TLP-UPSC Mains Answer Writing
SYNOPSIS [7th August,2020] Day 51: IASbaba’s TLP (Phase 2): UPSC Mains Answer Writing (General Studies)
1. Why is emotional intelligence crucial to address mental health issues during the ongoing pandemic? Illustrate with the help of suitable examples.
चल रही महामारी के दौरान मानसिक स्वास्थ्य के मुद्दों को संबोधित करने के लिए भावनात्मक बुद्धिमत्ता क्यों महत्वपूर्ण है? उपयुक्त उदाहरणों की सहायता से चित्रण करें।
Demand of the question:
It expects students to write the importance of emotional intelligence to address mental health issues especially focussing on the impact of ongoing pandemic on mental health with relevant examples.
Introduction:
The covid-19 pandemic is leaving an unprecedented impact on the mental health of people. With the increasing number of cases of suicides, domestic violence on women the mental health issue came to forefront. Emotional Intelligence due to its multitude of positive way of action can play a pivotal role to address mental health issues during the ongoing pandemic.
Body:
Emotional intelligence refers to ‘the ability to identify one’s own emotions and those of others, harness and apply them to tasks, and to regulate and manage them’. Due to its direct co-relation with the mental health of the people, emotional Intelligence is crucial to address mental health issues during the ongoing pandemic in following ways:
Mental Health issues during the ongoing pandemic:
- Fear of exposure to disease: Children, Old age people and those who are fighting with long term illness, this section of population is at more risk of exposure.
- Fear and worry about one’s own health and the health of their loved ones, created an atmosphere of fear in the family which leads to have a negative impact on the productivity of persons in the family.
- Anxiety and threat to life: Health care professionals and frontline workers are the first line of defence and hence, fear to get infected, fear of loss of life overpowers their thoughts if their level of emotional intelligence is not that high.
- Ethical question of whether to save my own life or serve others: Essential workers such as employees in food sector, vegetable vendors, medical shop owners etc. might get depressed due to the fact that when the whole world is sitting inside their home and making sure that they and their loved ones are safe during pandemic, why I should be the only one who should take risk and work.
- Suicides of students and jobless people: In Jalandhar district of Punjab, 80 suicides are reported till date during pandemic-induced lockdown.
- Feeling of helplessness and vulnerable: The pandemic has exposed the harsh realities of rich-poor gap and extent of government facilities across the population. In this pandemic situation where people have no source of income due to lockdown their mental state deteriorated while addressing the question of from where to get money to eat.
- Also In a tragic incident, 16-year-old class 10 student allegedly committed suicide after she failed to attend online classes in the absence of a computer or a Smartphone.
- Deterioration of Mental health of family: The UN has described the worldwide increase in domestic abuse as a “shadow pandemic” alongside Covid-19. The cases of domestic violence have increased by 20% during the lockdown, as many people are trapped at home with their abuser.
- The rise in cases of domestic violence is due to the increased presence of the husbands and children in home. As it results in more work demand on women, women if fails to carry out a responsibility in home, faced physical and mental abuse inside the home. Hence, It resulted in the deterioration of mental health of whole family.
- COVID-19 positive patients mental health: The scale of impact on the mental health of the people who are getting treatment for COVID-19 is horrible. As many of them have faced social ostracization, feeling of loneliness overpowered them, and felt helpless in this situation.
- Lack of motivation: As a considerable section of the population lost jobs, and sat idle at home they lost their motivation to do better in life.
The COVID-19 pandemic induced lockdown has posed a great challenge in terms of different mental health issues. However, emotionally intelligent society can respond in proper way to these mental health issues of pandemic in following ways :
- Emotional intelligence in a way helps to tackle fear of exposure to disease by inducing right thinking, and supplementing the right course of action such as not leaving the home for unnecessary things or inculcating right habit of washing the hands properly to tackle the pandemics challenge.
- Social awareness: Emotional intelligence help the frontline workers and healthcare providers to look at this pandemic as an opportunity for them to help every person who might or might not get infection of covid-19.
