Quote of the Day December 16, 2021

 

“The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.”
Doug Larson

“दुनिया ऐसे लोगों से अंटी पड़ी है जो असाधारण सुख की आस में संतोष को ताक पर रख देते हैं।”
डग लारसन

Current Affairs-December 16, 2021

 

INDIA

– ‘Durga Puja in Kolkata’ inscribed on ‘Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’ by UNESCO

– 8th Indian Ocean Dialogue jointly hosted by External Affairs Ministry and Indian Council of World Affairs

– Columbia Journalism School alumni award for The Hindu Group chairperson Malini Parthasarathy

– Cabinet approves India-Poland treaty on mutual legal assistance in criminal matters

ECONOMY & CORPORATE

– Centre approves incentive scheme for promotion of RuPay Debit Cards and low-value (upto Rs. 2,000) BHIM-UPI transactions

– Cabinet approves implementation of Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana for 2021-26

– Cabinet approves Programme for Development of Semiconductors and Display Manufacturing Ecosystem in India

– WTO panel asks India to withdraw subsidies in sugar dispute

– NTPC awards India’s first green hydrogen-based microgrid project at Simhadri (AP)

– Pilgrims to Kartarpur gurudwara in Pakistan can carry up to Rs 11,000, says RBI

– SBI, Indian Army renew MoU to offer benefits to army personnel, their families

– Assam’s Manohari Gold Tea sets record, auctioned for Rs 1 lakh per kg

– WhatsApp starts pilot to adopt 500 villages in India for access to digital payments

WORLD

– President Ram Nath Kovind holds delegation level talks with Bangladesh’s President Md Abdul Hamid in Dhaka; participates in 50th Victory Day celebrations of Bangladesh

– India, Iran and Uzbekistan hold meet on joint use of Iran’s Chabahar Port

– NASA-launched spacecraft ‘Parker Solar Probe’ enters Sun’s corona for first time in history

IIT Dropout Series: Jharkhand boy left IIT-Delhi for own startup, now runs a Rs 750-crore company with global partnerships

 Ankit Prasad made it to the list of Forbes 30 under 30 in 2018 and has also been recognised in the Business World magazine’s 40 Under 40 list.

Ankit Prasad from Chaibasa — a small town in Jharkhand – always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Whenever a relative would ask him the usual question, “What would you become once you grow up?” Ankit always replied, “Bill Gates”.

Computers always fascinated him and he was fortunate enough to have a visionary father, who got the first computer in Chaibasa in 1995 and Ankit became part of the tech revolution started by Gates.

Around the same time, the Prasad family soon moved to Jamshedpur after Ankit’s father, Ranjit Prasad, got a job as geology professor at NIT Jamshedpur. Both Ankit and his two-year elder brother, Rahul completed their primary schooling at Saraswati Vidya Mandir in Chaibasa. The duo did not get to learn English alphabets until they joined DAV School at NIT Jamshedpur.

“Adapting to a new language was proving to be more difficult than expected. All the subjects that required English proficiency started to scare me and that’s when mathematics became my best friend. It required nominal understanding of the sentence, which made me feel very comfortable,” said the 30-year old.

Since childhood, the brothers have been interested in computers. Since the age of six, Ankit has been deeply fascinated by coding. They both started with web design in 2005 and founded a small company that designed websites for local restaurants, service providers and hotels. The small scale business soon picked up and started generating profits.

In 2005, the average boy surprised everyone by achieving a spot in the school’s top 3 scorers in class 10 board result. As the normal social convention goes, he too was fascinated by the IITs. “I realised people’s obsession with IIT and the definition of success that follows,” said Ankit.

He joined a coaching centre in Jamshedpur to prepare for the IIT entrance exam. Throughout childhood, Ankit suffered from hyper myopia and had the eyesight of -18 and -19. It was only in 2017 he got normal vision after a surgery. He could not see what coaching teachers were writing on the board and the huge class sizes bugged him. “Our website business supported me with the coaching expenses but I was not enjoying the process,” he said.

After spending a year in the “pressure cooker”, he finally left to prepare on his own. In 2007, he appeared for the entrance exam and achieved a rank above 5000, which could not get him into an IIT but allowed him to secure a seat at NIT Jamshedpur. He took admission but still wanted to join an IIT.

