Indian languages face threat of fossilisation, need revitalisation

India has now been a free country for 70-odd years. Over these decades, we have made progress in many spheres of activity but there is one area where things seem to be sharply deteriorating — the state of Indian languages. I am not merely referring to the 220-odd minor languages and dialects than we have lost since the 1960s but the condition of major languages with tens of millions of speakers. This is hardly the first time someone has raised this issue, but the usual thinking is that Indian languages are being hurt by mutual suspicion combined with the apathy of an English-speaking elite. However, there may now be an even bigger threat — fossilisation.

Harivansh Rai Bachchan is one of the most important figures in Hindi literature but his great grand-children are almost certainly more comfortable in English than in Hindi. This is neither a unique situation nor can it be blamed solely on lingering colonial attitudes in elite schools. Across the country, this is being experienced by rooted families who are proud of their linguistic heritage.

The professional usefulness of English too is not a credible explanation. Indians have long been comfortable with a link language that was different from what they used in daily life. Over the centuries, Sanskrit, Persian and English were used for government, commerce, legal documents, high culture and so on. Far from displacing local languages, they enriched them with new words, ideas and themes. This is why the greatest writers and poets in most Indian languages were themselves multilingual and happily borrowed from the link languages.

In my view, the current crisis in Indian languages comes from a set of interlinked factors that are holding them back from evolving with the times. The first problem is that school textbooks are hopelessly outdated. I have personally verified this for Bengali and Hindi, but also asked parents of children learning other languages.

In lower grades, textbooks will have a smattering of folktales, stories from the Panchatantra and the epics, the lives of folk-heroes and so on. These are acceptable as they are timeless; analogous to nursery rhymes and fairy tales in English. However, the rest of the material seems stuck somewhere between the 1930s and 1970s. A survey of the technology reflected in the stories is quite telling. Forget mobile phones and laptops, you will rarely find television sets and aircraft. It is still a world of steam engines and animal husbandry.

Matters do not improve in higher grades — a great deal of preaching about “good habits” and the need to help the poor. These may be worthy goals but why do Indian language classes need to be specifically burdened with them? There is simply no sense of fun in the material. This is no way to promote a language in a country where the young, including the poor, are so aspirational. Munshi Premchand’s Idgah may be a great story but, at the risk of offending his fans, it may no longer resonate with most school children.

The second major problem with Indian languages is that the output of innovative new literature has slowed drastically. Allowing for the odd exception, publishing is increasingly limited to literary novels aimed at winning government awards rather than engaging readers. Once there was a flourishing culture of writing science fiction, detective novels and travelogues in languages like Bengali but these have slowed to a trickle.

Less than a decade ago, pretentious literary writing was strangling Indian English publishing till the arrival of Chetan Bhagat, Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Patnaik. Whatever one thinks of their writing styles, there is no denying that they opened up the field. A similar revolution in popular writing needs to happen in other languages. The steadily improving editorial quality of Indian language newspapers shows that there is demand for good writing.

The third related problem is a dearth of translations into Indian languages. A Tamil or Marathi writer will be pleased that his/her novel has been translated into a foreign language. While this may be good for the personal reputation of the writer, it does little for Tamil or Marathi. A language is a medium for transmitting ideas and its repertoire grows as it absorbs material from elsewhere. The success of English lies in the fact that we can read Homer and Kapuscinski without having to learn ancient Greek or Polish. Therefore, inward translation is more important than outward translation. For several languages, translation is an area where government support may be critical to creating a minimum ecosystem of material.

Popular culture depicted in cinema and television are today the most important factors that have kept Indian languages alive. However, these will not be enough in the long run if they do not keep evolving by generating and absorbing new material that fires the imagination of successive generations.

Source: Hindustan Times, 6-10-2016

Theory of Evolution

ANIL K RAJVANSHI





In the beginning, space was in equilibrium with time. It was as if time was embedded in it.This space has been called `God' by Adi Shankaracharya, `Ishwar' by Patanjali and `Purusha' by Sankhya. It is similar to what scientists call the `event', just before the Big Bang. Then something happened to disturb the equilibrium and time came out. We still do not know what triggered that. With coming out of time, the space started moving since movement cannot happen without time.This movement of space resulted in eddy formation from which gravity came out and the formation of matter, worlds and life took place. Eddies are small vortex formed when anything flows. These are seen in the flow of water in rivers and canals. In air they give rise to production of drag on aeroplane and sometimes produce bumpy rides. Formation of eddies is like a new structure formed from the flowing material. These eddies apparently gave rise to the matter and to basic molecules of life that formed the visible world. This is what scientists call as production of matter from vacuum.
The life molecules started becoming more complex and led to life as we know it today. Life forms, whose `pinnacle glory' is human beings, will evolve and lead to entities who can manipulate space dimensions.
This evolution towards manipulating space and dimensions will continue till we would have exhausted dark matter and energy and reach a level where gravity and time will again be sucked back into space and the cycle will continue.

