Studenting Era: One stop service to help students in making better career choices

Digital Learning introduces the first of its kind, a student online services portal,“Studenting Era” (studentingera.com) that will help the students in making better career choices. In an exclusive interaction with Raja Dasgupta, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Studenting Era Pvt. Ltd told Elets News Network (ENN) that the genesis of creating “Studenting Era” was to provide students with a one stop service portal.
Inspiration & AspirationWe started envisaging a dream to parent the students towards success. This led to a thought where we decided to build a gateway for students so that they have access to diverged opportunities and possibilities. Hence we started dreaming to meet every need of a student from education to career planning, from entrepreneurship orientation to employability, from healthcare to daily utilities, from aspirational hobbies to entertainment. This gave the antecedence to “Studenting Era”.   

While we will continue to strengthen these service verticals, our market research & development team are constantly exploring emerging trends and service areas, so that we can offer today’s trend-oriented students with the emerging opportunities & services much before they become fashionable.   

We are very confident to create this ecosystem where studenting becomes a part of our process and  help us to adapt to a pedagogy where learning, reading, researching, exploring and digitizing harmonizes to our daily life.

The mission of “Studenting Era” is to create an environment, which will enable students to get access to information, services and opportunities that will enable them to enhance their career goals and objectives. The website is developed in a way to regularly evolve with the most diverged services which are relevant and aspirational for students, thus parenting them to success.

To avail various career related services such as Career Counselling and Profiling, Global Collaborative Learning, Entrepreneurship Development and Mentorship etc, students need to register @ www.studentingera.com, which will help them with a host of opportunities and possibilities through an annual membership.

A) After registration, students will instantly get gratified with Seventeen free certified trainings, One retail voucher and One medical consultation.

• Online Global Certificate course on Confidence Series, Meeting Etiquette, Interview Skills, Stress Management, Corporate Etiquette, Non Verbal Communication, Art of Speaking
• Online course on CAT, SBI PO, Employability Quotient Test
• Online Certificate course on Ethical Hacking, Programming on C+, Phython, Big Data
• Refresher Program on Quantitative Aptitude, C Programming, SQL Programming
• One free Online Doctor Consultation
• Value Retail Voucher from Togofogo.com

B) Registered students will also be entitled for an annual membership to Studenting Era and be able to avail of the following services:

Career Counselling and Profiling Services – Under these services, students will be able to search mentors, who could understand their strengths, analyze the market trends and create a roadmap to enhance his/her career in this age of diverged opportunities. Studenting Era creates this platform to extend the opportunities for career guidance and profile creation through some progressive organizations and consultants, thus ensuring students’ success.

Global Collaborative Learning – Collaboration is the way to go forward and is the only way to grow. Every student has been exercising this aspect in their learning, while preparing for examinations, working on the laboratory or doing projects. “Studenting Era” has already adapted  this successful methodology by bringing in Learning opportunities on IT, Soft Skills and domain skills through the leading Universities and Institutions across the globe. Another very important feature of this vertical is ‘Sharing’, seniors of same course and pass-out or toppers will be encouraged to share their class notes with the entire student fraternity and help them gain in their journey of studentship, thus remaining a “hero” as always.

Entrepreneurship Development Program – As we move forward towards a progressive economy, there is a need for vigorous innovation and out-of- the-box thinking. The world requires transformational business along with influx of first generation entrepreneurs. Under this program of the website, students will be encouraged to aspire to be leaders of businesses. This program will take the students through a three phases of learning cycle. The students will be exposed to state-of- the-art online training, followed by online mentorship through eminent thought leaders and finally get introduced to the incubation process.

Project and Employability Program – This is a very crucial part of studentship. Under this program, the website aims to provide a new age online project evaluation guidance. Under this, a platform will also be created for students enterprises to collaborate for employment and internship.

Student Lifestyle Value Additions – Studenting is a part of everyone’s life and Studenting Era will try to provide all kinds of support and services which are essential for students. This section is initiated with the services such as online doctor support, tele-medicine and student loans.

Digital Student Portals: Unique feature for you to consider it.Access Anywhere AnytimeOnline Human – to – Human CollaborationDigital Archives of Academic Material and Student DataOnline Communities of counsellors, educators, learners and students

Digital Student Portals and Digital Learning is different – better – and is far more beneficial than what we as students are used to.