“My brother wanted to pursue an undergraduate degree at IIT but he could not get in. My parents had high hopes for me but my first attempt did not go as planned. Hence, I gave it another shot and got AIR 400,” said Ankit, who then joined IIT Delhi for an integrated MTech in Mathematics and Computing in 2008.After joining IIT Delhi, he continued with his business. Soon, the business expanded and he started earning steadily. Through 2009-10, he worked with multiple startups. “I was in college but was already working to get good money. Adhering to professional deadlines started hampering my classes, but I enjoyed my work as opposed to the theoretical research-driven curriculum being taught in the engineering classes,” said Ankit.

The success of Flipkart, Snapdeal and Zomato motivated Ankit and he created Touch Talent from the hostel room in 2012 with his brother. It is a web-based global community that allows users to display, share, appreciate and monetize art and design. During the same time, he started attending lesser classes and could not appear for semester exams. That’s when he decided to pull off a full-time career instead of an engineering degree.

However, he wanted to tap into the growing smartphone industry and in 2015 founded ‘Bobble AI’ which created ‘Bobble Indic’ keyboard. Around 120 languages from around the world, as well as 37 Indian languages, are assisted by the keyboard. Bobble AI’s valuation was recorded to be over 500 crores in 2020The app makes stickers, GIFs, emojis among other graphics to make texting more expressive and visual. The app now has more than 65 million users and partnerships with global smartphone companies such as Xiaomi, Gionee, Panasonic and Lava among many others in South Africa, Pakistan, Turkey and Europe.

“People made fun of me when I used to call myself a CEO of my small company at the age of 21. I took the path less travelled and most of my relatives did not get it. However, my parents’ openness allowed me to make my own decisions,” said Ankit.

He made it to the list of Forbes 30 under 30 in 2018 and that’s when “people’s perception changed” towards him. “It was my first recognition and it instilled confidence of being on the right path,” Ankit said. Besides, he has also been recognised in the Business World magazine’s 40 Under 40 list.

“Even today, my mother does not understand what I do or how much revenue does the company generate, but she uses my interactive keyboard to interact with everyone and that feels great,” said the IIT Delhi dropout., which increased to more than 750 crores in the third quarter of 2021.

Written by Sheetal Banchariya

Source: Indian Express, 16/12/21

When ‘veg’ is ‘non-veg’: what Delhi High Court said

 

Delhi High Court has directed the food safety regulator to ensure that food business operators make full disclosures on all that goes into any food article. Who went to court, and why? What is the problem with the labelling?

Delhi High Court has directed the food safety regulator to ensure that food business operators make full disclosures on all that goes into any food article — “not only by their code names but also by disclosing as to whether they originate from plant, or animal source, or whether they are manufactured in a laboratory, irrespective of their percentage in the food article”.

The operators must comply strictly with Regulation 2.2.2(4) of the Food Safety and Standards (Packaging and Labelling) Regulations, 2011 “on the basis that the use of any ingredient — in whatever measure or percentage, which is sourced from animals, would render the food article as Non-Vegetarian,” the court said.“Every person has a right to know as to what he/she is consuming, and nothing can be offered to the person on a platter by resort to deceit, or camouflage,” a division bench of Justices Vipin Sanghi and Jasmeet Singh said in an order passed on December 9.

What are the labelling requirements under the 2011 Regulations?

The Regulations define non-vegetarian food as containing “whole or part of any animal including birds, fresh water or marine animals or eggs or products of any animal origin, but excluding milk or milk products”.

All non-vegetarian food must be labelled with “a brown colour filled circle… [of a specified diameter] inside a square with brown outline having sides double the diameter of the circle”. Where egg is the only non-vegetarian ingredient, a “declaration to this effect [may be given] in addition to the said symbol”. Vegetarian food must be labelled with a “green colour filled circle…inside the square with green outline”.

The regulations also require manufacturers to display a list of ingredients along with their weight or volume. Manufacturers must disclose which types of edible vegetable oil, edible vegetable fat, animal fat or oil, fish, poultry meat, or cheese, etc. has been used in the product.

“Where an ingredient itself is the product of two or more ingredients”, and such a “compound ingredient constitutes less than five per cent of the food, the list of ingredients of the compound ingredient, other than food additive, need not to be declared”, the Regulations say.

Who went to court, and why?

