"HOORAY, summer vacations are here! No school from tomorrow. Now 45 days of unlimited cartoons, movies and computers." Tomorrow arrives, but so does the school bus! The bright yellow 25-seater rolls in at 9 am to find Junior waiting with neatly groomed hair, still wet from the recent bath. Satchel in hand, he boards the vehicle to a school that promises to fulfil every child’s fantasies and meet every parent’s aspirations.

• What parents should know

Secret love lives of celebrities
Suraj Saraf
NAPOLEON, one of the greatest generals of history, was a victim of a sex scandal; Hitler, Mussolini and Franco had secret lovers; Marry Ann Chaworth was the only woman who broke the heart of the romantic poet Byron; D.H. Lawrence’s wife had an Italian army officer as her lover who was the model hero of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; Essex who was favourite courtier of Queen Elizbeth I was in fact her secret lover; and Einstein the brightest mind and the most famous scientist of the twentieth century had a crush on a Russian spy.

A TRIBUTE
A scholar par excellence
V.N. Datta
I CAME to know R.K. Kaul when we were contemporaries in Government College, Lahore. In 1945, he passed his B.A. (Hons) in English with flying colours, standing first in the Punjab. He was assistant editor of Ravi (the college magazine), while Abdul Islam, later the Nobel Laureate, was its editor.

A sage on my bookshelf
I.M. Soni
I follow this advice: next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books. In Tune with the Infinite (Ralph Walds Trine) is memorable to me for two reasons. I stumbled on it, figuratively, at a pavement "book shop" in Sector 15, Chandigarh, when I was looking for the back number of a magazine which had carried an article of mine.

Hobbies bring out the best in you
D.C. Sharma
DO you have a hobby? If not, you must have one. It can bring in fresh mental vigour into your life! Dr Robert Root-Bernstein, professor of physiology at Michigan State University (USA), recently discovered that scientists make their best discoveries not in their labs but outside the lab.