Monthly Archives: December 2012

“Make differently abled children feel special”

Education

 Deputy Commissioner of Police (law and order) R. Thirunavukkarasu releasing a handbill during the World Differently-abled day in Madurai, Tamilnadu, on Monday /  Photo: R. Ashok / The Hindu /

Mercy Pushpalatha, the principal of Lady Doak College, signed a MoU with Bethshan Special School pledging the college’s support to them.

“Differently abled children should not be pitied. We should make them feel special,” said R. Thirunavukarasu, Deputy Commissioner of Police (law and order) at the World Differently Abled Day Celebrations, held here on Monday.

“Children with disabilities are more likely to be in low income group, who have less awareness of rights and entitlements. They are subjected to strong social stigma in the community and family. We should lend them help in whatever way we could to support them”, he told the students. Mercy Pushpalatha, the principal of Lady Doak College, signed a MoU with Bethshan Special School pledging the college’s support to them. Mr. Thirunavukarasu then released an awareness handbill on the rights and entitlements of the differently abled.

Caroline Nesabai, Head, Department of Social Studies, Lady Doak College, said that there is a need to promote an inclusive society, in order to help the differently abled integrate into the mainstream.

Ameen from Kalyani Associates Private Limited, said a lot of corporate companies here are eager to contribute a part of their profit to help the differently abled. “We have been associated with Bethshan Special School for nine years. We have recruited a few students from the school to our company to help them enter the mainstream”, he said.

L. Murali Krishnan, managing director, Kalyani Associates, received the first copy of the handbill released by the Deputy Commissioner.

Stephenson, managing trustee of Bethshan Special School, and Jeyapaul, co-ordinator of the school, spoke.

sources: http://www.TheHindu.com / Home> News> Cities> Madurai / by Staff  Reporter / December 04th, 2012

‘My work speaks for itself’

Science & Technologies

Nirvikalpa Natarajan of Chennai has notched up so many formidable accomplishments that her peers in medicine find it hard to believe that she is only 30 years old.

Those accomplishments include performing hundreds of surgeries, and treating even more hundreds of patients in India, Ireland and Britain. Dr Nirvikalpa is a practitioner of oral and maxillofacial surgery, one of a only handful of women in her field.

That distinction, of course, attracts praise from her colleagues at Chennai’s Apollo Hospital. It sometimes also invites envy. The envy invariably comes from less accomplished people, and it takes the form of whispers that perhaps Dr Nirvikalpa is too young for her position, or that she’s a relentless seeker of success.

Such behind-the-back criticism doesn’t faze her. Dr Nirvikalpa has a simple credo: “My work speaks for itself.” It does indeed. In recognition of her work, she received a hugely prestigious award, the Dr M. S. N. Ginwalla Trophy for the Best Scientific Paper at the 37th National Conference of the Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons of India, last Saturday evening.

More than a thousand surgeons from across India and from abroad had gathered for the conference at the Hyderabad International Convention Centre, a facility where the auditoriums are so cavernous that a speaker on the stage can seem dwarfed.

But not Dr Nirvikalpa. Attired in a striking green sari, the tall surgeon with flowing black hair glided to the podium and gave a 10-minute oration that had the audience riveted. One could be forgiven for mistaking her for a fashion model.

She was so lucid that even an attendee unfamiliar with the field’s lingo could follow her. The way she projected her voice, and the manner in which she highlighted the salient points of her address on a screen presentation, spoke of her self-confidence. That self-confidence has been hard won. A graduate of Government Dental College in Mumbai, Dr Nirvikalpa went on to do post-graduate work at Saveetha University in Chennai. She has received two memberships at the Royal College of Glasgow, and a coveted fellowship from Royal College in Ireland. She has been selected for a fellowship in cranio-maxillofacial surgery in Hannover in 2013.

Oral and maxillofacial surgery is a unique specialty that deals with conditions, defects and esthetic aspects of the mouth, jaws and face. It is especially relevant in India, which has the world’s largest number of traffic accidents; such accidents often result in severe traumas to the head and face.

