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Battling Ebola Faculty crunch |
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Challenges ahead for PM
Promoting dictionary literacy
CINEMA: NEW Releases Too creepy for comfort
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Battling Ebola Soon
after the WHO declared Nigeria to be free from Ebola, there were reports of the virus spreading to the West, with a doctor in New York being the latest victim. In Nigeria, a dedicated doctor diagnosed an infected patient, and contained the virus. Since there is no specific treatment or vaccine, patients are given supportive care, and the fatality rate can be as high as 90 per cent. The doctor and her patient were among the eight persons who died in the country. However, her prompt and firm action saved Nigeria from a major health crisis. It allowed health officials to identify other people the patient may have come in contact with and monitor their symptoms. Even as the government in Nigeria prepares to handle more challenges, it has shown that even one right person at the right place and time can save the day. Some countries have banned passengers from Ebola-hit nations. Recently, the US put into place rules that would obligate passengers arriving from the Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to fly into five selected airports that have extensive screening facilities. India too has reviewed various contingency plans for handling Ebola patients, in case they fly into the country. However, there is some worry about the effectiveness of such plans, so the first emphasis needs to be on monitoring visitors from the affected countries. The World Health Organisation, which has been criticised for its slow and bureaucratic response to the deadly virus’ threat, has now geared up and said it hopes to test two experimental Ebola vaccines in West Africa by January. It also plans to make available, within two weeks, a blood serum treatment in Liberia. No one knows how long it will take to control the epidemic. The need is for concerted action. The resource-rich nations which have the means to provide help in treating and containing the infection, must participate fully in eradicating the menace, even as other international agencies work simultaneously to develop proper drugs. The fight against Ebola will be long, but as Nigeria showed recently, it can be won.
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Faculty crunch The
idea of academic pursuit has lost its sheen. It’s not just the poor pupil-teacher ratio in higher education, which has come to 23 students per teacher, that should be worrying the planners and educationists. The more worrisome part is academics no more attract talent. Despite salaries being comparable with the best in the employment market, not many would like to work as faculty in colleges and universities mushrooming across India. Lack of research facilities, grants and opportunities to excel in one’s area of research — often due to nepotism and favouritism — is a major factor that pushes bright academicians to seek offshore jobs. Even after the University Grants Commission (UGC) made it mandatory for all aspiring faculty members to clear the National Eligibility Test or the State-Level Eligibility Test to ensure quality, not much has changed in terms of either the number of teachers available or the quality of teaching. In fact, till as late as 2011, the UGC was flip-flopping on the decision to honour or reject PhD degrees recognised and awarded by its own universities for a faculty position. All this is symptomatic of the malaise that prevails across our much esteemed institutions of
knowledge, from the top to bottom. As a result, 75 per cent of our technical graduates and more than 85 per cent general graduates produced by our universities are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries, according to the results of assessment tests administered by the National Association of Software and Services Companies. There have been suggestions to abolish the UGC, which has failed to respond to the changing requirements of education at multiple levels. In a rush to ‘produce’ more degree holders, we ignored quality. Now, just to get more faculty members, the same should not be repeated. Wipro, an Indian MNC, started a programme called ‘Mission 10 X’ to train teachers in appropriate pedagogy techniques for teaching engineering students to meet its quality requirements in education. Why can’t the UGC take a leaf out of the Wipro book?
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Thought for the Day
It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge and skill. —
Wilbur Wright
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Minor girls in the Punjab MR. Barker, Divisional Judge of Jhelum, calls attention to one extraordinary feature of the working of the Guardian and Wards Act in 1913. "The total number of wards under the Act is," he says, "199, and in the case of 97 of these guardianship is of the person only. Out of these 97 wards who are under guardianship only in respect of their persons no fewer than 93 are girls. Only one conclusion is possible, namely, that the possession of a girl in these days is a highly profitable thing and that much money is made out of the marriage of them." If there are facts in support of this conclusion guardianship seems to have degenerated into a sort of traffic which it is the duty of the Government to prevent. Persons who harbour such designs are obviously unfit to be appointed. The District Judges of Ambala and Hoshiarpur are making a stand against the appointment of a guardian solely in order to confer a right to give a girl in marriage or to restrain her mother from arranging her marriage. It appears that judges decline to take action unless the actual welfare of the minor demands it.
