Articles

The problems in mentor-mentee relationship in our society has been discussed from an experience based approach. Mentors should become special friends to the mentees and might eventually rise to the level of friend, philosopher and guide. However, all seeds do not make big trees. So, a friend plus position for the period of cooperation is good enough. Mentor and mentees may be close in age like classmates or they may have age gap of one or two generations. Mentees like to see mentors to be slightly advanced co-thinker of the problems faced by them.

I abhor the practice in which a guide is assigned to a student immediately on entering the graduate school and the guide looses no time in proposing a problem – something that unfortunately happens all too often in our universities.

A mentor-mentee relationship is a crucial one in the professional lives of both the persons. It has to be handled with utmost care and sensitivity.

Mentoring carries the responsibility of enabling someone to move out of debilitating circumstances; it is much more than the term that has emerged as a catchphrase in an NGO-ized women’s studies discourse—“capacity building.”

 The schema of learning and teaching presents itself as a mutual experience for both the artist and the one who wants to be an artist, distinctions that are difficult to make sometimes.