Ram Gaua Raksha Dal, a non-government Trust that works for the safety and welfare of cows, filed a petition in October seeking implementation of the existing rules, and prayed that all products, including non-consumables like crockery, wearable items, and accessories, should be marked on the basis of the ingredients used. For food items, the petition sought on the label not just the ingredients, but also the items used in the manufacturing process.

The trust, whose members are followers of the Namdhari sect, submitted that the community strongly believes in following strict vegetarianism, and that their religious beliefs also prohibit the use, in any form, of goods containing animal products.

So, what is the problem with the labelling?

The court said that the law “very clearly intends and expressly provides for declaration on all food items…as to whether they are vegetarian or non-vegetarian”. However, “it appears, some Food Business Operators are taking advantage of — upon misreading of the Regulations, the fact that the Act does not specifically oblige [them] to disclose the source from which the ingredients — which go into manufacture/production of food articles, are sourced, except…specific express exceptions”.

The court gave the example of the chemical disodium inosinate, a food additive found in instant noodles and potato chips, which is commercially manufactured from meat or fish. “A little search on Google…shows that it is often sourced from pig fat,” it said.

When such ingredients are used, often “merely the codes of the ingredients are disclosed, without actually disclosing on the packaging as to what is the source, i.e. whether it is plant based, or animal based, or it is a chemically manufactured in a laboratory,” the court said. “Many food articles which have ingredients sourced from animals, are passed off as vegetarian by affixing the green dot.”

What directions did the court issue, therefore?

The court said the use of non-vegetarian ingredients, even in “a minuscule percentage”, “would render such food articles non-vegetarian, and would offend the religious and cultural sensibilities/ sentiments of strict vegetarians, and would interfere in their right to freely profess, practice and propagate their religion and belief”.

The failure of authorities to check such lapses is leading to non-compliance of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, and the Regulations, the court said.

It directed food business operators “to ensure full and strict compliance of Regulation 2.2.2(4)”, (“Declaration regarding Veg or Non veg”) and observed that “failure…to comply…would expose [them] to, inter alia, class action for violation of the fundamental rights of the consuming public and invite punitive damages, apart from prosecution”.

Written by Sofi Ahsan

Source: Indian Express, 16/12/21

Finding idealism in humanities education in India

 

Vamsee Juluri writes: We must inspire our students to look beyond the physical classroom to the lessons all around, including the lessons ‘within’

Chief Justice of India N V Ramana expressed a concern that generations of students and parents can relate to (‘No country for ivory towers’, IE, December 11). The push towards professional degrees turns life into a prison drill for children, and what these degrees yield is, at best, private success for the students who survive it and for the companies that profit from their labour. The absence of humanities in education, and the need for “idealism” to accompany “ambition,” was rightly pointed out by him.

Having leapt (or stumbled) from a professional degree to the liberal arts myself, I wish to share a few concerns about the state of “idealism” in humanities education today. There is, however, also hope for such idealism in my view, evoked, coincidentally enough, also by Justice Ramana from a gesture he made at the annual convocation of the Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning in Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh.

If the balance of goals between students and teachers in universities once lay between a pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (say, humanities) and that of knowledge for personal benefit (professional degrees), today the picture seems to have shifted towards a different ideal supplanting both — social justice. University leaders are concerned about issues like equity and diversity, and increasingly, corporate employers too have taken to the language of social justice and change.

But, as the deep polarisation in America in recent years shows, this seeming wedding of idealism and ambition in education has been a dismal failure. Schools, parents, professors, diversity experts, activists — everyone seems to be in conflict with everyone else. In a recent election for governor in Virginia, the Democrats lost because of a feeling that the party establishment and mainstream media had demonised parents concerned about a new “social justice”-oriented curriculum in schools as racists and even terrorists. “Woke” has become an insult in some circles, and a badge of honour in others.

There is a lesson to be learned in all this. If education aimed at promoting social justice of the sort taught widely in American colleges and schools has led to a growing polarisation along class lines and has failed to inspire real understanding and empathy for the poor, where might the growing promotion of activist culture and social justice rhetoric in Indian schools and colleges lead us? Will we end up with a small group of well-meaning but uninformed, and even heartless professional elites?

Will “let them protest” become the “let them eat cake” of our times?