Kangra Temple Restoration Committee HIS Highness Maharaja Sir Ripudaman Singh Bahadur of Nabha has made a handsome donation of Rs. 5,000 to the Kangra Temple Restoration Committee. The gift is doubly welcome as an indication of High Highness' large-hearted liberality and his readiness to help a deserving object of public interest. The munificent help to the Sikh Kanya Mahavidyalya, Ferozepore, and many other institutions, is worthy of a go-ahead and enlightened Ruling Prince, and we confidently trust that his generous donation to the Kangra Temple Committee will stimulate other Punjab States to assist the scheme of restoration.
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Challenges ahead for PM Two
questions arise out of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s impressive victories in the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly elections. How far do they strengthen Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hand in trumping some of the regressive policies of his mentor, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh? Second, can he surmount his ideological bent to make the country a truly modern nation, instead of a hybrid of myths and technology? Mr Modi’s triumph in the Lok Sabha elections, followed by his vigorous campaigning in Assembly elections, temporarily abandoning Prime Ministerial gravitas for the vocabulary of a street fighter, is a feather in his cap. Particularly in the last round of elections, he was, in effect, the only campaigner, the party deciding that he was the best card to play. Mr Modi has, thus, wrested a large measure of autonomy from the RSS in pursuing his policies, leaving the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to resort to sly asides. The deification of a leader, apart from dead souls, is totally contrary to the RSS credo of emphasising the collective, rather than the individual. Mr Modi has proved that however you define his impact, he is the single most important vote getter for the party. On the second question, the answer can only be tentative because it is a work in progress. Thus far he has embraced nationalism as a policy plank, together with his reputation for being a decisive leader. Predictably, he has made much of the need for the country to catch up with modern technology, particularly in the internet field, and is an avid practitioner of social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The tasks before the Prime Minister are many and challenging. In popular perception, his reforms in his first months have been slow although the decontrol of diesel prices won him plaudits. Perhaps Mr Modi is cautious in making his moves because he is feeling the political ground before acting. Sometimes, the BJP’s political rhetoric while in the Opposition, is catching up with Mr Modi such as bringing black money back home. Sometimes, it is the inexperience of his newly-installed ministers that force them to commit gaffes. Appropriating Congress icons is the easier part. The test will arise over how far the BJP government can fulfil its promises of spurring economic development and attracting foreign and domestic capital to achieve significant manufacturing jobs for millions of job seekers, the aspirational youth who brought him to power. Luck has favoured Mr Modi because the record-low oil prices are helping reduce the country’s budget deficit, enabling the decontrol of diesel prices in the first instance. Mr Modi realises that luck alone is a fickle companion and many hard decisions lie ahead in re-plumbing India’s infrastructure and economic structure. And the BJP has its own skeletons in the cupboard, given its past vociferous opposition to inviting foreign investment in retail trade. On the other hand, many in the country applauded Mr Modi for overhauling ancient laws still on the statute book, underlining the merit of a new broom cleaning the mess, both figuratively and literally. Indeed, no one can quarrel with the Prime Minister launching the Clean India campaign by using Mahatma Gandhi’s known fetish for cleanliness. In psychological and philosophical terms, Mr Modi has two overall challenges: reconciling his Hindutva philosophy with the inter-ethnic and inter-religious reality of India and in separating the RSS’ myths from cultivating a modern generation. If schoolchildren are fed on the myths of ideologues such as Dina Nath Batra, how can the country produce a new generation of men and women who can compete in the world? Indeed, how can Mr Modi marry modern technology to fiction in the hope that things will work out? It is a universal truth that innovations begin with a search for answers with an open mind, what is described as cultivating the scientific temperament. It is commendable that the Prime Minister encourages scientific achievement in fields such as space research and lauds the successful Mars mission. But he would do well to remember that the country’s advances in space are the fruits of a journey Jawaharlal Nehru began many years ago. Apart from the philosophical aspects of the RSS ideology, its harking back to a supposedly glorious past to build a new nationalism is flawed because the foundations are weak, if not delusional, and can only encourage retrograde thinking. India needs to look at the future, rather than the past. Indeed, the messianic streak in the Modi government is sometimes jarring. Take its flurry of diktats on the use of Hindi in administrative work, embarrassingly withdrawn or explained away after meeting strong opposition from non-Hindi speaking states, particularly in the South. And Mr Modi himself is not serving his ends by speaking his version of Sanskritised Hindi in the setting of Urdu-speaking Kashmir. Mahatma Gandhi had wisely promoted Hindustani as the lingua franca because it was based on the street language spoken in large parts of the country. If Mr Modi’s challenges are big, his rewards in making a dent in the country’s endemic problems will be equally great. He has shown his penchant for showmanship and use of technology to great effect, both in electioneering and in presenting himself in the best light. In this respect, the contrast with his predecessor is striking. But packaging, to be effective in the longer term, must have substance and Mr Modi will be judged on the latter score. In a sense, Mr Modi is trying to emulate the Mahatma, perhaps the greatest communicator in modern times, by emphasising the trivial and the mundane in his public addresses. The Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech, with its accent on cleanliness and the urgent need of building toilets for the entire population, was plucked straight out of the Mahatma’s script. The dilemma for Mr Modi and his party is how to reconcile the open philosophy of the Mahatma with the narrow view of Hindutva, the BJP credo.
