Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Saturday, May 24, 2014
Friday, May 9, 2014
California museum to return statue to Cambodia
The Norton Simon Museum has agreed to return a 10th century statue that may have been looted from a Cambodian temple during that country’s genocidal civil war in the 1970s.
“Temple Wrestler,” a sandstone figure missing its hands and feet, has been displayed at the museum for nearly four decades. The five foot (1.52-metre)-high work depicts Bhima, a heroic figure in the Hindu epic Mahabharata, in a fighting pose. The sculpture is one of three being returned to Cambodia from the U.S.
Museum officials met with Cambodian officials earlier this year and are returning the statue “as a gesture of friendship, and in response to a unique and compelling request by top officials in Cambodia to help rebuild its ‘soul’ as a nation,” the Pasadena museum has said. “The Norton Simon properly acquired the Bhima from a reputable art dealer in New York in 1976,” the museum said. The decision marks the latest progress in efforts to bring back together nine figures that once formed a tableau in a tower of the temple. —AP
Helping old clocks keep time - Evelyn Ratnakumar
Painstaking task:Syd Nazeer, the clock winder and technician of the century-old-clock at the Chennai Corporation Ripon Buildings.- Photo: B. Jothi Ramalingam
Syd Nazeer carefully climbs up the dusty, Victorian spiral staircase that winds through the interior of the clock tower at Ripon Buildings.
For the 40-year-old clock technician, this is has been a daily affair for the past five months, ever since the restoration work of the tower was completed. He makes for a towering presence in the closed space which houses the five bells connected to the century-old clock.
“Twenty years ago, the winder at the Ripon Buildings taught me how to do this,” he says, carefully wiping the dust off the clock’s white dials from the inside.
He made several trips into the tower with the winder, learnt the ropes and became a watch and clock technician. But it was only when the winder — a government employee — retired, did Mr. Nazeer step in.
He is now the clock technician and winder for the clock here, and the ones at Chennai Central and Egmore railway stations, while taking care of the maintenance of the old clocks at St. Andrews Church , Egmore, and CSI George’s Cathedral. When repairs at the clock tower were completed, Mr. Nazeer worked on restoring the four eight-foot-dials that face every direction, but his association with Chennai Central has been longer.
“I have been winding Central’s clock for seven years now,” he says, adding that manual clocks require meticulous handling. “I never let anyone into the tower while I wind the clocks, afraid that they may damage the bells or weights.”
Inside the tower, there is a distinct tick for every second that the clock records. As he briskly winds the lever, Mr. Nazeer sets the tower reverberating with a musical chime that calls to mind colonial times, even while an Indian flag furls to the winds right outside. The chime is repeated every quarter of an hour, while loud ‘dongs’ mark the hours.
Each chime lasts a good twenty seconds, savoured by those at the Ripon Buildings at that moment. Those who pass by on the road scarcely notice the music.
Courtesy & Source:http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/helping-old-clocks-keep-time/article5991550.ece
When Madras ran with the bulls for the first time - Nitya Menon
Fifty-year-old Aramugam from Thiruvidaimarudur pounced on a charging bull and held on for dear life as frenzied crowds in Nehru stadium cheered in feverish excitement on January 22, 1974, a Sunday afternoon, in Madras.
This was the first time Jallikattu, the rural bull-baiting sport of Tamil Nadu, was brought to Madras city, or so the State Government’s Tourism Development Corporation claimed.
For the event, held as part of the Pongal tourism festival, the stadium teemed with crowds viewing the spectacle of 36 catchers attempting to demonstrate male prowess.
With tickets priced at Rs. 5, Rs. 3 and Re. 1, the public was ensured its money’s worth by two Jallikattus being organised simultaneously, allowing spectators from all sides of the stadium to partake in the thrill of taming 23 enraged bulls.
Not surprisingly, there was much that did not go quite as planned. In one instance, a ferocious bull broke the enclosed barricades and ran amuck for fifteen minutes.
Five, including a woman spectator, were injured in the bull’s unbridled run.
As the injured were rushed to the nearby General Hospital, the bull was brought under control by M.M. Ponan, an experienced bull tamer.
In another instance, an unimpressed section of the audience pelted stones at participants in the arena.
The police were then compelled to intervene in a scuffle that involved an infuriated bull, its catchers and the spectators at large.
While the sport is conventionally understood to be a part of Tamil Nadu’s rural tradition surfacing during the harvest season, the city of Madras seemed to have appropriated bull-fighting as a performance art, from around the 1950s, in its urban culture.
Reunion
The reunion celebrations of the Madras Regimental Centre in 1949 and the campaign trips of Sri Prakasa, Governor of Madras in 1953, for instance, found bull fights to be popular entertainment provided for distinguished visitors.
