulated. We wake up tired from sleep, because we spent the last hour before bed buried in blue light and extreme dopamine loops.

It’s easy to brush this off as a tech problem. But it’s also a cultural one. We’ve collapsed the boundary between work and rest, effort and ease, focus and distraction. And we haven’t taught ourselves how to rest in a world that doesn’t reward slowing down.

So no, you’re not broken for feeling tired all the time,even when you “haven’t done anything.” Your mind is doing more than you realize. Constant low-grade activity. Constant tiny hits of attention that are pulled in a hundred directions.

Rest, real rest, might look very boring now. But boredom is underrated. So is solitude. So is stepping away from the constant dopamine shots. Distancing ourselves from this is probably the best thing to do ,not because I'm saying it but because your body’s telling you it’s had enough. And maybe it’s time we listen.

By Aditi Sawarkar

In an effort to incorporate major local religious festivals, the district administrations in Thoothukudi and Tirunelveli districts of Tamil Nadu have declared local holidays on Monday, July 7, and Tuesday, July 8, respectively. The District Collectors of the two districts have issued notifications, which would allow government offices, schools, and colleges to celebrate the festival day.

The holidays have been announced with a view to keeping in mind big temple festivals which are religious and culture-oriented in the southern states. But the holiday announcement has several significant omissions. Public government examinations on July 8 will proceed as planned, with no respite for the students, teachers, and schools concerned. The authorities have declared formally that exams will continue uninterrupted regardless of the holiday scenario in the areas.

Also, as the holidays have not been notified under Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, the banking sector will not be impacted. The banks will function as per normal, and regular bank transactions will go on according to normal. However, government treasuries and subordinate offices shall function with skeleton staff in order to ensure essential services, e.g., government securities processing.

In Tirunelveli, July 19, Saturday, is declared a workday in lieu of the holiday notified. The decision is taken to weigh administrative work and the requirements of public service against the two-day holiday.

These localized variations have come about from attempts by the district administrations to weigh the ease of entry of people into meaningful cultural activity against the need for continuity in required services and academic calendars.

While local administrations are expecting their thousands of citizens to take part in regional celebrations, the public have been requested to be vigilant regarding safety precautions and assist civic organizations in ensuring that the celebrations are a seamless process.

It's that time of year again — admission season. But in West Bengal, something is off. The government has only recently extended the deadline for college applications to July 15, and the excuse proffered — "student convenience" — just scratches the surface. The true tale appears far more disturbing: thousands of college seats remain empty, and the state's previously dependable higher education system seems to be slipping from its hold on young minds.

Let's be honest — the figures don't lie. Only 3.2 lakh students have logged onto the centralised admission portal, a portal that was inaugurated a year ago with great haste, assuring transparency, convenience, and speed. But for a state with more than 90 lakh students in Class 12 alone in the recent few years, the number is disappointing, if not alarming. And on top of that, the 18.24 lakh number of applications — that's hardly sufficient to bring hope, and only 2,800+ non-Bengali students have been interested. It's not a system glitch — it's a reflection of dwindling faith.

To add to the woes, the late opening of the admission portal this year — because of a lingering legal battle over OBC reservation — appears to have compelled students to seek alternative options. And "elsewhere" increasingly implies other states. Bengal's brightest minds are catching trains to Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Bhubaneswar — in pursuit not only of better education, but of better safety, faculty, and employment opportunities.

Within classrooms, instructors are seeing what numbers cannot indicate: disappearing students. Departments which had hundreds of applicants are getting a dribble now. Some have dwindled to a third of what they had last year.

Students now aren't just pursuing degrees. They're pragmatic — taking vocational courses, skill-based training, or direct employment. The traditional route of a degree, with its old curriculum and prolonged, unsure admissions, appears more like a bet than a surety.

What's tragic is the disconnect. Bengal has talent. It has institutes with rich heritages. But between policy slippage, safety issues, and a shifting youth psyche, the connect is weakening.

If this deadline extension is intended as a temporary solution, it will not suffice. What we require is radical self-reflection — not merely about how students apply, but why they are choosing not to.

Bengal's education system needs to reinvent itself — or else face being made redundant by the very youth that it once held its head high serving.

In addition to the four-year BA Honours History course of Maharaja's College in Kochi, senior Malayalam actor and college alum Mammootty has been officially included as part of a new course named History of Malayalam Cinema. The second-year students this year will learn about his three-decade-long career, proposed by the college board of studies.

