“An Empty Mind is a Devil’s Workshop”

An empty mind is a devil’s workshop. All the negative thoughts will breeze into an empty mind”, said Ms Subita Nair, the Executive Director of EWRF to a group of standard Six students at SJK (T) Bangi. What she meant was when students sit and do nothing, their minds are prone to be influenced by all the negative thoughts which would rope them into unhealthy activities such as petty thefts, smoking, consuming alcohol, etc.

In order to keep the students from frittering their time away, she called on them to constantly read beneficial books, magazines and newspaper whenever they have free time to enrich their minds with positive thoughts.

Without mincing of words, the Executive Director put her thoughts to the students before handing over the Tri-lingual Dictionary to 28 students at SJK (T) Bangi on 8.8.2007. The dictionaries were given out to the students as additional reference materials apart from the various books which were already given to them under the Project Read that is being carried out by EWRF at the school since March. The project is aimed to inculcate the reading habit among Tamil school students and to increase their proficiency level in English.

She urged the students to take full advantage of the opportunities given to them for their betterment. Reading will build up their self-esteem and confidence which will prepare them mentally to face challenges, especially when they move up to secondary school, i.e. the school environment, the syllabus and multi ethnicity.

K. Durgashini, one of the students who was given the dictionary, was overjoyed as she did not have any dictionaries at home. “Now I am happy that I have been given a dictionary which I can use to improve my level of proficiency in English. Before I joined in Project Read, I had hardly read any English books. Now I read English books often through this project and it helps me to construct sentences in English easily”, said Durgashini proudly.

Vinod Mogan, another recipient of the Dictionary said that the Trilingual Dictionary would enrich his proficiency level not only in English but also in Bahasa Malaysia and Tamil. “Since the mediums of instruction in the secondary school are Bahasa Malaysia and English, now I will be able to polish up my skills in both languages with the help of this Dictionary and I am certain I will perform better in my studies”, said Vinod confidently.

EWRF fervently hopes that its efforts in bringing the student community to the peak of success would bear fruit in the long run. What is consistently needed is the continued participation of parents in their children’s education.