- It will also help to have a positive impact on the health of patients who are treated by these health care workers.
- Motivation: Having a strong emotional intelligence to face the situation and get a desired output if imbibed, it will help to have a strong society with good character.
- Emotional intelligence due to its ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately, can help to reduce the domestic violence.
- The mental health of a person also plays a prominent role in recovery of an ill body. Hence, if a patient whose emotional intelligence is strong, he/she will not fall to the negative thoughts, and in turn they will respond the treatment well and will recover from the infection earliest.
- Self awareness: Emotional intelligence gives a greater awareness of self. So an essential service provider if understands that by doing his/her job, duty he/she is helping the people to tackle this pandemic then it will surely instil sense of doing duty for betterment of others.
Conclusion:
Emotional intelligence due to its characteristic to manage emotions so as to attain specific goals has potential to be more useful to reduce the impact of pandemic. Having a strong emotional intelligence in society will help to respond to the upcoming pandemic threats in future in right manner and tackle them successfully.
2. Why is rote learning not a good thing? Do you think children should be made emotionally aware and be imported with emotional intelligence through school education? Substantiate.
रट कर सीखना अच्छी बात क्यों नहीं है? क्या आपको लगता है कि बच्चों को भावनात्मक रूप से जागरूक किया जाना चाहिए और स्कूली शिक्षा के माध्यम से भावनात्मक बुद्धि के साथ आयात किया जाना चाहिए? पुष्टी करें।
Demand of the question:
It expects students to put forth their views on why rote learning is not a good thing. It also asks students to write about whether children should be made emotionally aware and be imported with emotional intelligence through school education.
Introduction:
Modern education in India is often criticised for being based on rote learning rather than problem solving. Preschool for Child Rights a child rights NGO states that creativity is not encouraged or is considered as a form of entertainment in most institutions and preference is given to rote learning to gain marks. Emotional intelligence can help to put aside the rote learning and develop the creativity in students due to its prominent characteristics.
Body:
Problems of rote learning:
- Promote Convergent Thinking: Rote learning trains a mind to solve problems with a single answer which is right, as opposed to meaningful thinking which allows the mind to reach different solutions.
- Deny Exploring Different Options: A teacher presenting information to students in a manner that doesn’t allow or encourage questioning and divergent thinking is encouraging rote learning.
- Makes People Passive Learners: Rote learners never learn to question and explore. Their minds are trained to receive information and recall it at the right time. These people develop their listening and writing skills but not their thinking and questioning skills. Taken out of their comfort zone, passive learners will be quiet and disinterested in the proceedings around them.
- Not Allowing Connections to Form: Since rote learning teaches just one answer, people who learn like this cannot make mental connections between the knowledge they already have, and reaching a solution to the problem they are working on.
- Not Promoting Understanding: Rote can be considered a “quick-fix” solution to gaining knowledge. It is the lazy person’s answer to teaching and learning. The teacher will inform the students of the answer to a particular problem without really explaining how the answer was reached or encouraging the students to find the answer for themselves.
- It Is Geared Towards Scoring: Learning should be something that promotes understanding and bases knowledge gained on how problems are approached and solved. In the rote learning method, the emphasis is on getting a higher score.
- Discourage Social Skills and sensitivity: Group studies, research and other factors that make up meaningful learning encourage socialization and learning from peers. Rote learning has the opposite effect because information has already been transferred by a single source, and it is the only one which is acceptable. This discourages discussions and further learning from social interactions.
It is very important to recognize that rote learning is not the most effective way to learn most things. Meaningful learning, where the learner is taught to question, think and arrive at a solution from a different angle is how true learning takes place. Emotional intelligence due to its characteristics can help a student to have meaningful learning in following ways:
- Self-awareness ability of emotionally intelligent student allows him/her to know which subjects are easy and hard. How to handle these subjects, which approach should be followed, what to learn from it and what are their respective applications.
- Develop Empathy: Having empathy is critical to be a good person in society. A student who knows the plight of the weaker sections of society can think to eliminate the plight of workers in more realistic way rather than just rote learning the problems and solutions.