Courtesy & source:http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-tamilnadu/when-madras-ran-with-the-bulls-for-the-first-time/article5991480.ece
Cancer patients to benefit from genomics diagnosis
The new generation healthcare company Strand Life Sciences and Triesta Sciences, which is a unit of oncology care provider HealthCare Global (HCG) Enterprises, announced a partnership for genomics-based diagnostics for cancer on Thursday.
The partnership, to set up Strand-Triesta Centre for Cancer Genomics, primarily translates into patients of HCG, including those coming for preventive check-ups, being offered the option of genomics-based tumour profiling at a cost.
Addressing a press meet here, HCG chairman and CEO Ajaikumar said genomics have come to play a major role in personalised medicine. Genomic testing will help oncologists in clinical decisions and patients receive targeted individualised therapies, he said. A release said sequencing of tumour using NGS (next generation sequencing) technologies and analysis of patient’s DNA variations would help physicians go beyond ‘a one size fits all’ model of cancer therapy.
Strand Life Sciences chairman and CEO Vijay Chandru said the coming together of the three entities would help achieve a scale of adoption of genomic testing that enables affordability besides offering insights about cancer. Research on molecular profiles of patients was expected to establish new targets for development of targeted cancer drugs. A portfolio company of Biomark Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based global fund for health and life sciences, Strand has three clinical and research laboratories in Bangalore.
Noting that it raised $10 million a little over a year ago, he said Strand was in talks with investors for a $20-30 million funding, which it intended to use for expanding the operations. In the first round of funding around 11-years ago, the company received $3.5 million with which it created the basic informative platform.
On whether genomics-based testing is covered under health insurance schemes, Mr. Chandru said in the U.S. it had started picking up.
White House honours two Indian-Americans
The White House has named two Indian-Americans as ‘Champions of Change’ in recognition of their work to educate Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) about President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare act.
Manjusha P. Kulkarni and Ranjana Paintal were honoured by the White House and the Department of Health & Human Services along with nine other advocates and community leaders for their work to educate AAPI about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) at an event here on April 24.
“For too long, many members of the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander community have lacked access to quality, affordable health care,” the White House had said in a statement.
Based in Artesia California, Kulkarni is executive director of South Asian Network (SAN) - a community-based organisation dedicated to advancing the health, empowerment and solidarity of persons of South Asian origin in Southern California.
From Chicago, Ms. Paintal serves as programme manager for the Asian Health Coalition’s partnership consortium around education, outreach and enrolment to underserved AAPIs communities in Illinois.
Courtesy & reference:http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/white-house-honours-two-indianamericans/article5991354.ece
Saturday, May 3, 2014
Friday, May 2, 2014
Filtering content on the internet - Chinmayi Arun
Disintegrating into binaries
The petition assumes that pornography causes violence against women and children. The trouble with such a claim is that the debate disintegrates into binaries; the two positions being that pornography causes violence or that it does not. The fact remains that the causal link between violence against women and pornography is yet to be proven convincingly and remains the subject of much debate. Additionally, since the term pornography refers to a whole range of explicit content, including homosexual adult pornography, it cannot be argued that all pornography objectifies women or glamorises violent treatment of them.
Allowing even for the petitioner’s legitimate concern about violence against women, it is interesting to note that of all the remedies available, he seeks the one which is authoritarian but may not have any impact at all. Mr. Vaswani could have, instead, encouraged the state to do more toward its international obligations under the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). CEDAW’s General Recommendation No. 19 is about violence against women and recommends steps to be taken to reduce violence against women. These include encouraging research on the extent, causes and effects of violence, and adopting preventive measures, such as public information and education programmes, to change attitudes concerning the roles and status of men and women.
Child pornography
Although different countries disagree about the necessity of banning adult pornography, there is general international consensus about the need to remove child pornography from the Internet. Children may be harmed in the making of pornography, and would at the very minimum have their privacy violated to an unacceptable degree. Being minors, they are not in a position to consent to the act. Each act of circulation and viewing adds to the harmful nature of child pornography. Therefore, an argument can certainly be made for the comprehensive removal of this kind of content.
Indian policy makers have been alive to this issue. The Information Technology Act (IT Act) contains a separate provision for material depicting children explicitly or obscenely, stating that those who circulate such content will be penalised. The IT Act also criminalises watching child pornography (whereas watching regular pornography is not a crime in India).
Intermediaries are obligated to take down child pornography once they have been made aware that they are hosting it. Organisations or individuals can proactively identify and report child pornography online. Other countries have tried, with reasonable success, systems using hotlines, verification of reports and co-operation of internet service providers to take down child pornography. However, these systems have also sometimes resulted in the removal of other legitimate content.
