Extempore Topics for Exams & Competitions

My answer is one line: social media connects the already-connected and divides everyone else. That is not a bug — the feed is designed this way, and I will defend it before I offer any fix.

Connection was the advertisement; division is the business model. Outrage keeps us scrolling far longer than agreement ever did. Every platform I use earns more when my neighbour's opinion makes me angry than when it makes me curious — and that one incentive decides what two billion people see each morning.

I saw both sides within a single week in my own family. My uncle in another city watches my grandmother's festival videos every day — that is genuine connection across a thousand kilometres. The same week, a classmate posted an opinion about our college fest, and by evening strangers had split into two camps insulting people they had never met. Same person, same week, same platforms. What decided which happened was not the technology — it was whether the algorithm could make money from our anger.

So I stand by my line: it divides more than it connects — not because people became worse, but because division became profitable. Fix the incentive, and the connection we were promised can finally arrive. Thank you.

Teachers will not be replaced — they will be reassigned, from delivering information to doing the one thing a machine still cannot: being believed.

The lecture is already dead; a recorded one is free, pauseable and better paced than most of us ever were. What survives is accountability. A student will disappoint a video without guilt, but not a person who remembers their name. The teacher's real job was never transferring content — it was transferring standards: showing a fourteen-year-old what good work looks like, and refusing to accept less.

During board exam season I watched this play out with a friend. She prepared almost entirely from AI chatbots — instant explanations, unlimited patience, any hour of the night. Her marks rose in every subject that had clean, checkable answers. But in the one subject without fixed answers — the essay — she was stuck, because no machine could tell her whether her writing was honest or merely fluent. Then one teacher read two paragraphs, said 'this sounds like everyone, where are you in it?', and changed how she wrote from that day on. That single sentence was the entire difference between the app and the human.

So AI reassigns teachers — downward in status, upward in importance. The information was never the hard part of education. Being the person whose judgement a teenager actually trusts: that was always the job, and it still is. Thank you.

Marks measure exactly one ability — reproducing what is expected, under pressure, within three hours. Calling that 'ability' flatters the exam, not the student.

A mark sheet rewards memory, compliance and exam temperament. But every workplace I can name pays for different abilities entirely: tolerating ambiguity, cooperating with people you did not choose, finishing things nobody is checking. Those are never graded — which is precisely why marks predict admission far better than they predict careers.

In my own class, the topper could reproduce an entire chapter under exam conditions — genuinely impressive, and I do not mean that as an insult. The same year, a classmate organised our college fest: vendors, budgets, forty volunteers, three failures a day, no syllabus and no timer. Years later, one of them runs a small business and the other runs her revision. I will not tell you which is which, because both abilities were completely real. Only one of them ever appeared on a mark sheet — and our system still calls the other one invisible.

So: marks are honest evidence of one narrow ability — never a measure of the person. Treat them as a toll ticket for the system: pay it, move on, and never confuse it with the destination. Thank you.

Remote work is here to stay — but not in the form we celebrated in 2021. What survives is hybrid, and the office is returning as a place you choose, not a place you are watched.

The pandemic ran the largest workplace experiment in history, and the results split cleanly down one line. Work that can be written down — code, documents, analysis — went remote and stayed productive. Work that depends on presence — trust, apprenticeship, the urgent chaos of a real crisis — pulled people back within two years. The future of the first category is remote; the future of the second is still a room.

My cousin's firm went fully remote and publicly swore it would never lease an office again. Two years later, it signed a lease for three floors — not for surveillance, the founder admitted, but because new hires were learning three times slower without overhearing how the seniors actually worked. Meanwhile his wife, a data analyst, moved to another city entirely, kept her full salary, and meets her team once a quarter. Same company, same year, two opposite answers — because the nature of the work was different, and both arrangements were correct.

So yes — remote work is here to stay, for work that can be written down. Everything that must be overheard, imitated or trusted will keep pulling us back into rooms. The offices that survive will be chosen, not assigned — and that is the healthier version anyway. Thank you.

I agree, with one correction: money does measure something real — it measures options. What it never measures is outcomes. And a life is made of outcomes, not options.

Money's genuine power is buying options: which city to live in, which doctor to see, which Tuesday to take off. But the outcomes we actually want — respect that is not rented, health that is not negotiated, a calm mind on a Sunday evening — are famously out of stock no matter what you can afford. Chasing options as if they were outcomes is, I would argue, the modern definition of greed.

I have seen both sides inside one family. A relative spent his forties collecting options — a bigger house in a better postcode, a car with a longer option list than his neighbour's. His ledger was rich and his evenings were empty; he had bought a beautiful cage with excellent security. My grandfather retired on a teacher's pension and, by every measure that matters — time, sleep, grandchildren who competed to visit — died a wealthy man. Nobody in that family ever needed a spreadsheet to see which of the two had spent his one life well.

So yes — real wealth is never measured in money. Money is the down payment on a life; it is not the life. Earn it seriously, spend it honestly — and refuse, every single day, to confuse the down payment with the house. Thank you.