There is a danger already in Indian society that polarisation has pushed us into “Left” and “Right” silos, from which everyone else looks like either “anti-nationals” or as “fascists.” We can also see signs of this being institutionalised into permanent divisions along lines of class and educational privilege; an elite transnational liberal arts culture on one side, and a more modest patriotic middle-class culture on the other. In time, one group will occupy the positions that will define the discourse, while the other will merely focus on earning a living, finding its voice ever diminished in the running of the nation.

Is there a way out of this path of polarisation? Critical Humanities from India, edited by D Venkat Rao, offers a deeper insight into the role of education in addressing Indian pasts and futures than most “critical” paradigms have offered so far. Even as Indian and Indian-origin scholars abroad (mostly identified as “South Asian” for the convenience of the American ivory tower) profess a “critical” postcolonial position, much of what has been normalised as humanities education from or about South Asia has been along the lines of the “mantra” (as Western critical scholars called it) of “race, class, gender,” with “caste” filling in for “race” at best.

Unfortunately, “caste, class, gender” cannot be the beginning and end of humanities education in India, because much of the discourse around these terms comes not from Indian life or thought but from European religious assumptions. Indian liberal humanities education, we learn from this book, is limited by its location in “deeply nurtured Christian theological ideas of moral self-formation (Bildung).” The “crisis in humanities” comes from “our failure to understand the conception of man that is deeply enshrined in the discourses of the humanities that we continue (instrumentally) to service.”

There are, however, different conceptions of “man” that still exist and express themselves, albeit in complicated ways, that we might learn from. One such space in my life happened to be Prasanthi Nilayam, the ashram of Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba where Justice Ramana spoke recently. At the end of his formal speech calling on students to live up to the ideals of their institution, he suddenly switched from speaking in English to Telugu, because, he said, Baba valued three things: “Matrumurthi. Matrubhasha. Matrudesam.” The audience broke out in applause. To use a creative writing analogy, it was as if everything else had been about “telling” what was important, and these words, in Telugu, were now “showing” it. Macaulay, it seemed, was slain momentarily by an evocation of Matrutva.

My formal education may have been in an English-medium school (whose claim to fame is churning out CEOs) and a Marxism-heavy American university. But I was taught by a lot more, including the experience of culture and community in Prasanthi Nilayam, a place like no other I had seen. The real hope for idealism, I think, is the fact that while many of us might mistake our formal education for the limits of knowledge, the real world of generations of life is also present around us. If we can inspire our students to look beyond the physical classroom to the lessons all around, including the lessons “within”, perhaps a renewed humanities will indeed blossom.

Written by Vamsee Juluri

Source: Indian Express, 16/12/21

Quote of the Day December 15, 2021

 

“One kind word can warm three winter months.”
Japanese Proverb

“एक मीठा बोल सर्दी के तीन महीनों को ऊष्मा दे सकता है।”
जापानी कहावत

Current Affairs-December 15, 2021

 

INDIA

– Parliament passes bill to extend tenure of CBI Director to a maximum of five years

– Parliament passes bill to extend the tenure of ED (Enforcement Directorate) Director to a maximum of five years

– Supreme Court allows Centre to widen roads for Char Dham project in Uttarakhand from 5.5 metres to 10 metres

– PM attends 98th anniversary celebrations of Sadguru Sadafaldeo Vihangam Yog Sansthan

– UP: Special Investigation Team probing the Lakhimpur Kheri violence of Oct 3 describes the killing of fours farmers and a journalist as a “pre-planned conspiracy”

ECONOMY & CORPORATE

– Defence hands over five DRDO developed products to Armed forces and other security agencies

– Piyush Goyal calls for enhancing economic ties between India and Southern African Customs Union which consists of Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho

– Maharashtra tops list of states with maximum number of beneficiaries under ABRY (Atmanirbhar Bharat Rojgar Yojana)

– Wholesale price-based inflation hits 12-year high of 14.2% in November on dearer fuel, food

– Global Technology Summit organised by Carnegie India and Ministry of External Affairs

WORLD

– India votes against UN Security Council draft resolution that linked climate change with global security challenges

– Climate Change: UN recognizes new Arctic temperature record of 38 degrees measured in Siberia in 2020

– Tunisian President Kais Saied announces constitutional referendum, elections next year

– 7.3 undersea earthquake in Indonesia triggers tsunami warning

SPORTS

– US gymnast Simone Biles named Time’s 2021 Athlete of the Year