Slow down breathing to speed up your work

It Manipulates Emotional, Physiological State To Make Us Less Stressed And More Productive

Take a long, slow breath.Really , it'll help.
The idea that breathing exercises can somehow calm you down is an ancient one -yoga isn't a recent development, you know. But few people understand exactly how breathing can relieve stress on a physiological level and can even be used to increase workplace productivity .
The answer lies in the autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for the automatic functions that keep our body ticking. While most autonomic functions -such things as heart rate and digestion -are out of our conscious control, breathing is unique in that we can take charge, if desired. Not only that, but invoking different breathing patterns can have a sort of cascade effect, shif ting our entire autonomic nervous system between a state of rest and relaxation (scientists call this zone the “parasympathetic“ state) and the ready-to-rumble state of fight-or-flight (this is called the “sympathetic“ state).
In layman's terms, different breathing patterns can serve as a quick and often easy way to manipulate your emotional and physiological state in ways that allow you to be calmer, less stressed, and more productive. Our lungs are filled with receptors that tell our brains whether we are inhaling or exhaling, explained Dr.Patricia Gerbarg, an assistant clinical professor in psychiatry at New York Medical College and co-author of The Healing Power of the Breath. As we inhale, we activate the sympathetic state (the fight-orflight system). As we exhale, we activate the parasympathetic state (the calm and collected system). This is why yogastyle breathing exercises often involve long exhalations.
“For maximum productivity, you want to breathe in a way that will keep you in the parasympathetic zone so you are calm and stress-free, but not too far into it to the point where your mind is mush,“ Gerbarg said. To achieve offi ce zen, Gerbarg suggests a breathing practice called Coherent Breathing, which features equal-length inhalations and exhalations at a very slow pace, without holding your breath. For most adults, the ideal breathing rate is four and a half to six full breaths per minute1. According to Gerbarg, this technique is ideal because it strikes a balance between the benefits of both the parasympathetic and sympathetic states and can be done with little effort after a bit of training. Studies have also linked it to a reduced stress and increased cognitive performance.

Source: Times of India, 6-10-2016

Are We Living Life Or Living Our Mind?

Satsang: Swami Sukhabodhananda





Is not our mind just a flow of thoughts?Thoughts, most of the time, prevent you from experiencing the moment. Whenever there are thoughts, you are closed to this moment. Thought is an expression of memory and memory being the past, pulls you backward and not towards the present moment. Whereas life is in this moment, and one is meeting life with the past.This is one of the greatest errors in our living. Thought has its place, and it is not only overused but also used wrongly , causing inner chaos.
In life, you move either on a dream path or past (dead) path. What appears as thinking is nothing but an association of past thoughts, and foolish projections into the future with some hope of peace. In the process, you miss the dance of life which is in the present. Life's existence or the root is in the present, and you are flying with the thoughts of the past or imagining an illusory future. Present oriented consciousness and bliss are the same. Being unconscious of this fact is misery and hence unconsciousness and misery go together. So, one has to learn to look into present consciousness. Such looking is not through thought but silence, which is a state of no mind or a state of thought-free awareness. So, transform the energy from thinking to present consciousness.
What happens when we get identified with thoughts?
We have built a prison around ourselves, from which only we have to try and come out. I can only guide you. But you have to navigate your way out since you have created this inner prison. When we get identified with thoughts, we get identified with our past. We live our past. Most of us are living our minds. We are not living in the world, but we live our minds. When we get identified with thoughts, we are flowing with our beliefs. Thought is rooted in some belief, an idea, dogma or conclusion. All of them are riding on the common vehicle popularly known as desire.
Thought is another form of conclusion or another form of desire or idea. Now, what does desire do? It tells us that the future will be your saviour and when you get the object of desire, you will be happy . It fools you. Mind or thought convinces you that the future or getting the object of desire will make you fulfilled.
Once this happens, your thoughts gain strength and like an army , march forward. During this process, something else silently happens. You will be telling yourself that though you are unhappy now, you will be happy in the future. This hypnosis happens.
Thus, you are unhappy , and this unhappy person is seeking happiness.When the object of desire is fulfilled, who receives it? It is the unhappy you.So the unhappy self continues to be unhappy and instantly it projects another object of desire and again fools you to believe that fulfilment of this will lead to happiness.

Why the Nobel Prize winning discovery of autophagy matters

Disruption of autophagy processes of the cell has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes.

Nobel laureate Yoshinori Ohsumi’s work on mechanisms underlying autophagy — a fundamental process of degrading and recycling cellular components — has generated much interest in the science behind the biological process. In this article, we will aim to explain the significance of this discovery and the earlier work in this area.

What is autophagy?

