“I think the person who takes a job in order to live that is to say, for the money has turned himself into a slave.”
Joseph Campbell
“मेरे विचार से जो व्यक्ति जिंदा रहने अर्थात पैसे के लिए किसी कार्य को करता है, वह स्वयं को गुलाम बना लेता है।”
जोसेफ कैम्पबैल
– Can sedition cases be kept in abeyance till government completes review of Section 124A: SC asks Central govt
– Taking different stands does not help: SC to Centre on identification of minorities
– Rocket-propelled grenade hits Punjab Police Intelligence wing HQ in Mohali; no injuries
– Santoor player and music composer Pt Shiv Kumar Sharma dies at 84; won Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1986, Padma Shri in 1991, and Padma Vibhushan in 2001.
– Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare Dr. Bharati Pawar launches Atal Innovation Mission- Prime Playbook that aims to help entrepreneurs grow and scale-up
– Northern Railways introduces ‘Baby Berth’ on a trial basis in few trains
– 4 Indians Danish Siddiqui (posthumously), Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave win Pulitzer Prize 2022 in the ‘feature photography’ category
– Sri Lanka troops issued shoot-on-sight orders as homes of ruling party politicians vandalised
– Philippines: Ferdinand Marcos Jr elected new President
– France and Germany advocate early ceasefire in Kyiv and Moscow negotiations: President Emmanuel Macron
– Centre tells SC it will reconsider and re-examine provisions of sedition law
– Severe Cyclonic Storm ‘Asani’: Heavy rain likely to lash AP, Odisha and West Bengal from May 10
– Highest sex ratio at birth in Ladakh (1104); Manipur (880) has lowest, says annual report on Vital Statistics based on 2020 Civil Registration System report
– Jammu and Kashmir Delimitation Commission chaired by Justice (retired) Ranjana Prakash Desai notifies new J&K Assembly constituencies
– Minister of State for External Affairs Meenakashi Lekhi visits Panama, Honduras and Chile from April 28 to May 5
– LIC IPO subscribed nearly 3 times; govt raises Rs 21,000 cr
– Shares of Campus Activewear list at premium following successful IPO
– Delhi High Court directs Centre to appoint Chairman, member in Customs, Central Excise and Service Tax Settlement Commission in 6 weeks
– New UK India Industry Taskforce launched to facilitate free trade deal
– Jan Suraksha schemes — Pradhan Mantri Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana and Atal Pension Yojana — bring insurance, pension accessible to common man: FM
– L&T Infotech and Mindtree to merge, cite benefits of scale
– Sri Lanka: PM Mahinda Rajapaksa resigns
– Russia: President Vladimir Putin addresses annual Victory Day parade in Moscow; marks triumph over Nazi Germany in World War II.
– G7 countries pledge to phase out imports of Russian oil
– UN Office for Project Services chief Grete Faremo resigns after probe into investments
– UAE to introduce unemployment insurance in latest economic reform
– NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig wins $2,50,000 World Food Prize
– Nobert Kigen (men’s) of Kenya, Bekelech Borecha (women’s) of Ethiopia win Prague Marathon
– Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz wins men’s singles title at Madrid Open tennis
– Boxing: Russia’s Dmitry Bivol retains his WBA light-heavyweight World title
– D. Gukesh wins Chessables Sunway Formentera International chess tournament
– India’s Abhay Singh wins Archi Factory Open squash tournament in France
– Athletics: Avinash Sable breaks national record in men’s 5,000m
– Athletics: Annu Rani breaks her own National mark in women’s javelin throw
– President appointments Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia, JB Pardiwala as Supreme Court judges
– Centre defends sedition law and requests Supreme Court to reject pleas challenging it
– President inaugurates permanent campus of IIM-Nagpur
– UP: Prominent crossing in Ayodhya to be developed, named after Lata Mangeshkar
– DoT abolishes NOCC (network operation and control centre) charges for all telecom licence holders
– Pushp Kumar Joshi takes charge as new CMD of PSU Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL)
– 32 dead after a massive explosion destroys Saratoga Hotel in Havana, Cuba; gas leak is thought to be the cause of the explosion
– Northern Ireland election: Sinn Fein wins 27 seats in the 90-seat Assembly; emerges as the largest party for the first time
– Russian Defense Ministry says civilians’ evacuation from Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine ends
– John Lee Ka-chiu, the sole candidate for Hong Kong’s leadership election, confirmed as city’s next chief executive
– Nepal’s Kami Rita Sherpa climbs Mount Everest for 26th time to set new world record
– World Red Cross Day observed on May 8; is birth anniversary of ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) founder Henri Dunant
– World Thalassemia Day observed on May 8; Thalassemia is blood disorder characterized by abnormal formation of haemoglobin
– UN observes ‘Time of Remembrance and Reconciliation for Those Who Lost Their Lives during the Second World War’ on May 8-9
Whether you are a student or professional, you can make your way into deep tech by landing the right internship. These programmes not only offer you a chance to sharpen your resume and make connections but also to learn how a large organisation or a start-up works. Not all internships are equal, especially when it comes to deep technology companies. Here are some factors to consider:
Interest and values alignment: This is one of the most important decisions when choosing an internship. It is more likely that you will put in more effort if you really care about what you are doing. Therefore, look at the company’s vision and focus area, the problem being solved, and whether there are any innovative and exciting projects in the pipeline.
