Thomas Freidman may take credit for the branding; but the fact is that convergence and information technology have been the real stars of the decade. Terms, inventions and innovations like Outsourcing, Facebook, Google, Twitter and the like have indeed made the world much smaller, and flatter. Alas, if only the information technology and telecom revolutions could have made the world much more tolerant and peaceful.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
South Asian writers
The decade saw the emergence of Indian and Pakistani writers on the world literary scene. Subcontinental storytellers writing in English are now visible everywhere. Salman Rushdie was once a lone ranger in these climes, but today he has ample company. Not a single year goes by without a writer of Indian, Pakistani or Bnagladeshi origin finding a mention in the Man Booker shortlist. The names that attracted attention were Hari Kunzru, Arvind Adiga, Kiran Desai, Amitabh Kumar and Jhumpa Lahiri from India, where as Bapsi Sidhwa, Mohammad Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin and Mohsin Hamid from Pakistani, made their country proud. Detractors, however, maintain that most of these books were written keeping western readers and the Man Booker in mind and that these works lacked the depth of true literature.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Get Sunburnt at Goa!
Asia’s biggest electronic dance music festival is here!
When New Year is around the corner, everybody is looking out for the best parties around. Those who can afford to fly out, don’t think twice before heading to the Mecca of partying – Ibiza. Or if they’ve had enough of that Spanish isle, then Mykonos in Greece is the next choice of the discerning clubber. And for those who prefer to pile on the air mile reward points head to South Beach in Florida. Goa, on the other hand, is where the rest of us try our level best to get to. Goa is the Indian man’s Ibiza, Mykonos and South Beach, and with a crazy number of parties and DJs who really can work a crowd, it does truly live up to all the hype. But before you begin planning to fly in on the 29th December this year, here’s a tip – Goa gets hot and happening a lot earlier, from the 27th to be precise – when thousands will be getting together to bump ‘n’ grind at Goa’s Candolim Beach to electrifying dance music at this year’s edition of The Sunburn Festival.
With a line-up that includes the world’s no.1 DJ, it’s hard to imagine that this will only be the third edition of The Sunburn Festival. In Nikhil Chinapa’s (Festival Director and Creative Consultant) words, “The line-up that we have is the most glamorous, most heavyweight line-up that we’ve seen in Asia ever. We have the world’s no. 1 DJ Armin Van Buuren, arguably the world’s no. 1 House DJ, Roger Sanchez, and the DJ who’s risen up the ranking most spectacularly in the past four years – Sander van Doorn. To add the cherry to the cake, we’ve got Gatecrashers hosting a whole stage, and people who’ve been following dance music for the past 20 years, know that Gatecrashers is to dance music what Pink Floyd is to rock.” A number of Indian artists and bands will also be playing at the festival like Pearl, Jalebee Cartel and Tuhin Mehta. Aiming to offer an irresistible synergy of music, entertainment, food and shopping, the organisers are positive the festival will be the biggest and the best that Asia, and not just India, has ever experienced.
While one might imagine that The Sunburn Festival is here to become the East’s answer to Ibiza-like parties, the Festival is in fact interested in catering to families. “Our aim is to make Sunburn Festival the Glastonbury Festival of the East, with lots of different bands, different acts, different genres of music, with flea markets, with art and lifestyle areas, and we definitely want to introduce the concept of camping at a festival. But to do that, we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the security apparatus in place. It’s not just that the people can get there, but be safe too. It will take some time to get to those levels, but we aim to get there eventually,” says Nikhil.
This annual three day festival is not just god-sent for all music-lovers, but for Indian musicians, and could potentially put India on the map as a dance festival destination. And while Goa so far has been our answer for the best parties in India, The Sunburn Festival also gives us desis hope of camping at our very own Glastonbury Festival, very soon...
When New Year is around the corner, everybody is looking out for the best parties around. Those who can afford to fly out, don’t think twice before heading to the Mecca of partying – Ibiza. Or if they’ve had enough of that Spanish isle, then Mykonos in Greece is the next choice of the discerning clubber. And for those who prefer to pile on the air mile reward points head to South Beach in Florida. Goa, on the other hand, is where the rest of us try our level best to get to. Goa is the Indian man’s Ibiza, Mykonos and South Beach, and with a crazy number of parties and DJs who really can work a crowd, it does truly live up to all the hype. But before you begin planning to fly in on the 29th December this year, here’s a tip – Goa gets hot and happening a lot earlier, from the 27th to be precise – when thousands will be getting together to bump ‘n’ grind at Goa’s Candolim Beach to electrifying dance music at this year’s edition of The Sunburn Festival.