The word autophagy originates from Greek words auto, meaning “self”, and phagein, meaning “to eat”, according to the release put up on the Nobel Prize website. The concept emerged during the 1960s, when researchers first observed that the cell could destroy its own contents by enclosing it in membranes – autophagosomes - for degradation.

Scientists discovered during the 1950s that the cell contained specialised compartments, with enzymes that digest proteins, carbohydrates and lipids. These compartments also helped with degradation of cellular constituents. During the 1970s and 1980s, researchers explained the working of a system used to degrade proteins.

Experiments on autophagy

Professor Ohsumi started working on protein degradation in the vacuole (the fluid-filled pocket found in the cell) in 1988. At that time scientists used yeast cells as a model for human cells. But he faced a major challenge; yeast cells are small and their inner structures are not easily distinguished under the microscope and thus he was uncertain whether autophagy even existed in this organism.

But he reasoned that if he could disrupt the degradation process in the vacuole while the process of autophagy was active, then autophagosomes should accumulate within the vacuole and become visible under the microscope. He cultured mutated yeast lacking vacuolar degradation enzymes and simultaneously stimulated autophagy by starving the cells. Within hours, the vacuoles were filled with small vesicles that had not been degraded. His experiment proved that authophagy existed in yeast cells. He had also figured out the method to identify and characterise key genes involved in this process. This was a major breakthrough.

Within a year of his discovery of autophagy in yeast, Professor Ohsumi had identified the first genes essential for autophagy. He studied thousands of yeast mutants and identified 15 genes that are essential for autophagy. Subsequently, he characterised the proteins encoded by these genes according to their function. The results showed that autophagy is controlled by a cascade of proteins and protein complexes, each regulating a distinct stage of autophagosome initiation and formation.

Professor Ohsumi studied the function of the proteins encoded by key autophagy genes. He outlined how stress signals initiated autophagy and the mechanism by which proteins and protein complexes promoted distinct stages of autophagosome formation.

Physiological functions

Autophagy can rapidly provide fuel for energy and building blocks for renewal of cellular components, and is, therefore, essential for the cellular response to starvation and other types of stress. After infection, autophagy can eliminate invading intracellular bacteria and viruses. Autophagy contributes to embryo development and cell differentiation. Cells also use autophagy to eliminate damaged proteins and organelles, a quality control mechanism that is critical for counteracting the negative consequences of aging.

Disruption of the autophagy processes of the cell has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders that appear in the elderly. Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic disease. Disturbances in the autophagic machinery have also been linked to cancer. Efforts are on to develop drugs that can target autophagy in various diseases.

If not for ProfessorOhsumi’s research in the 1990s, the world would not have known the fundamental importance of autophagy in physiology and medicine.

Reference: [Information sourced from The Nobel Prize website]

Keywords: Nobel Prize, Nobel Prize in Physiology, Nobel Prize in Medicine, Yoshinori Ohsumi, autophagy

Source: The Hindu, 3-10-2016

The battle over Bt cotton

While Monsanto and Indian seed companies spar, more worrying is the confused lawmaking underpinning regulation of patents

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) breed controversy like no other. Little wonder then that Monsanto’s much-maligned Bt cotton has spawned the mother of all intellectual property (IP) disputes in India, involving at least 15 different proceedings in various courts, government agencies and tribunals at last count.

Most proceedings appear to have come at the behest of certain seed companies led by Nuziveedu. Its founder, Prabhakar Rao, is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that these seed majors beget a better deal than what they bargained for when they first contracted with Monsanto to licence its proprietary GM technology.

A recent controversy centres around which of the two IP regimes governs the dispute: the Patents Act or the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act (PPVFRA). To me, this appears to be a false dichotomy and a red herring of sorts. Both these legislations apply and one does not necessarily trump the other. But first a word about the technological underpinnings of this dispute, so this point about co-existence can be appreciated better.

Monsanto and patent protection

Monsanto patented a number of components related to Bt cotton, a biotech invention involving the infusion of the Bt gene into the cotton genome. Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacteria whose genome codes for a protein that kills the bollworm, a pest that has perennially plagued the cotton plant. The patent does not cover the plant itself, as plants and animals are ineligible for patent protection in India, as are ordinary biological processes for creating them. However, microbiological processes (such as methods of creating transgenic varieties) and microorganisms (such as new and inventive transgenes and their constructs) are patentable under the terms of the Indian Patents Act, and Monsanto’s patents cover most of these components. It bears noting in this regard that Bt cotton technology was never static, but evolved over time to cater to the pest resistance that soon developed. While the technology pertaining to Bollgard-I was never patented in India (since this technology was discovered prior to India’s undertaking of Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or TRIPS commitments), Bollgard-II was, and it is this technology that is in dispute.