Team, resources and partners: Do a thorough background check on the company and the people you will be working with. Sometimes it is better to work with companies who have already proven their technology. Access to capital, labs or partners for research and development should also be considered.
Role and work: Deep tech companies can have a long period of research before the product is ready for the market (“gestation period”). Knowing your specific job responsibilities in advance can make an internship more aligned with your expectations. Focus on skills that will be useful in the future, not just things you want to learn or want an employer to know. If you are looking for Machine Learning internships, ensure the company does end-to-end model creation and deployment, rather than employing a Data Science team that does the Maths. This will give you hands-on experience with model creation, validation and deployment.
Remember, internships are not just about getting your foot into the door but also about learning and gaining experience. The most obvious approach is to highlight the contributions and insights that you made during your internship. Artefacts, patents, publications or systems built by the intern or references from an internship go a long way in demonstrating the aptitude for the work and ability to come up to speed and contribute quickly.
The next step is to describe why the work was impressive and who benefited from it. What motivated you to pursue the work and what was your role in completing it? If you did not make significant contributions, then you must show that you had great ideas or insights that led to new directions for exploration or research. If you did a lot of work that didn't result in a product or publication, focus on the work that was most impressive within the context of your internship. Last, people hire for culture fit, so show that you belong.
Whether it is a large/small company or a start-up, deep tech requires a plethora of skills, which can be gained through hands-on experience. So keep your eyes open for opportunities and learn as much about the field as possible.
Source: The Hindu, 7/05/22
The fifth edition of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) provides a valuable insight into changes underway in Indian society. It throws light on traditional parameters, for instance immunisation among children, births in registered hospital facilities, and nutritional levels. While there is a general improvement in these parameters, there were mixed signals in nutrition. Gains in childhood nutrition were minimal as were improvements in obesity levels. The prevalence of anaemia has actually worsened since the last survey in 2015-16. But the survey’s major contribution is its insight into behavioural and sociological churn. When highlights were made public last year, the focus was on India’s declining total fertility rate that had, for the first time in the country’s history, dipped to below the replacement level, or a TFR (Total Fertility Rate) of 2.1. If the trend were to persist, India’s population was on the decline in line with what has been observed in developed countries, and theoretically means improved living standards per capita and greater gender equity. Because this TFR had been achieved across most States, two notable exceptions being most populous Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, it was also evidence that population decline could be achieved without coercive state policies and family planning has struck deep roots. The more detailed findings, made public last week, suggest that this decline is agnostic to religion.
The fertility rate among Muslims dipped to 2.3 in 2019-2021 from 2.6 in 2015-16, the sharpest among all religious communities when compared to the 4.4 in NFHS 1 in 1992-93. Another set of subjective questions that the NFHS attempts to answer using hard data is gender equity. Less than a third of married women are working and nearly 44% do not have the freedom to go to the market alone. However, a little over 80% have said that they can refuse demands for sex from their husband. This has implications for legal questions surrounding marital rape. Only 72% of Indian men think it is not right to coerce, threaten or use force on a woman if denied sex, which again points to the vast territory that needs to be covered in educating men about equality, choice and freedom in marriage. This question made it for the first time in the family health survey as did another question, about the number of registered births and deaths, in the family survey. Multiple surveys such as the NFHS, Sample Registration Surveys, the Census, labour, economic surveys and ways of interrogation are necessary for insights about a country as vast and complex as India; the Centre should invest more substantially in improving their reliability.
