Quote of the Day April 23, 2021

 

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.”
Helen Keller

“विश्व की सबसे सुन्दरतम वस्तुओं को देखा या छुआ भी नहीं जा सकता है, उन्हें केवल दिल से महसूस किया जा सकता है।”
हेलन केलर

Little Guru: World’s First Gamified Sanskrit Learning Application

 The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) tied up with the Gamapp Sportswizz Tech Private Limited to launch “LITTLE GURU” application. It is a specialized mobile application for learning Sanskrit.

About “Little Guru”

• Little Guru is a gamified application.
• It teaches Sanskrit in an interactive platform. This makes learning easier.
• The app was launched during the celebrations of the 71^st Foundation Day of ICCR.
• It is world’s first Gamified Sanskrit learning application.
• It will help people to learn Sanskrit in an easy manner based on competition, games, peer to peer interactions, etc.

Significance of the Application

• The application is of great help to the Indian Diaspora wishing to stay connected with their roots.
• It will also help number of students and faculties associated with Sanskrit Universities located all over the world.

ICCR role in India-China relations

• The ICCR has provided scholarships to more than three hundred Chinese students. The aim of these scholarships is to promote cultural, intellectual, and academic exchanges between India and China.
• There are several Chinese kids learning Indian culture in the country. During the 71^st foundation celebrations of ICCR, Chinese kids of age 6-7 years who are learning Indian dance forms in India performed Indian dances. Their dance performances were based on the theme “Azadi ka Amrit”.

Azadi ka Amrut

The idea of Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav was launched by PM Modi in March 2021. It is a series of events organized by the Government of India to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of independence. It was launched 75 weeks ahead of the 75^th anniversary. It was launched on March 12, 2021 to commemorate 91 years of Dandi March.

World Book and Copyright Day: April 23

 Every year the World Book and Copyrights Day is celebrated on April 23 by UNESCO. UNESCO is United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. This year, to celebrate the World Book and Copyright Day, UNESCO has created “Bookface Challenge”.

About World Book and Copyrights Day

The first World Book and Copyrights Day was celebrated in 1995. The UNESCO Prize for Children’s and Young People’s Literature in the Service of Tolerance is awarded on this day. Also, the day will increase the understanding of copyright laws and other measures that protect intellectual properties.

Why on April 23?

The UNESCO decided to celebrate the World Book and Copyrights Day on April 23 as it is the death anniversary of William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes and Inca Garcilasco de la Vega.

World Book Day in different regions

• In Catalonia (Spain), the World Book Day is celebrated as St George’s Day since 1436. On this day, people exchange gifts between loved ones. Catalonia is an autonomous community in Spain.
• In Spain, the World Book Day is being celebrated since 1926 on October 7. This is because Miguel de Cervantes was born on October 7.
• In Sweden, the World Book Day is called the Varldsbokdagen. It is celebrated on April 13.
• In UK and Ireland, they organise an event called the “World Book Night” to celebrate the World Book Day.
• The World Book Day is celebrated as a street festival in the US.

World Book Capital

Every year UNESCO and other international organisations select World Book Capital for a one-year capital. This year Tbilisi of Georgia has been selected as the World Book Capital.

Tips to choose the right remote internship

 

The pandemic led to the “work from home” and “learn from home” transitions. While remote learning quickly became the new normal, what was to be done about internships — a critical milestone for students and a litmus test for experience and employability? In order to ensure that students were able to garner some understanding of what work experience meant, institutions began to embrace remote internships. Though this has its limitations, it offers benefits such as flexible working hours and minimal expenses. And, while everything cannot be recreated virtually, real-time work experience is indeed possible to achieve online.

With remote internships currently being the only viable option for students, choosing the right one is crucial. So, what should one look for? Here’s a handy five-step list.

1. Ask yourself: what am I looking for?

Don’t choose an internship only because it is mandated. The primary objective is to acquire real-world experience in a domain of your interest. Therefore, be clear about your areas of interest and strengths, and the skills you want to develop. Once you identify these, search for relevant opportunities. Be open to options outside your comfort zone, but don’t apply to every open position. Seek guidance and advice from trusted people.

2. Do your homework

Search for companies that are the best in your domain of interest and that you would want to work for. Understand the roles they offer and the skill sets they look for. Search using terms such as “remote”, “virtual” or “online”. Don’t restrict yourself to local or national companies; apply to international ones too. Check out various platforms, websites, and apps.

3. Brand yourself

In today’s online world, building a digital brand for yourself is critical to stand out. Your digital personal brand includes the Google search results for your name and all your social media accounts, in addition to your CV. So, curate your social media thoughtfully to reflect a blend of your personal and professional personalities. Engage actively in discussion forums and try blogging platforms to give more visibility to your thoughts and ideas. Request recommendations from former teachers or professors. More importantly, when you are active on social media, you are more likely to come across opportunities that you wouldn’t have found with a one-hit search on Google.