What sets oral and maxillofacial surgeons apart from other specialists is their in-depth understanding of the skeletal and dental framework of the face. Much as the foundations of a building are made from iron, the foundations of the face are its bones and teeth.

Knowing the subtleties of this allows them to deal effectively in areas of cosmetic jaw surgery, facial trauma, craniofacial surgery, oral pathology, temperomandibular joint surgery, oral implantology and oral cancer.

“Oral and maxillofacial surgery is ‘The Next Big Thing,’” Dr Nirvikalpa says. Why? Because it’s a super specialty in medicine, and because the technologies are advancing so rapidly that opportunities to serve bigger cohorts of people are increasing exponentially. Moreover, there’s a shortage of surgeons with requisite experience and skills in the field.

It is a multi-disciplinary field, one that requires surgeons like Dr Nirvikalpa to be deeply familiar with neuroscience, ophthalmology, dentistry and audiology, among other fields of medicine. It is a field that pays surgeons far more in the West than in India, and Dr Nirvikalpa could have just as easily joined the 400,000 physicians of Indian origin who practice medicine in the United States, Britain, Europe and Australia. But she chose to work in her homeland because of the rich diversity of patients, because of patients’ needs, and because, ultimately, “one has to give back to one’s own country.”

There’s also the fact that India, an economic giant, sorely needs more doctors. (Some 45,000 doctors graduate from the country’s medical school each year, and about 3,000 of these go abroad annually.) Even though India is a major supplier of physicians and nurses to industrialised countries, there are just about 600,000 registered allopathic physicians in India, according to the Union Ministry of Health. That translates into one doctor per every 2,000 of the population.

There’s one thing more that keeps Dr Nirvikalpa in India. That’s the benevolence of the man who founded Apollo Hospitals nearly 30 years ago, a cardiologist named Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy. Both Dr Reddy, and Apollo’s director of medical services, Dr N Satyabhama, serve as her
mentors.

Another mentor is Dr Vinod Narayanan, who is highly experienced in oral and maxillofacial surgery, and who is a consultant at Apollo Hospital. Dr Nirvikalpa also looks to Preetha Reddy, managing director of Apollo Hospitals, which has 55 institutions around India, and is one of the world’s largest healthcare systems.

So is she a relentless seeker of success? It’s not a question that Dr Nirvikalpa Natarajan will answer. After all, her work speaks for itself. And the fact that she’s still single at 30 also speaks for itself. One is tempted to add that she’s a very eligible 30-year-old surgeon. Anyone aspiring to change that situation should be prepared to put up with Dr Nirvikalpa’s 18-hour work days, seven days a week, and the fact that she shows no signs of slackening.

Pranay Gupte is an author and veteran journalist

source: http://www.KhaleejTimes.com / Home> International / by Pranay Gupte / December 04th, 2012

Beginnings of Indian cricket

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Historical Links, Pre-Independence

MADRAS MISCELLANY:

Looking for a definitive date for the beginnings of cricket in Madras, a Daniells painting seemed to indicate that it would have been 1792. By the 1840s, European clubs, British military teams and Planters’ XIs had begun to play the game a bit more seriously and by the 1860s, more competitively. By the 1860s too, they had introduced the game to Indians, who began to play it in schools and colleges and in friendlies between scratch teams. But it was the founding of the Madras United Cricket Club in 1888 that resulted in Indian cricket being born as an institution. That Club, now called the Madras United Club, will begin celebrating its centenary year from December 8, a few days away.

Responsible for founding the Club was M. Buchi Babu Naidu of the Dera Venkataswami Naidu clan, and a few of his friends who shared his passion for the game. Buchi Babu’s own passion for the game developed when the English nurses he and his four brothers had, used to take them to watch the sahibs at play. It was said many years later, “Buchi Babu lived and died like an Englishman with all the English love for horses, cricket, tennis and fox-hunting.” It was this love for the game that had him gathering as many teenagers as possible in his neighbourhood to learn the niceties of the game in the spacious grounds of the family mansion in Luz. His fellow-founders of the Club did the same in their homes. And these recruits were the nucleus of the MUCC team when it got its own ground on the Esplanade where its clubhouse still is, though those grounds have been taken over by Government.