A team of four Indian photographers from Reuters news agency — slain photojournalist Danish Siddiqui, Adnan Abidi, Sanna Irshad Mattoo and Amit Dave — have won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for their coverage of the Covid-19 crisis in India.
Announcing the winners, the Pulitzer Prize website noted that they were receiving the award for “images of Covid’s toll in India that balanced intimacy and devastation, while offering viewers a heightened sense of place.”
Arguably the most coveted award for journalists from across the world, the Pulitzer is announced by America’s Columbia University and bestowed on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Indians who have previously won the Pulitzer
A member of the Ghadar Party in America, Indian-American journalist Gobind Behari Lal, was the first from India to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1937. He won the award for reporting with four others, for their coverage of science at the tercentenary of Harvard University. A postgraduate from University of California, Berkeley, he also received the Padma Bhushan in 1969.
In 2003, Mumbai-born Geeta Anand was part of the team at Wall Street Journal that won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on corporate corruption, and in 2016, Indian-American Sanghamitra Kalita, then managing editor of Los Angeles Times, won the Pulitzer in the Breaking News Reporting category with her team for their coverage of the San Bernardino shooting in California in 2015 and the terror investigation that followed.
In 2000, London-born Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. In 2011, Siddhartha Mukherjee (Indian-American physician, biologist and author) won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his demystification of cancer in The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
In the Feature Photography Category, Siddiqui — who was killed on July 16, 2021, while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban forces in Spin Boldak district of Kandahar — was also awarded the Pulitzer in 2018 for his images of the Rohingya refugee crisis. He was part of the team from Reuters that bagged the award, which included another co-recipient from this year, Adnan Abidi.
The latter also won in the the 2020 Pulitzer in the Breaking News Photography category as part of the team from Reuters that covered the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests.
In 2020, Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan and Dar Yasin of Associated Press won the Pulitzer in the Feature Photography category “for striking images captured during a communications blackout in Kashmir depicting life in the contested territory as India stripped it of its semi-autonomy,”
Who was Joseph Pulitzer, after whom the awards are named?
Born to a wealthy family of Magyar-Jewish origin in Mako, Hungary, in 1847, Joseph Pulitzer had a stint in the military before he built a reputation of being a “tireless journalist”.
In the late 1860s he joined the German-language daily newspaper Westliche Post, and by 25 he had become a publisher. In 1978, he became the owner of St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Under him, the paper published several “investigative articles and editorials assailing government corruption, wealthy tax-dodgers, and gamblers”. In 1883, he also negotiated the purchase of The New York World, which was in financial straits, and elevated its circulation.
In 1884, he was elected to the US House of Representatives from New York’s ninth district as a Democrat and entered office on March 4, 1885. During his tenure, he led a movement to place the newly gifted Statue of Liberty in New York City.
When were the Pulitzer awards instituted?
The awards were instituted according to Pulitzer’s will, framed in 1904, where he made a provision for the establishment of the Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence. Pulitzer specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and five travelling scholarships.
In his will, Pulitzer bestowed an endowment on Columbia of $2,000,000 for the establishment of a School of Journalism, one-fourth of which was to be “applied to prizes or scholarships for the encouragement of public service, public morals, American literature, and the advancement of education.”
According to the Pulitzer prize website, he stated: “I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people. I desire to assist in attracting to this profession young men of character and ability, also to help those already engaged in the profession to acquire the highest moral and intellectual training.”
After his death in 1911, the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in June, 1917.
Changes that have been made to the awards
A forward-looking entrepreneur, who knew that alterations might be necessary with the changing times, Pulitzer established an overseer advisory board and willed it “power in its discretion to suspend or to change any subject or subjects, substituting, however, others in their places, if in the judgment of the board such suspension, changes, or substitutions shall be conducive to the public good or rendered advisable by public necessities, or by reason of change of time.”
In keeping with the provision, several changes have been made, including the addition of new categories and inclusion of recognition of online content. In 2008, it was announced that content published in online-only news sources would also be considered, and, since 2016, print and online magazines, too, have been eligible to apply in all journalism categories.
Source: Indian Express, 11/05/22