Source: Digital Learning, 17-09-2016

Ourview A boost to fundamental rights

Courts are finally protecting individual liberty in prohibition and beef ban cases

The politics of alcohol consumption and cow slaughter have, of late, run roughshod over issues of constitutional law and philosophy. The Patna high court’s recent judgement on prohibition in Bihar—especially when read together with the Bombay high court’s earlier beef ban verdict—is a necessary redressal of the balance. These judgements are a nuanced look at how the relationship between the republic and the citizen is being renegotiated within the constitutional framework. The fundamental question at the heart of both cases is this: Do Indian citizens have the right to drink and eat what they want?

Justice Navaniti Prasad Singh, in penning the main argument in the Bihar prohibition judgement, answers in the affirmative. He writes: “Similarly, with expanding interpretation of the right to privacy, as contained in Article 21 of the Constitution, a citizen has a right to choose how he lives, so long as he is not a nuisance to the society. State cannot dictate what he will eat and what he will drink.” This is a landmark observation since never before have the courts viewed prohibition through the lens of personal liberty. Previous judgements on the issue, almost always upholding prohibition, have viewed it through the right to livelihood lens and found that the limitations on the production and sale of alcohol were reasonable restrictions imposed by the state. This time, however, the personal liberty aspect was specifically raised by the petitioners who included not just alcohol traders but also individuals asserting their right to drink reasonable quantities of alcohol in the confines of their home.

A similar line of thinking is seen in the Bombay high court’s beef ban verdict. In striking down section 5 (d) of the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Act which criminalized the possession of the flesh of cattle slaughtered outside Maharashtra (such slaughter is banned within the state), the court opines: “As far as the choice of eating food of the citizens is concerned, the citizens are required to be let alone especially when the food of their choice if not injurious to health…. The state cannot make an intrusion into his home and prevent a citizen from possessing and eating food of his choice…. This intrusion...is prohibited by the right to privacy which is part of personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21.”

These are hugely progressive steps in the evolving discourse on personal liberty but they aren’t without their challenges. The directive principles of state policy (DPSP) urge the state to prohibit the consumption of intoxicating substances that are injurious to health (though this is not a call for a blanket ban because drinking in moderate sums is, arguably, not injurious to health—a point that is made in the Bihar verdict)—and the slaughter of cows and calves and other milch and draught cattle. What happens when the state seeks to realize these goals but also steps on the citizens’ fundamental rights? This issue has been debated at length by the courts, and the ground rule now is that while the two need to be viewed harmoniously, in case of conflict, fundamental rights cannot be sacrificed in the pursuit of DPSP.

Notably, in the prohibition verdict, even though the two-judge bench agreed that the alcohol ban did not stand up to legal scrutiny on other grounds, there was disagreement on this specific issue of fundamental rights versus DPSP. The chief justice of the Patna high court argued that the framers of our Constitution did not see alcohol consumption as a fundamental right because then they wouldn’t have listed prohibition as a DPSP. This is a convoluted line of reasoning which, as Justice Singh rightly points out, erodes fundamental rights to secure a DPSP—thereby militating against the principles set out famously in the Minerva Mills case.

Similarly, in the beef ban verdict, while the court struck down section 5 (d) for violating the fundamental right to privacy, it upheld the other sub-sections, 5 (a) to 5 (c), even though they too could have been brought under the same umbrella. For example, enforcing section 5 (c) which criminalizes the possession of flesh of cattle illegally slaughtered in Maharashtra requires the same intrusion of privacy that the court objects to for Section 5 (d).

That said, it is important to keep in mind that in deciding the beef ban case, the Bombay high court had to take into consideration several Supreme Court judgements that had previously upheld complete beef bans. These judgements had rejected arguments based on freedom of religion and freedom of trade because cattle preservation was considered to be in the public interest in an agrarian economy. But evidence points to a ban on cattle slaughter being the wrong way to protect that public interest.

It is also worth wondering if the courts’ zealous attitude towards cow slaughter will change as India becomes an industrialized economy. The issue of laws evolving to reflect changing social mores is touched upon in the prohibition verdict where Justice Singh writes, “We have to view this concept (of personal liberty) in changing times, where international barriers are vanishing.” He goes on to talk about Indian citizens who enjoy their drink being reluctant to move to a dry state, thereby restricting their right to move and settle anywhere in the country. This might be pushing the argument too far but nonetheless offers a progressive push to both law and society.

Source: Mintepaper, 6-10-2016

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