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Promoting dictionary literacy “If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.” A little nip in the air marks the arrival of winter. Showing “mark” as the headword, the dictionary explains not just what the word means in a given situation but also what it can mean in many other situations. The entries include phrasal verbs and idioms the headword generates, for instance, “be slow off the mark” meaning be slow to react to a situation. The word’s synonyms such as streak, smear and fingerprint can be found highlighted in a separate box. An understanding of its opposites and collocations as also of its word family comprising “marked (adj.), marker (noun), marksman (noun), marksmanship (noun)”, explained with examples in the dictionary, can enhance our language competence. 2. The product is from a nationalized company. “Nation”, a noun, indicated as the headword in the dictionary, changes its form to a verb to meet the requirements of the sentence. The book presents all the derivatives of “nation” like nationalize (BrE also –ise), denationalize (OPP), nationally (adv.), nationalistic (adj.), nationality (noun, pl. -ies) and its compound nouns like National Socialism with their usage. 3. Paul Bunyan uses a hyperbole here: “Well now, one winter it was so cold that ... even the snow turned blue.” At times, the spelling of a word can mislead us into mispronouncing it. It is erroneous to say “hyperbole”, “epitome” and “extempore” without their final sound /i/, as heard in “party”, the sound represented by the symbol /i/. Against the 21 consonant and five vowel letters of its alphabet, English has 24 consonant and 20 vowel sounds, each sound represented by a distinct symbol. The key to the 44 symbols appears in most dictionaries. By interpreting the symbols, we can pronounce every word correctly. 4. There were allegations of nepotism in recruitment. Words also acquire cultural meanings with the society labelling them as taboo, offensive and archaic or acknowledging their placement in different contexts as literary, figurative and ironic. “Nepotism” is tagged as “disapproving”, “feisty” as “approving, “perchance” as “old use” and “beck” as “dialect”. The tags change with the public perception changing, as in the case of “damn” in the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind”. Rhet Butler’s use of “damn” in “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” had become controversial then but is listed as “informal” now. Among other inclusions are Oxford 3000 word list (elementary) and Academic Word List (advanced) based on frequency of occurrence across a range of fields. They can be a useful reference point in language study.
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CINEMA: NEW Releases Film Happy New Year
There are two kinds of people in this world, winners and losers…so keeps reiterating the famous King Khan rather famously in the film. Well, to add to it there are two kinds of filmmakers. One there are the originals who are constantly thinking afresh, pushing the envelope and raising the bar. And then there are others who pride themselves as entertainers. In the garb of entertainment (read raking moolah) they continue to recycle the good old formula with a little twist here and there. Needless to say, Farah Khan the director and SRK the producer belong to the latter category. So, the only refreshing ground that Happy New Year (HNY) cuts is that it marries a heist film with a dance reality show. Whoever thought participation in a dance competition in Dubai could become a ruse for stealing diamonds worth 300 crore dollars held in high security safe? The writers do and much else that is as unthinkable as ludicrous… and the result you have a cross between Charlie’s Angels and Ocean’s Eleven. Ha ha…indeed HNY has little similarity with these two Hollywood flicks. Our allusion to these two movies is as much of an oxymoron as the film, which in typical Farah Khan style, borrows left right and centre from films of yore. There are dialogues from Chak De, a tune from Om Shanti Om and references galore to Hollywood too. Yes, yes, we get it; she is not being a copycat only paying a tribute in a spoof like fashion. But the point Farah is, there is too much of a good thing and it comes by the name of excess. Anyway, before we digress, to cut a long story short, Charlie here is our dear superstar Shah Rukh Khan with a revenge gaatha as the back story to explain his motives. And his angels come by the way of a lovely dancer Mohini (ladies first didn’t the casting promos where Deepika Padukone’s name takes precedence over SRK remind us) and Boman Irani, Sonu Sood, Abhishek Bachchan and Vivaan Shah. Now all of them are riddled with some or the other quirk. So, Sood an ex-army officer can’t hear right and gets all charged up at the very mention of anything