Quote of the Day

 

“Storms make trees take deeper roots.”
Claude McDonald

“तूफ़ानों से पेड़ों की जड़ें और गहरी व मज़बूत होती है।”
क्लॉड मैक्डॉनल्ड

Facebook launches Creator education programme in India

 

Key Points

• This programme will provide an opportunity to content creators, on its platform and Instagram, to learn, earn and grow their communities.
• While addressing the 2021 edition of ‘Creator Day India’, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri noted that India is one of the fastest growing markets for photo sharing and short video platform.
• India has become the best place for creators to grow and make a living. So, Facebook has planned to do this by developing a range of creative tools in order to democratise expression. For instance, Reels is a great example of democratised creativity. On an average, more than 6 million Reels are produced in India per day.
• Social media platform is also introducing monetisation tools in order to help creators earn through content.

About creator education and enablement programme

It is the next phase of ‘Born on Instagram’. This programme would give creators in India a chance to learn through a self-paced online learning course. Programme will provide live master classes with experts, product updates, latest information on trends, and challenges in order to help creators keep up with new unfolding on Instagram. Participants will receive a course completion letter at the end of the course. The programme will also provide creators the opportunity to real monetary opportunities by means of several programmes.

Born on Instagram programme

This programme was launched in 2019. Reel feature was launched in year 2020, allowing users to create and share short videos. India was among the first countries where Reel feature was launched. India was also one among first two countries where Instagram launched Live Rooms.  Currently, Instagram is testing a new ‘Collab’ feature in India and the UK to allow users to collaborate with others people on Feed Posts and Reels.

Current Affairs- October 21, 2021

 

INDIA

– PM inaugurates Kushinagar International Airport in UP

– PM lays foundation stone of Rajkiya Medical College, Kushinagar (UP)

– Conference on ‘Tourism in Buddhist Circuits – A way forward’ being held in Kushinagar (UP) on Oct 20-21

– Namal Rajapaksa presents trilingual copy of Bhagvad Gita to PM Modi in Kushinagar (UP)

– PM virtually addresses a joint conference of CVC and CBI at Kevadia in Gujarat

– UPSC launches helpline for govt. job aspirants from economically weaker section, backward classes

– India more vulnerable to heat extremes: Lancet report

– Centre extends PMGKP (Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Package) insurance scheme for healthcare workers for 180 days

– Police Commemoration Day being observed on Oct 21

– Punjab: Huge cache of weapons recovered near India-Pakistan border in Tarn Taran

– WHO chief Adhanom Ghebreyesus discusses Covid vaccination and other issues with Indian Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya

– Israel: EAM S. Jaishankar calls on President Isaac Herzog, PM Naftali Bennett in Jerusalem

– India expresses strong opposition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor) projects at the UN Global Sustainable Transport Conference in Beijing

ECONOMY & CORPORATE

– Sri Lanka receives first consignment of non-harmful Nano Nitrogen liquid fertiliser from India to boost paddy, maize cultivation

– India is exporting only non-GMO rice to the world: Government

– Bijnor farmer wins U.P. sugarcane competition with a yield of 2,635 quintal per hectare

– India talks tough at CERAWeek, pushes for lowering of crude oil price

WORLD

– Fossil fuel plans evade Paris limits, says UNEP report

– Jailed Russian Opposition leader wins top EU human rights prize

– Jailed Russian Opposition leader Alexei Navalny wins EU’s Sakharov Prize

– IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath to leave job and return to Harvard University

– Facebook fined $70 million in Britain for breaching order in Giphy deal

– Russia hosts conference on Afghanistan in Moscow with participation from Taliban, Pakistan, China, Iran, India and former Soviet Central Asian states

– Japan: Mount Aso volcano erupts at country’s main island of Kyushu

Whether in India or the UK, discrimination begins in school

 

Sameena Dalwai writes: It is a rite of passage to a senseless, prejudiced world.

Early in the morning, my brother’s message wakes me up from my slumber: “…and it has started!”

My nephew told his parents that one of his friends at school informed him that half of the class does not want to play with him because they do not like Chinese faces. How does the friend know this? It seems he asked the other kids.

My nephew is six years old — a truly beautiful boy of Chinese-Indian parentage growing up in Oxford. My brother and his wife both have PhDs in economics and finance, and hold faculty positions.

And, yet, it has started for the little boy. A life that is full of small daily rejections, token acceptance and patronising tolerance.