Mammootty has appeared in more than 400 films in five decades of acting and received three National Film Awards. The fourth-highest civilian award, Padma Shri, was given to him in 1998. He received various state and Filmfare awards, honorary doctorates in 2010, and Kerala Prabha from the state government in 2022.

The elective will have students examine Mammootty's career move from second lead to the top star, deconstruct his acting of historical and literary characters, the importance of his award-winning performances, and his experiments in foreign languages. It is a rare case of an actor from today being examined in an academic history course. The new syllabus also names other prominent Maharaja's notable alumni like India's first scheduled-caste woman graduate and Constituent Assembly member Dakshayani Velayudhan and reformers and thinkers like Arnos Pathiri and Tapaswini Amma.

While Mammootty's coming may come as a surprise, the faculty feels his corpus of work, diversity of performances and cultural standing make him a subject for scholarly examination rather than effusive fanboying. "Academic discernment and not sentimental fanboying" is Zakharia Thangal, head, History Department.

Mammootty's upcoming films are debutant Jithin K Jose's Kalamkaval with Vinayakan and multistarrer Patriot with Mohanlal and Fahadh Faasil by Mahesh Narayanan.

In this more complex world of technology, war, and runaway social change, human rights education is no longer an intellectual indulgence—but a matter of professional exigency for women and men committed to full, participatory living.

From street placards to courtrooms, human rights education is empowering people with the authority to know, claim, and fight for minimum professional rights that every working person—man or woman—ought to be aware of.

Regardless of your professional career as a teacher, technology specialist, physician, designer, or business owner, it's worth understanding your rights as an employee. Too many professionals are unaware of protections and benefits under world law and home law.

What Are Your Basic Professional Rights?

  • Equal Pay for Equal Work: There is to be no one given less pay on the grounds of gender, caste, religion, or background for doing equal work under equal conditions.
  • Right to Freedom from Harassment and Discrimination: Employers are legally bound to protect people against sexual, verbal, and psychological harassment, as well as discrimination against identity.
  • Safe and Healthful Working Environment: All workers are provided a healthy, clean, and danger-free working environment.
  • Right of Privacy and Online Protection: With increased AI observation and data tracking, communication privacy and personal information are guaranteed.
  • Leave and Parental/Maternity/Paternity Leave: All workers are entitled to paid leave, family leave, sick leave, and maternity leave as set by the laws in the geographical area.
  • Right to Join and Form Trade Unions: The workers are free to join and establish trade unions and bargain collectively for better terms of employment.
  • Right of Access to the Mechanism of Redressing Grievances: Law ensures the existence of an in-built reporting mechanism of grievances on a reasonable basis at all places of work.

Why Human Rights Education Matters?

Human rights education empowers practitioners to recognize violations so that they can react legally and ethically and ensure others' rights. It's an interdisciplinary approach—applicable to AI and computer ethics in technology, workers' justice in business, ethical care in medicine, and women's equality in social science and law.

There are top-rate institutions such as LSE, Harvard, and Oxford providing human rights courses at an interdisciplinary level. There are regional institutions such as that of EMA in Venice providing such courses. JNU, Delhi University, TISS, and Tamil Nadu universities in India provide full-time and distance courses with specializations in gender rights, labour law, and public policy.

Scholarships like Open Society Fellowships, Erasmus Mundus, Fulbright, and NHRC scholarships enable young professionals to learn about human rights in action—anything from technology companies creating ethical AI, to nonprofits fighting for workers' rights.

Increasingly, employers are seeking human rights practitioners to bring a rights perspective to careers such as corporate governance ESG, digital governance, media accountability, and public health policy. Journalists, programmers, physicians, and economists alike are discovering compelling career tracks where responsibility meets rights.

The Bottom Line

Understanding your professional rights isn't so much about protection as it is about demanding accountability where it counts most. Systematic late payments from employers or HR departments aren't merely administrative oversights—they are evasions of core worker rights.

When senior administrators or HR delay pay, allowances, or reimbursements without explanation or fair process, they subvert trust, destabilize incomes, and damage the ethical consensus of the workplace. Staff—whether senior or on contract—have a right to be paid for their work in good time. It's not a favour; it's a legal and moral right.