4. Network like there’s no tomorrow

Social media is now an accepted platform to network, and offers a pool of employment opportunities. The trick is to network beyond your immediate circle of family and friends. Reach out to connections from school or college and seek advice, introductions, and recommendations. Your faculty may have industry connections, colleagues with intern needs, or alumni connections with projects on hand.

5. Check the (work) culture

Interning with a big company and a start-up have their pros and cons. To intern at a start-up is considered as one of the best learning experiences that a student can get. While big company names are a nice addition to your resume, working in start-ups allows you to shoulder larger responsibilities, multi-task, and dabble in multitude of tasks. If possible, try interning at both. This will allow you to compare the experiences and understand where you will fit better.

Saraswathy Ramamoorthy

The writer is co-founder of Learning Matters and a psychologist.

Source: The Hindu, 17/04/21

Are we listening to the lessons taught in the first year of Covid-19?

 

The pandemic revealed the precarious state of India’s informal sector. Localised production, trade and markets offer a better alternative to existing paradigm of development.

Another wave of COVID, another round of lockdowns, another long journey back home for migrant workers. If there is one lesson we are learning after a year of COVID-19, it is that we have not learnt any lessons, at least not the crucial ones.

2020 exposed the abysmal flaws of an economic system that drives tens of millions of people into insecure jobs that they can lose overnight, with no alternative or safety net. This is the fate of a majority of the 90 per cent of India’s workforce that is in the unorganised sector. Over the last few decades of “development”, economic policies have created a massive pool of cheap labour for the state-dominated or capitalist industrial class, adding to the already large numbers of landless agricultural labourers caught in traditional caste, class and gender discrimination. Since 1991, about 15 million farmers have moved out of agriculture, many because the economic system simply does not make farming (including pastoralism, fisheries and forestry) remunerative enough. And 60 million people have been physically displaced by dams, mining, expressways, ports, statues, industries, with mostly poor or no rehabilitation. Meanwhile, exploiting such people desperate for any kind of job, and also nature, a minority becomes wealthier by the second. The richest 5 per cent of Indians now earn as much as the remaining 95 per cent.

As Aseem Shrivastava and I showed in Churning the Earth, the Indian government’s capitulation to global financial forces in 1991 significantly increased the vulnerability of hundreds of millions of people and caused irreversible damage to our environment. Of course, not all of India’s unorganised or informal workforce is necessarily insecure; farmers, fishers, pastoralists, forest-dwellers, craftspersons, entertainers, are relatively secure if their resource base (land, nature, tools, knowledge, clientele) is intact, or if they have guaranteed access to a security net like the MNREGA. But then they are not available as cheap labour, so they or their livelihoods must be displaced in the name of “development”. The three farm laws introduced by the government last year will further hand agricultural control to corporates, creating an even bigger pool of exploitable labour. Farmers realise this, which explains the intensity and resolve of their prolonged agitation.

It is true that agriculture alone cannot provide full employment in villages. And that the youth do not necessarily want to remain in traditional occupations, especially if they are also associated with caste and gender discrimination. But these realities result from our collective failure to tackle these issues at their roots. In any case, since 1991 there has been, for the most, “jobless growth” in the formal sector, meaning those leaving villages end up in some other informal work, mostly very insecure.

But there are alternatives to such a trajectory, and they provide clear lessons. Since mid-2020, we have compiled dozens of examples of what we call the Extraordinary Work of “Ordinary” People — Beyond Pandemics and Lockdowns. In the midst of COVID-19, several communities have had enough to eat, dignified livelihoods to sustain themselves, community solidarity systems to help the most vulnerable, collective health systems to ensure the virus does not run rampant, and alternative methods of learning their children could enjoy.

In Telangana and Nagaland, respectively, Dalit women of Deccan Development Society (DDS) and tribal women of North-East Network ensured complete food security for dozens of villages throughout 2020. Community health systems in Sittilingi panchayat, Tamil Nadu and in Kunariya panchayat, Kutch, denied COVID any chance of gaining a foothold. In Assam, Farm2Food worked with several thousand students to continue local food growing in schools and communities. In Kolkata, the youth group Pranthakatha created a local neighbourhood safety net for 32 widows who had been forced to beg for a living. In the western Himalaya, Titli Trust, Birds of Kashmir, CEDAR, and Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust continued nature guided activities with local communities, to build capacity for when tourism returns. Beejotsav Nagpur, the Gurgaon Organic Farmers’ Market, village self-help groups facilitated by Navadarshanam in Tamil Nadu, Samaj Pragati Sahayog in MP, and Mahila Umang Samiti in Uttarakhand were able to ensure that farm produce reached a (mostly local) consumer base, averting economic collapse for thousands of farmers.