Filtering speech on the Internet
Child pornography can be blocked or removed using the IT Act, which permits the government to send lists of URLs of illegal content to internet service providers, requiring them to remove this content. Even private parties can send notices to online intermediaries informing them of illegal content and thereby making them legally accountable for such content if they do not remove it. However, none of this will be able to ensure the disappearance of child pornography from the Internet in India.
Technological solutions like filtering software that screens or blocks access to online content, whether at the state, service provider or user level, can at best make child pornography inaccessible to most people. People who are more skilled than amateurs will be able to circumvent technological barriers since these are barriers only until better technology enables circumvention.
Additionally, attempts at technological filtering usually even affect speech that is not targeted by the filtering mechanism. Therefore, any system for filtering or blocking content from the Internet needs to build in safeguards to ensure that processes designed to remove child pornography do not end up being used to remove political speech or speeches that are constitutionally protected.
In the Vaswani case, the government has correctly explained to the Supreme Court that any greater attempt to monitor pornography is not technologically feasible. It has pointed out that human monitoring of content will delay transmission of data substantially, will slow down the Internet, and will also be ineffective, since the illegal content can easily be moved to other servers in other countries.
Making intermediaries liable for the content they host will undo the safe harbour protection granted to them by the IT Act. Without it, intermediaries like Facebook will actually have to monitor all the content they host, and the resources required for such monitoring will reduce the content that makes its way online. This would seriously impact the extensiveness and diversity of content available on the Internet in India. Additionally, when demands are made for the removal of legitimate content, profit-making internet companies will be disinclined to risk litigation much in the same way as Penguin was reluctant to defend Wendy Doniger’s book.
If the Supreme Court makes the mistake of creating a positive obligation to monitor Internet content for intermediaries, it will effectively kill the Internet in India.
(Chinmayi Arunisresearch director, Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi, and fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.)
Courtesy & Soucrce: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/filtering-content-on-the-internet/article5967959.ece
M.S. Pattabhiraman passes away
M.S. Pattabhiraman (90), former vice-president of the Music Academy, passed away on Thursday afternoon.
Apart from his involvement with Carnatic music promotion in the Music Academy, he was an active Rotarian and supporter of social and religious causes and Chairman of the Kedarampatti Swamy Trust in Kancheepuram.
He is survived by daughter Tara Murali and two sons, Ramesh Pattabhiraman and P. Vasanthkumar. The last rites and cremation were performed on Thursday evening at Mylapore.
Narada Gana Sabha secretary R. Krishnaswami recalled Mr. Pattabhiraman’s association with the Sabha in the 1960s. “He was a supporter of good causes and during his two terms as a committee member of the Narada Gana Sabha in our infant stages, he was very supportive,” he said.
Veena maestro and Vice-Chancellor of Tamil Nadu Music and Fine Arts University E. Gayathri said that Mr. Pattabhiraman was a very fine gentleman and both Ms. Sulochna, his wife, and he were connoisseurs of music and art. “Though he held a very senior position in the Academy, he would not show it. I always regarded him in a special light,” she said.
Renowned Bharathanatyam artist and guru Sudharani Raghupathy recalled that Mr. Pattabhiraman was a great soul and loveable person.
“Inspite of his age, he would take the trouble to appreciate artists, including the very young ones. Usually people are very stingy with kind words, but he was a man who had a kind word for everyone,” she said.
Know where your ancestors lived 1,000 years ago
In a groundbreaking research, scientists have developed a tool that can trace back the place where your DNA was formed up to 1,000 years ago.
The revolutionary Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool works similarly to a satellite navigation system.
“What we have discovered here at the University of Sheffield is a way to find out where your DNA was formed up to 1,000 years ago by modelling these admixture processes,” said Eran Elhaik of University of Sheffield.
Genetic admixture occurs when individuals from two or more previously separated populations begin interbreeding. This results in the creation of new gene pools representing a mixture of the founder gene pool.
“What is remarkable is that, we can do this so accurately that we can locate the village where your ancestors lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago,” Elhaik added.
To demonstrate how accurate GPS predictions are, the researchers analysed data from 10 villages in Sardinia, the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and over 20 islands in Oceania.
The researchers were able to place a quarter of the residents in Sardinia directly to their home village and most of the remaining residents within 50 km of their village. They also achieved 90 percent success of tracing islanders in Oceania exactly to their island
The study appeared in the journal Nature Communications. — IANS
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Article on May Day Park Chennai ( The Hindu News Paper - Chennai's park with a past - SRIRAM V.)