Human rights education prepares professionals to see such delays as part of a pattern of disrespect, and to act on them. Ethical responsibility for HR and leadership entails ensuring all workers are paid in full and on time—not sometimes, but always.

Late payments in the modern workplace aren't merely poor practice—they are a violation of dignity. And silence at the top is complicity.

It will be denied new student admission for the next upcoming academic session 2025-26. But already admitted till 2024-2025 session will be permitted to complete their programme

National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) derecognized 2,962 Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs) of the nation for not uploading Performance Appraisal Reports (PARs) online for the years 2021-22 and 2022-23 after sending show-cause notices in March and April.

The colleges will be debarred from admitting new students for the upcoming year 2025-26. But students who have been admitted up to the academic year 2024-2025 can proceed with the programme.

NCTE, which is responsible for the task of making sure there are norms and standards in teacher education, made it obligatory to submit PAR in September 2019 so that only authenticated institutions can try fulfilling NCTE norms, standards, and guidelines. While submitting PAR, colleges need to submit a list of documents to the council, such as faculty details together with qualification records, institute finance statements, together with geo-tagged documents and photographs.

NCTE had previously made December 30, 2024, the date for PAR receipt, with a double extension. In February 2025, the commission, with member of NCTE's Northern Regional Committee Harish Chandra Singh Rathore as the chairperson, established the five-member expert committee to recommend actions against defaulting institutions. Show-cause notices were sent by NCTE to defaulting institutions for failure to submit PARs for 2021-22 and 2022-23 in March and April 2025. Defaulting institutions were then given notices of withdrawal of recognition by NCTE in April and May 2025 for defaulting in accepting the notices.

"Those colleges have not filed their PARs since they were provided with double the extension and did not respond to show-cause notices. We will take action against additional TEIs as well if we discover that they are breaching our rules and regulations as well. We wish to maintain education standards at TEIs as per provisions under National Education Policy (NEP) 2020," Rathore told HT in an interview.

In light of intimation to defaulting institutions, recognitions to such institutes have been withdrawn with effect from academic year 2025-2026 as per Section 17 of the NCTE Act, 1993. According to Section 17 of NCTE Act, 1993, a regional committee is also authorized to withdraw recognition of a teacher education institution for default against the Act or rules and for course drop out, affiliation cancelled, false qualification to teach, and ban to admit students without recognition.

India's TEIs have been classified into four zones. According to information accessed from NCTE website, the maximum number of derecognised TEIs is in Northern zone at 1,225 (41.36% of the total of 2,962), followed by Southern zone with 960 (32.41%), Western zone with 748 (25.25%), and the minimum in Eastern zone with 29 (0.98%).

Uttar Pradesh dominates the North with 1,059 derecognised TEIs, or 86% of the region total and more than 37% of derecognitions within India. Tamil Nadu (361) and Karnataka (224) dominate South derecognitions. Maharashtra (571 derecognized TEIs) dominates other Western state rivals such as Gujarat and Rajasthan (63 each). West Bengal dominates the East with 18 derecognised TEIs.

Rakesh Mani Tripathi, Principal derecognised Dr Ram Prasanna Maniram Singh Mahavidyalaya, Ayodhya stated: "We have been conducting Bachelor of Education (BEd) since 2002. NCTE is recognising us for the first time for our college. We were unable to fill PAR in time. We are discussing with our teaching staff how we can appeal against the NCTE order.".

Shad Khan, Choudhary Bashir Khan Mahavidyalaya Meerut official also added, "We have been running BEd course since 2016-17 but this year NCTE derecognized our college. The college management committee is searching for the next move to appeal against the NCTE order."

As per NCTE, in case the institution is not content with this order, the institution can prefer an appeal under Section 18 of the NCTE Act, 1993 in online mode on the NCTE website within 60 days from notice. The provision has been made under the section for appeals against the orders of NCTE and it is mentioned that any aggrieved person can prefer an appeal before the council within the given time limit.

"Derecognised TEI persons can send their documents to appeal committee under various regional committees of NCTE. Appeal committee will consider their documents and make a fair judgment," Rathore added.

As per recent available data available on NCTE website, India as nation has 20,454 formally certified TEIs with highest number of them located in Northern Region (8,120 TEIs), followed by Western Region (4,928), Southern Region (4,757), and Eastern Region (2,649).

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