The United Kingdom even celebrates a “tolerance day” at school. That is the best my nephew will get. Not wholehearted acceptance, not joyful assimilation, but tolerance, for one day of the year. In a Twitter post, a Chinese Oxford faculty member reported that he was asked to step aside as white tourists wanted to take a photograph of an “authentic Oxford setting”.

When I was studying for my PhD in the UK, shopkeepers would talk loudly to me, lest I do not understand their English. “You speak English very well” was the usual compliment to Indians and we were asked if we have doctors in India. Statistics tell us that Indians form the largest English-speaking population outside the US, and the NHS, the government health provider in England, is mostly run by Indian doctors and nurses. But can you fight prejudice with statistics?

Better, then, to fight it with humour and a certain level of arrogance. When I was asked whether we have mangoes in India, I just laughed, as I had never sighted a mango tree on the green pastures of England. When I was told that I must try the black pudding or bacon, I responded with, “I do not relish pigs, dogs or frogs, but respect those who do”.

Yet, we realised that no amount of jokes can make us equal. When we are amongst a group of white people, many of them will not notice us or remember meeting us the next time. Their gaze will just pass over us as if we do not exist. We learnt that love conquers all, but not race. Being a girlfriend/ boyfriend is ok, but when it is time for commitment, it will boil down to, “you will not be able to adjust to British culture” or “wouldn’t the children face an identity crisis?”

All of this plays in my head like a reel. My heart sinks.

It starts with school. Everywhere.

I was six years old — the same age as my nephew is now — when my teacher, a Maharashtrian, called me to her and asked, “Your father writes from right to left, na?” My father was Muslim and she meant to mock his Urdu writing — a “reverse” language to her simple mind. I was perplexed. Why would my father write incorrectly? When I asked my mother, she must have been as devastated as my brother is now by the helplessness of not being able to protect one’s child from a harsh, ignorant world.

My father and his clan were Konkani Muslims and most of them spoke and wrote impeccable Marathi. Yet, we got compliments on how we speak Marathi “very well”. When, as a five-year-old, I got the first rank in Sanskrit recitation, the teachers all huddled together to discuss whether someone with that kind of name should be given an award for Sanskrit.

My brother once painted a picture of a blue sky with a crescent moon and sparkling stars. His teacher was not happy. She asked, “Why did you paint this picture? Like the flag of Pakistan? Is it because you are Muslim?” My brother was stunned. Was he a Muslim? And what was Pakistan?

As children of Hindu, Muslim, socialist parentage, we were raised on Russian books, Dalit poetry and revolutionary songs. However, since our father was born Muslim, we were marked as Muslim. Patriarchy is an unimaginative system.

The same patriarchy spared me the worst experiences because I was a girl. A Muslim girl needs saving from her own community — from abusive husbands with four wives, from oral triple talaq. My brother, however, was a boy and so definitely an “enemy”. When he was 12 years old, the boys who lost to him on the playground turned hostile, they began a tirade against him and all Muslims. “Rajputs finished the Mughals, now we will finish you,” they yelled. The intricate relationship between masculinity and violence puts little boys in harm’s way. The history classes turned into “us” vs “them”, where everyone would look at the lone Muslim boy, blaming him for the battles between Aurangzeb and Shivaji. The boys routinely taunted my brother and cousins using a derogatory term for circumcised men.

The school becomes a rite of passage to a senseless world. In parallel experiences, Dalit autobiographies recount the branding and degradation that first-generation learners face when they enter schools. It is not the difficulty of subjects such as math, science or languages that causes failure and dropouts among poor, Dalit/ Muslim/ OBC students. It is the hostility of upper-caste teachers and classmates that makes learning impossible.

Childhood humiliation haunts all of us well into our adult lives. The 36-year-old, super-educated, confident self cannot protect the six-year-old confused and hurt self. Must the next generation face it all over again?

Source: Indian Express, 21/10/21

How the militant aspect of India’s freedom struggle was sidelined

 

Arjun Subramaniam writes: A recent film, Udham Singh, highlights how the role of violent acts of defiance was diminished by overplaying the impact of the non-violent movement. This only served British interests

This is not an article about the recently released film, Sardar Udham, or the power-packed and understated performance of Vicky Kaushal. The movie was a good watch, intense and engrossing as a biopic ought to be and searing in its indictment of British colonial rule. The only minor blemish is its extended and gory depiction of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The impact of the massacre would have been driven home with a shorter sequence. The biggest takeaway from the film is its indirect and oblique indictment of several contemporary Indian historical narratives that underplay the impact of revolutionaries like Subhas Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh on British colonial strategies. The film also shines a light on the failure of traditional Indian historiography to assess the countervailing impact of the more publicised non-violent freedom movement over the several violent expressions of angst amongst the Indian people, and its bearing on British rule.