With a line-up that includes the world’s no.1 DJ, it’s hard to imagine that this will only be the third edition of The Sunburn Festival. In Nikhil Chinapa’s (Festival Director and Creative Consultant) words, “The line-up that we have is the most glamorous, most heavyweight line-up that we’ve seen in Asia ever. We have the world’s no. 1 DJ Armin Van Buuren, arguably the world’s no. 1 House DJ, Roger Sanchez, and the DJ who’s risen up the ranking most spectacularly in the past four years – Sander van Doorn. To add the cherry to the cake, we’ve got Gatecrashers hosting a whole stage, and people who’ve been following dance music for the past 20 years, know that Gatecrashers is to dance music what Pink Floyd is to rock.” A number of Indian artists and bands will also be playing at the festival like Pearl, Jalebee Cartel and Tuhin Mehta. Aiming to offer an irresistible synergy of music, entertainment, food and shopping, the organisers are positive the festival will be the biggest and the best that Asia, and not just India, has ever experienced.
While one might imagine that The Sunburn Festival is here to become the East’s answer to Ibiza-like parties, the Festival is in fact interested in catering to families. “Our aim is to make Sunburn Festival the Glastonbury Festival of the East, with lots of different bands, different acts, different genres of music, with flea markets, with art and lifestyle areas, and we definitely want to introduce the concept of camping at a festival. But to do that, we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got the security apparatus in place. It’s not just that the people can get there, but be safe too. It will take some time to get to those levels, but we aim to get there eventually,” says Nikhil.
This annual three day festival is not just god-sent for all music-lovers, but for Indian musicians, and could potentially put India on the map as a dance festival destination. And while Goa so far has been our answer for the best parties in India, The Sunburn Festival also gives us desis hope of camping at our very own Glastonbury Festival, very soon...
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Doomed prophecies
Prophets of doom never give up, so why should we?
It’s been a while since people have been running around like frightened chickens expecting the sky to fall on their head or the earth to split wide open and gulp them down. The Romans, for example, believed philosopher Seneca, who had prophesised that the world would go up in smoke. So in AD 79, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, they believed the apocalypse was here. In 1665, when the Great Fire of London set the town on fire, Londoners imagined that it was a result of God’s wrath and that the whole world was to go up in flames. The year after, 1666, was also believed by European Christians to be a year of doom, as 666 is described as the number of the Beast in the Bible. Sixth June, 2006, saw a revival of the same sentiments. Jehovah's Witnesses, a Christian offshoot, had predicted 1914 as the year the world would end. When it did not, they predicted that it would end ‘shortly’. In 1997, a UFO was supposed to follow the Comet Hale-Bopp, and though nothing of the sort occurred, 39 members of Heaven's Gate cult did choose to commit mass suicide, so that their souls could board that aircraft. More recently, we were all supposed to have perished when the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn fell in line with the Sun and the Moon on 5 May, 2000.
Despite all the panic caused by end of the world soothsayers since hundreds of years, the world has happily continued. Will the world continue to spin post 21st December, 2012? Considering how previous prophecies haven’t affected our world one bit, we’d say it most probably will. As Yogi Ashwini says, “Nothing would happen in 2012 and we have to stop looking for reasons to panic and start hoping for peace and spreading joy.”
It’s been a while since people have been running around like frightened chickens expecting the sky to fall on their head or the earth to split wide open and gulp them down. The Romans, for example, believed philosopher Seneca, who had prophesised that the world would go up in smoke. So in AD 79, when Mt. Vesuvius erupted, they believed the apocalypse was here. In 1665, when the Great Fire of London set the town on fire, Londoners imagined that it was a result of God’s wrath and that the whole world was to go up in flames. The year after, 1666, was also believed by European Christians to be a year of doom, as 666 is described as the number of the Beast in the Bible. Sixth June, 2006, saw a revival of the same sentiments. Jehovah's Witnesses, a Christian offshoot, had predicted 1914 as the year the world would end. When it did not, they predicted that it would end ‘shortly’. In 1997, a UFO was supposed to follow the Comet Hale-Bopp, and though nothing of the sort occurred, 39 members of Heaven's Gate cult did choose to commit mass suicide, so that their souls could board that aircraft. More recently, we were all supposed to have perished when the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn fell in line with the Sun and the Moon on 5 May, 2000.
Despite all the panic caused by end of the world soothsayers since hundreds of years, the world has happily continued. Will the world continue to spin post 21st December, 2012? Considering how previous prophecies haven’t affected our world one bit, we’d say it most probably will. As Yogi Ashwini says, “Nothing would happen in 2012 and we have to stop looking for reasons to panic and start hoping for peace and spreading joy.”