Using the patented technology, Monsanto created a host of donor Bt cotton seeds and distributed them to seed companies under specific agreements mandating the payment of royalties (trait fees), etc. Seed companies in turn used these donor seeds to introgress the desirable genetic trait (bollworm resistance) into their own specific hybrid varieties by backcrossing.

Monsanto’s patents cover various components of the technology embedded in the donor seeds handed out to seed companies (the new man-made transgene, the DNA construct and the method of creating the new cotton genome). Any seed company that uses this donor seed and creates a new plant variety is entitled to register such variety under the PPVFRA.

This new plant variety registration, however, does not extinguish Monsanto’s upsteam patent rights. Neither does the patent right override the plant variety protection. They co-exist. As such, seed companies cannot commercialise their hybrids without a patent licence from Monsanto, in much the same way that Monsanto cannot sell or distribute these hybrids without permission from the seed company. If Monsanto refuses to licence the seed companies, they can move for a compulsory licence (CL) under the Patents Act, provided they satisfy the terms of Section 84, which states that a CL could be granted if the patented invention is exorbitantly priced or not available in reasonable quantities to the public or is not being worked in the territory in India.

But this licence application has to be under the terms of the Patents Act, and not the PPVFRA. Given this clear-cut demarcation, one wonders what the legal fracas is all about!

Unless of course one were to invalidate Monsanto’s patent. If news reports are to be believed, there are pending invalidity proceedings before both the IPAB (Intellectual Property Appellate Board) as also the DIPP (Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion).

At cross-purposes

The DIPP proceeding is a particularly interesting one, given that Section 66 of the Patents Act has been invoked, an exceptional provision that provides for revocation on grounds that the patent is “mischievous to the state or generally prejudicial to the public”. The key contention appears to be that the patent is no longer effective, given the pest resistance that developed over time. A ground not likely to pass muster with a court of law, given the rather high bar for invoking Section 66. Quite apart from the fact that it appears a tad bit paradoxical that while one wing of the government (the Ministry of Agriculture) has recently issued a draft notification qualifying GM technology as an industry “standard” that must mandatorily be licensed on FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) terms to as many seed companies as possible, another one (DIPP) insists that the technology is useless!

More surprising is the fact that the Ministry of Agriculture, with no proven expertise or jurisdictional competence over patent issues, would go out on a limb and suggest (in an official draft notification no less) that Monsanto’s patents over upstream GM technology must necessarily yield to downstream plant variety rights.

Whatever be our personal predilections against GMOs, it is a matter of deep concern that government agencies appear to be flouting the rule of law with impunity. While there may be merit in regulating GMO patents, this must be done after following due processes under the law, through the relevant competent authority (such as the Patent Office), and not through abusive lawmaking designed to seemingly favour one set of stakeholders who are essentially engaged in a private commercial dispute.

More importantly, one wonders why the government chooses to concentrate all of its eggs in the Bt cotton basket. Particularly so when its own institutes contend that even Bollgard-II technology is soon succumbing to progressive pest resistance.

Shouldn’t our government be encouraging a diversity of approaches in Indian agriculture, entailing both GM technology and the more traditional processes that have stood the test of time? More so, when nature has taught us time and again that the best of technologies can never really match up to the wisdom of an innate evolutionary process.

In fact, if it wishes to be a bit radical, the government could even encourage what maverick scientists did in Assam recently, when they encouraged farmers to reimagine beetles (that destroyed crops) as protein-laden delicacies to be consumed with relish. And this leaves us with just one real question in the end: can the bollworm be barbecued?

Shamnad Basheer is Honorary Research Chair Professor of IP Law at Nirma University and founder of SpicyIP.

source: The Hindu, 5-10-2016

SBI recruitment notification for 476 specialist cadre officers issued

The State Bank of India (SBI) on Tuesday said it will recruit 476 specialist cadre officers on a regular and as well as contract basis.

The notification (CRPD/SCO/2016-17/9) can be seen on the official website of the state-run bank. Interested candidates can apply online on SBI’s website by clicking here.

The online registration process will begin on October 4 and continue till October 22.

The selection process for the four regular positions of system officer, developers, test lead, tester and statistician is different from that of all contractual positions and the regular position of technology relationship manager.Candidates will be selected on the basis of online test and interview for the four regular positions. The test will be conducted tentatively on November 25, 2016.In case, the number of candidates for regular positions is less the bank may select applicants by shortlisting and interviewing them instead of conducting a test and an interview. The date for the test will be uploaded on SBI’s website and candidates will also be informed through SMS and emails.

Candidates can download their call letters for the online test from November 15, 2016.The test may be held at Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Chandigarh, Chennai, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Patna and Thiruvananthapuram. The bank, however, can add or delete any centre and allot a candidate to any another centre other than their choice.

For the contractual positions and that of technology relationship manager, candidates will be selected by shortlisting and interview.

Source: Hindustan Times, 4-10-2016