that is even remotely disparaging to his mother. Irani has an overbearing mother and a strange illness — epileptic fits that last all of 30 seconds. Clearly, all these idiosyncrasies have been hobbled together to make you merry. Whether you will find your laugh-out-loud moments here or not depends entirely on what amuses you. So if you think a guy puking without provocation or a fifty-year-old man being pulled up by his mother is funny…well by all means stand bemused. Not to say that there is no fun quotient in the film for the stiff upper-lipped. Lovely lass Deepika Padukone with her endearing accent and much else in place is literally the ray of light that brightens up the film. Of course, it takes quite a while till before she makes a grand entry gyrating to an item song main lovely ho gai haan. Even though she quizzes koi mujhe batayega main kya karoon she seems to know what to do and gets her act right. Not that others fare badly. Why the Junior Bachchan even has a double role. Never mind that he still remains a sidekick much like Uday Chopra of Dhoom series and Sonu matches SRK in flexing muscles and flaunting his abs. As for Shah Rukh, he is his usual self, flamboyant and charming as ever. Much of the film showcases him, a whole fight sequence devoted to show off his eight abs. But to be fair, the producer in him ensures that all members of his army get their fair share of screen time. Alas, the director’s bid to give viewers their ticket ka worth by stretching it to three long hours, boomerangs and only ends up adding to the Diwali fatigue. Of course, there are two types of viewers — the ones who look for substance and meaning in a film and the other tribe that believes watching Hindi films is no more no less than time pass. So if you are a member of the time pass club… go ahead and hum along I'm feeling alright cause it's a nonsense ki night, only don’t blame us for not warning you on time.
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Too creepy for comfort Film Honeymoon
What
can one say about a harmless little film Honeymoon? That it is lovey-dovey as these newly-weds try to find bliss in the woods. That there are dollops and dollops of love-making to go with it goes without saying. That's okay too. It is the calm before the storm which begins when the lady sleepwalks deep into the woods infested with creepy, crawly creatures. To begin with this couple Paul (Harry Threadaway) and Bea (Rose Leslie) are greeted rather grudgingly by the nearby restaurant owner Will (Ben Huber) and his wife who has known Bea as a youngster. It raises suspicions of a secret liaison in the past and suspicion is sprinkled like mustard. Bea, of course, is the stronger of the two and poor Paul ends up asking all the questions but getting no answers. On the contrary he finds a dramatic change in Bea's behaviour. As though, she is possessed. Is it something to do with her sleepwalk? Or, the past with Will, the restaurateur? So far, so good. But then Bea begins bleeding in the vagina and the action descends into the bizarre. But Bea is at first secretive about it and later refuses to give plausible explanations. Then we have a long worm-like creature being pulled out of her. Yuck…the censors must have dozed past this decidedly gory sequence. The viewer has by now switched off as director Leigh Janiak is like the proverbial blind man in a dark room (you know the rest) but the 87-minute duration seems much, much longer. And all this is supposed to pass off as entertainment. What on earth are we coming to!
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Kill Dill Happy Ending
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Saturday, October 25
& PICTURES CINEMA TV FILMY INDIA TALKIES MOVIES OK STAR GOLD STAR MOVIES ZEE STUDIO ZEE CINEMA Sunday, October 26 & PICTURES CINEMA TV FILMY INDIA TALKIES MOVIES OK STAR GOLD STAR MOVIES ZEE STUDIO ZEE CINEMA
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Kill Dill is an upcoming Hindi romantic action film directed by Shaad Ali and produced by Aditya Chopra under the banner of Yash Raj Films. The film stars Ranveer Singh, Parineeti Chopra and Ali Zafar in the lead roles, alongside Govinda who is playing a negative role in the film. The film is releasing on November 14. Two killers — Dev (Ranveer Singh) and Tutu (Ali Zafar) were nurtured by Bhaiyaji (Govinda) who trained them to be killers.
Happy Ending is an upcoming Hindi romance comedy film directed by Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K. and produced by Illuminati Films. The film stars Saif Ali Khan, Ileana D'Cruz, Govinda, Ranvir Shorey and Kalki Koechlin in pivotal roles. Kareena Kapoor Khan and Preity Zinta also feature in cameos. The film releases on November 21, 2014. Yudi (Saif Ali Khan) is a writer. He didn't write anything in the last few years.
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