Beyond a chapter or two, I do not recall having read much in school about the various violent and militant expressions against British rule beyond the rather disparaging analysis of the 1857 Revolt, which was showcased as a failure and a manifestation of a divided India. The narratives that influenced many young Indians like me were the building of the road-railway-telegraph network by the British; or the Quit India Movement, Dandi March or the several imprisonments of Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi in urban prisons, and not the trials, tribulations and even torture of prisoners like Udham Singh, or those incarcerated in the Andamans. Seminal events such as the Indian Naval uprising of 1946 and other violent acts of defiance by youth across the country have been subsumed by an Anglicised pedagogical system that drew heavily from colonial archives. Making matters worse was the inability of vernacular historiography to contribute to the predominantly Oxbridge and Delhi-centric histories churned out since Independence.

The propensity of traditional Indian historians to overplay the impact of the non-violent movement, which had its roots in a hybrid value system that combined a westernised model with spiritual Indian moorings, suited the exit strategies of India’s colonial masters in several ways. First, it allowed the sun to set gently on the empire and helped the British retain significant influence in the subcontinent for decades. Second, imagine if events like the assassination of Governor Michael Dwyer; the Naval Revolt; a widespread violent uprising against the trial of the INA leaders; or the organised expression of dissent by the tens of thousands of troops of the Indian Army led by well-trained Indian officers coerced the British out of India. There has been little discussion on whether such events could have prevented the British from influencing events such as the Partition or continuing with the Great Game during and after the first India-Pakistan conflict in 1947-48.

The impact would have been huge and was anticipated by prescient British generals like Claude Auchinleck, who transmitted their fears to Whitehall soon after WWII ended. That London appreciated this possibility and sped up the transfer of power to a political dispensation that was largely trained by them and heavily influenced by Western liberal thought, is testimony to the strategic foresight of an erstwhile great power.

War and conflict as waged by states are nothing more than sophisticated and organised violence, and the apparatus that states build to wage war is largely dictated by the strategic elite. India’s emerging strategic posture and its ability to intellectualise the conduct of war as a legitimate instrument of statecraft in the post-Independence era, was, to a large extent, shaped by the intellectual DNA of a well-meaning, well-educated and unrealistically altruistic set of leaders who overestimated the impact of the non-violent freedom struggle on nation-building. Consequently, the flavour of deterrence that emerged in independent India was one of diffidence clothed in the garb of restraint and responsibility. This is not to glorify the use of violence in inter or intra-state conflict. Nor to undermine the achievements of India’s founding fathers, who laid the foundations of a vibrant democracy.

By consigning the more militant and military events that dotted India’s struggle for independence to the sidelines, the British shaped a significant part of the larger historical narrative even as they left India. It is in this context that Sardar Udham is a “must watch” for every Indian to understand “other” narratives of India’s freedom movement.

Source: Indian Express, 21/10/21

Quote of the Day

 

“Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.”
B. Spinoza

“जिह्वा पर नियंत्रण करना सबसे कठिन है और इच्छाओं की तुलना में भी शब्दों को संयमित करना कठिन है।”
बी. स्पिनोज़ा

Report: Africa’s glaciers to disappear soon

 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and other agency released its new report on October 19, 2021. In its report, these agencies warned that, Africa’s rare glaciers are going to disappear in next two decades because of climate change.

Key facts

• The report was released ahead of “U.N. climate conference” which is scheduled for October 31, 2021 in Scotland.
• As per report, 1.3 billion people of Africa remain extremely vulnerable as African continent warms more and at a faster rate than the global average, even though 54 countries in Africa contributes for less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
• Report notes that, shrinking glaciers of Mount Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda are the symbol of rapid and widespread changes to come. Present retreat rates of these glaciers are higher than global average. If this continues to happen, there will be total deglaciation by 2040s.
• By 2030, around 118 million extremely poor people, or people living on less than $1.90 a day, will be exposed to floods, drought and extreme heat in Africa.

Economic effects of climate change

Estimates of economic effects of climate change vary in the African continent. However, in sub-Saharan Africa, climate change will decrease the gross domestic product by 3% by 2050.  Cost of adapting to climate change in Africa will increase to $50 billion per year by 2050.

Famine in Madagascar

United Nations has warned that “climate change has resulted into famine-like conditions in Madagascar, located in Indian Ocean Island. It also notes that, South Sudan are going through the worst flooding in about 60 years.