Summers are best spent away from Chennai and if you are stuck here, it is best to remain indoors with a powerful air conditioner and a tall cooling drink by your elbow. But if you are the outdoors variety then May Day Park is probably one location that you could visit. Its tall shade-giving trees, green lawns and herbaceous borders are the most soothing sights on a hot day. You access it from Anna Salai, taking a left along Simpson & Co. And there, just opposite the Chintadripet MRTS station is the park, all 14.5 acres of it.
In 1849 or thereabouts, all of this area, Simpson, The Hindu, The Mail and P Orr & Sons included, was one large property, occupied by Burghall’s Stables, a firm that was into the hiring out of horse carriages and the manufacture of saddles and livery. In 1869, a part of its land was handed over to the Government for the creation of a park. It was named after the then Governor, Francis, 10 Lord Napier and 1 Baron Ettrick. Entrusted to the Municipality in 1879, it became in time a much-required green lung for the Chintadripet area.
It is quite likely that much of the lush greenery here is due to sewage. In the 1860s, when underground drains were yet to make their appearance, the largely organic sewage in various parts of the city was drained into specially designated farms. Napier Park received the sewage of entire South Madras. One of the first modern sewage pumping stations was set up here in 1932 and Pumping Station Road next to the park commemorates this.
There is very little apart from the greenery to see and admire in the park. At the extreme left, HT Boddam, a highly unpopular judge from the early 1900s glowers down at you from below an ornate canopy. At the opposite end is an elegant Ashok Pillar, unveiled in 1966 by actor S.S. Rajendran. In the middle is what is best avoided – a gruesome rockery, commemorating the change of name to May Day Park in 1990. Madras was the first city in India to observe May Day, way back in 1923 under the leadership of M. Singaravelar. The park itself had much to do with the city’s labour history, being next to what was one of the biggest employers before modernisation brought numbers down – Simpson & Co. Known for militant labour unionism in the 1960s and ’70s, it is here that the workers of the company meet even today, on May 1.
On January 25, 1965, thousands of students marched from Napier Park to Fort St George as part of the anti-Hindi agitation. The then Chief Minister M. Bhaktavatsalam refused to meet them and tear gas shells were exploded injuring many. That treatment of students is even now believed to be one of the reasons for the Congress defeat in 1967, after which it has never come to power in Tamil Nadu.
Courtesy & Source: http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/society/chennais-park-with-a-past/article5928723.ece
May Day
May Day on May 1 is an ancient Northern Hemisphere spring festival and usually a public holiday; it is also a traditional spring holiday in many cultures. May Day coincides with International Workers' Day, and in many countries that celebrate the latter, it may be referred to as "May Day".
Traditional May Day celebrations
May Day is related to the Celtic festival of Beltane and the Germanic festival of Walpurgis Night. May Day falls half a year from November 1 – another cross-quarter day which is also associated with various northern European paganisms and the year in the Northern Hemisphere – and it has traditionally been an occasion for popular and often raucous celebrations.
As Europe became Christianized, the pagan holidays lost their religious character and either changed into popular secular celebrations, as with May Day, or were merged with or replaced by new Christian holidays as with Christmas, Easter, and All Saint's Day. In the 20th and continuing into the 21st century, many neopagans began reconstructing the old traditions and celebrating May Day as a pagan religious festival again.[3] Note that the source noted does not support any of the changes claimed by the previous statement. The only significant Christianization of May day is essentially localized to Germany where it is one of many historic days that were used to celebrate St. Walburga (the saint credited with bringing Christianity to Germany).
Origins
The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian times, with the festival of Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, and the Walpurgis Night celebrations of the Germanic countries. It is also associated with the Gaelic Beltane. Many pagan celebrations were abandoned or Christianized during the process of conversion in Europe. A more secular version of May Day continues to be observed in Europe and America. In this form, May Day may be best known for its tradition of dancing the maypole dance and crowning of the Queen of the May. Various Neopagan groups celebrate reconstructed (to varying degrees) versions of these customs on May 1.
The day was a traditional summer holiday in many pre-Christian European pagan cultures. While February 1 was the first day of Spring, May 1 was the first day of summer; hence, the summer solstice on June 25 (now June 21) was Midsummer.
In the Roman Catholic tradition, May is observed as Mary's month, and in these circles May Day is usually a celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In this connection, in works of art, school skits, and so forth, Mary's head will often be adorned with flowers in a May crowning.
Fading in popularity since the late 20th century is the giving of "May baskets", small baskets of sweets and/or flowers, usually left anonymously on neighbors' doorsteps.
Courtesy & Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day
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