Friday, January 08, 2010
At the mercy of irate teachers
Schools dole out violence, leave children scarred
Corporal punishment in Madhya Pradesh’s schools is on the rise. Teachers have turned on their students, punching and beating them, even fatally at times. It is also observed that many school managements try to hide such incidents in order to evade action. Moreover, the school education department is not making any concerted effort to stop such brutalities.
Within just a month, the state has reported three major incidents of merciless beating. A teacher punched a Class V student of a primary school, Premlata, so badly, that she died in hospital a few days later. Premlata’s fault? She answered a question incorrectly. She was admitted to hospital with severe concussions. She succumbed to her injuries three days later. The dust hadn’t yet settled on the Premlata tragedy when another sordid incident emerged, this time in Bhopal’s Saraswati Vidya Mandir School. According to reports, a delicate upper KG student, Anmol Kushwaha, misspelt a word in class. His teacher got so enraged that he broke his bones. Anmol’s injuries were so severe that doctors had to operate on him. It is no consolation that under extreme pressure the school management offered to foot the hospital bill.
In the industrial town of Jabalpur, prayer turned into a nightmare for a Class IX student. A teacher beat Mudit Tiwari with a bench slab for a minor transgression during a prayer meeting and fractured his hands. Mudit’s fault? He says he was asking a fellow student to “stand properly in line during prayer.” His teacher picked up a bench slab and beat him till his hands broke. According to Asif Shek, secretary of Jan Sahas, an NGO: “Physical punishment is now a crime, but students are badly hit by the teachers for every small mistake in the name of discipline. Incidents of fractures and even accidental deaths due to corporal punishments are occurring repeatedly.” According to a survey conducted by the women & child welfare department, about 65% of schools in the state take recourse to physical punishment to enforce discipline among students.
The president of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Shanta Sinha, says: “Schools should be safe zones for students and the teachers responsible should be suspended. Authorities should investigate the matter quickly and take action.”
NCPCP has stressed the need to strengthen the time-tested parent-teacher association (PTA) system to ensure swift action against the erring teachers. In fact, about ten states have also submitted a list of measures to the commission, seeking to prevent and control incidents of such punishment at school.
Madhya Pradesh, however, is gaining the dubious distinction of reporting a rise in the number of such cases.
Corporal punishment in Madhya Pradesh’s schools is on the rise. Teachers have turned on their students, punching and beating them, even fatally at times. It is also observed that many school managements try to hide such incidents in order to evade action. Moreover, the school education department is not making any concerted effort to stop such brutalities.
Within just a month, the state has reported three major incidents of merciless beating. A teacher punched a Class V student of a primary school, Premlata, so badly, that she died in hospital a few days later. Premlata’s fault? She answered a question incorrectly. She was admitted to hospital with severe concussions. She succumbed to her injuries three days later. The dust hadn’t yet settled on the Premlata tragedy when another sordid incident emerged, this time in Bhopal’s Saraswati Vidya Mandir School. According to reports, a delicate upper KG student, Anmol Kushwaha, misspelt a word in class. His teacher got so enraged that he broke his bones. Anmol’s injuries were so severe that doctors had to operate on him. It is no consolation that under extreme pressure the school management offered to foot the hospital bill.
In the industrial town of Jabalpur, prayer turned into a nightmare for a Class IX student. A teacher beat Mudit Tiwari with a bench slab for a minor transgression during a prayer meeting and fractured his hands. Mudit’s fault? He says he was asking a fellow student to “stand properly in line during prayer.” His teacher picked up a bench slab and beat him till his hands broke. According to Asif Shek, secretary of Jan Sahas, an NGO: “Physical punishment is now a crime, but students are badly hit by the teachers for every small mistake in the name of discipline. Incidents of fractures and even accidental deaths due to corporal punishments are occurring repeatedly.” According to a survey conducted by the women & child welfare department, about 65% of schools in the state take recourse to physical punishment to enforce discipline among students.
The president of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, Shanta Sinha, says: “Schools should be safe zones for students and the teachers responsible should be suspended. Authorities should investigate the matter quickly and take action.”
NCPCP has stressed the need to strengthen the time-tested parent-teacher association (PTA) system to ensure swift action against the erring teachers. In fact, about ten states have also submitted a list of measures to the commission, seeking to prevent and control incidents of such punishment at school.
Madhya Pradesh, however, is gaining the dubious distinction of reporting a rise in the number of such cases.
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