With the MUCC having a ground and a team, Buchi Babu was determined to take on the first formal cricket club in South India, the ‘Europeans Only’ Madras Cricket Club. This was easier said than done, with Indians not being allowed the use of the pavilion. Buchi Babu, who came from a family of dubashes (of Parry & Co) and who himself was a dubash, was, as a result, on friendly terms with many of the members of the MCC. One of them was P.W. Partridge of that leading law firm of the time, King and Partridge, which had a big say in the affairs of the MCC. And when Buchi Babu and Partridge worked out a formula whereby the MUC could use the pavilion but lunch on Indian food at a separate table, the first MCC-MUC match was played c.1890. Indian cricket was on its way. This fixture was to lead to what was Madras’s ‘Big Match’, the Presidency Match played annually during Pongal between the Presidency Europeans and the Presidency Indians.

The first match almost did not come off, Buchi Babu passing away a few months before the scheduled dates at the end of December. But his lieutenant B. Subramaniam felt the best way to honour Buchi Babu’s memory was to play the match. The European XI was mainly a MCC team, whereas the Indian XI was mainly college players and Subramaniam, P.D. Krishnaswamy and R. Chari from the MUC. The next year (1909), Subramaniam organised the Buchi Babu Memorial tournament which is still with us. The MUC ran the tournament till the first representative organisation for Madras cricket was formed in 1933.

Over the years that followed its founding, the Club began looking at other sports activities. After all, its bye-laws stated that to become a member, you had to participate in some sport or the other. And so the MUCC became the MUC when the membership decided to introduce other sporting activities. A MUC team took part in the first hockey tournament played in Madras, the Madras Hockey Tournament, for which the MCC offered the trophy. The MUC team and a Royal Artillery team from Bangalore were the first to take the field when the tournament started on July 22, 1901. The MUC team included Buchi Babu at full back and its best player, as reported at the time, was centre half S.V. Chetty. But the Indian team was thrashed 15-0 in the match, something which did not happen in later years when M.J. Gopalan began playing for it.

Tennis too was a sport in which the MUC played a leading role in ensuring participation in the game by Indian clubs. This was in 1913, with J.G. Ramaswami Naidu of the Club playing a key part. When in 1917 the South Indian became the MCC Lawn Tennis Tournament, with Indians included in the competition; the MUC was offered two places on the organising committee. And by 1925, the MUC was organising an All-India tournament of its own on its courts.

When the Club started playing football, following the lead of the Madras Gymkhana, the two clubs teamed together with Harry Buck of the YMCA to form the Madras Football Association in 1934. The MUC members behind the formation of the Association were J. Subbuswami, Dr. V. N. C. Rao and ‘Comet’ Ramaswamy. The Association’s offices were at the MUC for many years and its grounds were one of the most popular venues of the game.

Billiards, snooker and bridge were all other games in which MUC players made a mark in the city and, in some, nationally. Today, these three games, tennis (on two courts) and cricket in a lower division, but with no home ground of its own, survive and are supported by an enthusiastic membership. That membership in the year ahead will remember that their Club was the first Indian club to be formed with a total focus on sport. Will the centenary year see the drawing up of plans to bring back those halcyon days when the Club was a leading representative of Indian sport in the city?

source: http://www.TheHindu.com / Home> Arts> History & Culture / by S. Muthiah / Chennai, December 02nd, 2012

The Handwritten Story

Amazing Feats, Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Historical Links, Pre-Independence, Records, All

Chennai-based The Musalman, considered the only surviving calligraphic newspaper in the world, is being archived in the Netherlands

In a nondescript building on Triplicane High Road, the oldest neighbourhood of Chennai, there’s an unusual newsroom. There is no din of the printing press or the frenetic urgency of “breaking news”. Instead, as the ceiling fan rotates without a noise, a group of four men and women sits on wooden desks with large sheets of paper in front of them. Using calligraphy pens, they carefully script the news of the day in Urdu. This is the office of The Musalman, possibly the only handwritten paper in the world, whose story has been featured in a recent documentary The Musalman: Preservation of a Dream. Not only this, the newspaper has also found a place at Tribal Perspectives in Netherlands, an organisation that archives ancient and rare publications from around the world.