These and over a thousand other stories of alternatives (www.vikalpsangam.org), provide crucial lessons. The biggest is that local self-reliance for basic needs, and localised exchanges of products and services, are far more effective in securing people’s livelihoods than are long-distance markets and jobs. Rather than incentivise big industry to take over most production, virtually all household needs — soaps, footwear, furniture, utensils, clothes, energy, even housing, food, drinks — can be produced in a decentralised manner by thousands of communities. The shortage of purely agriculture-based livelihoods can be made up by crafts, small-scale manufacturing, and services needed by their own or surrounding populations. As Suresh Chhanga, sarpanch of Kunariya in Kutch told me when I visited in January, “if we can produce most of our household items locally, we not only save the Rs 40 lakh we spend every month buying these from outside companies, but we also create full local livelihood security.” The women’s collective Maati in Uttarakhand showed how farming and crafts must also continue along with community-led ecotourism so that there is a buffer, should one of these fail.

Unfortunately, the government’s most recent packages, ironically labelled “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (self-reliant India), are actually increasing the control of distant markets and companies over people’s lives, and increasing ecological damage (for example, coal mining in areas of central India where communities are still relatively self-reliant on land and forests). Where some government initiatives have learnt the lessons, as in the case of Kerala’s Kudumbashree programme that enables dignified livelihoods to several million women, we saw a visible difference in how COVID was dealt with. Many of these examples of rural revitalisation also display significant reduction in outmigration, and even the return of people from cities to villages.

Local self-reliance has to go along with worker control over the means of production, more direct forms of democracy (swaraj), and struggles to eliminate casteism and gender discrimination. Again, there are many examples of this. In central India, communities that have successfully claimed collective legal control over surrounding forests, and mobilised towards adivasi swasashan (self-rule), survived the COVID lockdown much better than those who did not have such control. In Spiti, as soon as COVID hit, a Committee for Preventive Measures and Sustainable Development was set up by local communities to ensure full health safety and encourage greater self-reliance in food and livelihoods. Dalit women farmers of DDS have shown how to resist gender and caste discrimination.

But governments have been most reluctant to enable such political and economic empowerment. It threatens their power, and their ability to hand over lands and resources to corporations as they please. Both the 73rd and 74th constitutional amendments, meant to empower village and city assemblies, or laws like the Forest Rights Act, have been only half-heartedly implemented. The current government has even tried weakening them or programmes like MGNREGA, which has been a life-saver for millions during the lockdown.

An economy that promotes mass vulnerability only increases social strife, creating an atmosphere ripe for communal, class and caste violence. This will eventually engulf all of us, other than the super-rich who will escape to some safer part of the world.

Many millions would not have to go back to insecure, undignified jobs in cities and industrial zones if they could have economic security in their own villages and towns. Alternative pathways that provide this are available, and have been demonstrated to work in the COVID crisis. But are we listening to their lessons?

Written by Ashish Kothari

This article first appeared in the print edition on April 23, 2021 under the title ‘Lessons Covid taught’. The writer is with Kalpavriksh, an environment research and advocacy group in Pune.

Source: Indian Express, 23/04/21

Quote of the Day April 22, 2021

 

“Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.”
Oprah Winfrey

“वर्तमान पल में सर्वश्रेष्ठ करना आपको अगले पल के लिये सर्वश्रेष्ठ स्थान पर स्थापित करता है।”
ओप्रा विन्फ्रे

What is Potamophylax coronavirus?

 Kosovar Biologist Halil Ibrahimi has named a newly discovered insect after COVID-19 virus.

About the insect

• Ibrahimi spent years working on a different type of Caddisfly species. The species was found in Accursed Mountains (Kosovo’s Western Bjeshket e Nemuna National Park). It has now been named as “Potamophylax coronavirus”.
• The species is endemic to the National Park.
• The newly found species of Caddisfly is different from those found in the Balkans. The new species is considerably smaller and lives in open and high-altitude zones, that is, 2,000 metres above the sea level.

River Pollution

During his study about the species, the scientists have also found that the Decanit River is severely deteriorated due to the construction of a hydropower plant.

Why is the species named after Coronavirus?

The new Caddisfly species is found along the Decanit river ecosystem. The construction of the hydropower plant across the river has a similar effect as the coronavirus creates on humans. Thus, the new species has been named after coronavirus.

Decanit river

It is a tributary of White Drin. The Monastery of Visoki Decani is located on the bank of the River Decanit. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The river drains into the Adriatic Sea.

Adriatic Sea

The Adriatic Sea separates the Italian peninsula from the Balkans. It is the northernmost arm of Mediterranean Sea. The Adriatic Sea consists of more than 1,300 islands.

The salinity of Adriatic Sea is less than the Mediterranean Sea. This is because Adriatic Sea collects more than a third of the fresh water flowing in to the Mediterranean.

Kosovo

The scientist belongs to Kosovo. Kosovo (a country in the continent of Europe) lies at the centre of the Balkans. It has gained recognition as a sovereign state from 98 members of United Nations.