- Management of stressful situations: Emotional Intelligence helps a student to respond to critical situation in life in right way. e.g. Performing well in exam induces stress in students, and emotionally intelligent student can tackle this stress like situation neatly.
- Motivation: Emotionally intelligent students can develop themselves in to better persons as the meaningful learning can motivate the students to have larger goals in life.
- Ability to Bounce Back from Adversity: Emotional Intelligence help students to bounce back quickly after a setback in exam. e.g. Students suicides can be stopped by teaching emotional intelligence and by making them emotionally aware.
- Social awareness: An emotionally aware student can understand the feelings of student from poor family who is not able to buy new clothes for school. Social awareness due to this will help a student to look for betterment of society in future.
Conclusion:
Emotional intelligence in the student is critical for their performance and learning in school curriculum. It will not just help to develop a good personality of student but at the same time it will also ensure an emotionally well aware and intelligent society which looks forward for growth and development of a nation.
3. In dealing with religious contentious issues, emotional intelligence plays an important role. Comment.
धार्मिक विवादास्पद मुद्दों से निपटने में, भावनात्मक बुद्धि एक महत्वपूर्ण भूमिका निभाती है। टिप्पणी करें।
Demand of the question:
It expects students to write both aspects of whether emotional intelligence’s plays a role while dealing with religious contentious issues or not.
Introduction:
Religious contentious issues arise over the teaching of science, certain religious practices, and the depiction of religion or religious figures in culture. In the age of science where a proof of things is essential to prove its existence, some religious belief and practises due to their inhuman nature emphasise the role of emotional intelligence of a person.
Body:
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to ‘the ability to identify one’s own emotions and those of others, harness and apply them to tasks, and to regulate and manage them’. Due to its direct relation with the emotions of the people, emotional Intelligence is crucial while dealing with religious contentious issues in following ways:
- Develops Compassion: EI is the ability to recognize our own and other people’s emotions; Hence, when people of different faiths and belief fights over religious contentious issues EI helps a person to talk-decide and act rationally.
- EI helps to control negative emotions, it in turn help to reduce the enmity between the people over the contentious religious issues. It also helps a person to protect his/her own religion and respect the other ones too.
- As Lord Buddha said “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else: you are the one who gets burned.”
- Helps to manage relations: As social awareness gets developed due to emotional intelligence, it promotes the felling of compassion and empathy between the people in turn reducing the contention in religious issues.
- Strong decision making: Self awareness about ones choices, belief, nature helps a person to act decisively if any threat to society occurs due to his/her act of religious practise. it may result in people leaving that religious practise and adopting a modern approach. e.g. Act of Sati was opposed by intellectuals like Raja Rammohan Roy.
- Conflict resolution: Emotional Intelligence help leaders to influence and mentor others and help in resolving the religious conflicts effectively.
- Ability to Bounce Back from trauma: Emotional Intelligence help people and leaders to bounce back quickly after a conflict which resulted in massacre of people due to religious contentious issues.
- For instance, Killing of Jews over ethno religious issue traumatised many people, but Victor frankle a psychologist and survivor of massacre helped many people to recover from the shock of massacre due to his emotional intelligence.
However sometimes this emotional intelligence is used by some miscreants and it proves to be a double edged sword.
- A leader who understands mass psychology can utilise any opportunity in the society to incite violence over the issue of religion. As he/she may play with emotions, religious belief of common people who are not emotionally aware and may spread religious contention in society by inciting them against the people of other religions.
- A person who understands that many people who have religious belief they are bounded by the hope that god will do better with them if they follow certain religious practises.
- Hence, if an emotionally intelligent person if uses his emotional intelligence in other way round and plunders the common people monetarily in the name of religion. Then it proves to be harmful to the society.
- This in turn would not resolve the religious contentious issues but will aggravate the religious contentious issues.
Conclusion:
Hence, inculcating emotional intelligence in the people for religious practise plays an important role by supplementing the rational decision making. It also ensure harmony in the society and promotes respect for other religions in people which prospects better future of society at large.