Conceptualised and directed by Delhi-based Ishani K Dutta, the 10-minute film traces the legacy of The Musalman, a name that has survived 85 years of political, social and communal turbulence in India. From Syed Azmathullah who founded it, to Syed Arifullah, his grandson who currently heads it — the newspaper cherishes calligraphy, which has kept the 1927-born establishment together.

“I’ve been thinking of making a film on The Musalman for very long but had no sponsors. Then I approached the Ministry of External Affairs, who gave their support and we set off to make the film in 2010,” says Dutta. The task, however, was made difficult by Arifullah, who is exceedingly reserved and refused to talk to the crew. “But once he opened up, he had a whole treasure to reveal,” she says.

As the documentary concisely breezes through first-hand accounts of people who are part of The Musalman, the legacy is made clear by one visual — that of the dingy 800 sq ft office, which seems frozen in time. “There may be a few changes here or there, but largely, things have remained the same. You’d think you have been transported to 1927,” says Dutta. The film nevertheless sticks to the core of the publication — calligraphy, something they call “the heart of The Musalman”, and the respect and loyalty it has earned them.

The documentary, within three weeks of being uploaded on YouTube, received widespread positive response. “It was all over the social networking websites and many people called us to get in touch with Arifullah. People wanted copies of The Musalman and offer donations,” says Dutta. Arifullah, however, remains nonchalant to all this.

With a meagre salary of Rs 80 per day given to the ‘katibs’ or calligraphers, The Musalman is carefully penned word-by-word by them, most of whom have been working her for over 20 years. Interestingly, the chief reporter belongs to the Hindu community, and has been working there for over 30 years.

The paper gives crisp and ample space to international, national, local as well as sports news. While a blank slot is kept aside everyday for last-minute changes, a segment is also devoted to verses from the Quran. Its masthead, despite the shift in India’s political and communal landscape over the years, did not have to be changed. Explains Dutta, “While talking to them, I got the impression that this is because of the reverence the effort of calligraphy has garnered from loyal readers. Secondly, their content is balanced.”

Earlier this year, Dutta was approached by Tribal Perspectives, to whom she had sent a copy of the publication. It was followed by the organisation recently adding the newspaper to its collection of rare and ancient documents from the world over. There is, however, a faint doubt that laces everyone’s mind. How long will it last? “There is monetary pressure and there are very few loyal patrons left who give advertisements and buy the paper. It’s just the passion and pride of these people that keeps the newspaper going. I don’t think they know it yet but in its own small way, The Musalman has made history,” says Dutta.

source: http://www.indianexpress.com / Home> IE> Story / by Pallavi Pundir / Saturday, December 01st, 2012

Vani Jayaram to get Bharathi Award

Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Records, All

Acclaimed playback singer Vani Jayaram at an event in Visakhapatnam.  / Photo: K.R. Deepak / The Hindu 

The Annual Bharathi Festival will be celebrated from December 9 to 11 at Bharathi Memorial, T.P. Koil Street, Triplicane.

Subramanya Bharathi’s songs will be rendered by eminent singers; scholars will give speech; dance, debate, quiz and other programmes will be organised during the festival. The highlight will be ‘Jathi Palakku’ (palanquin procession of Subramanya Bharathi’s idol) on December 11 morning and conferment of Bharathi Award in the evening.

This year’s Bharathi Award will be conferred on Vani Jayaram, playback singer, who has sung in all the 18 languages referred by Bharathi.

The award will be presented by musicologist Dr. M. Balamuralikrishna. Film director Dr. K. Balachander will felicitate Vani Jayaram.

source:  http://www.TheHindu.com / Home> News> Cities> Chennai> Downtown / Chennai, December 01st, 2012