A painting in the manner of Indian calendar art on the wall of a Yazidi temple in Lalesh, Northern Iraq. The Yazidis, facing attacks by IS militants, are a Kurdish-speaking minority in Iraq. Their religion is said to have similarities with Hinduism. They worship Melek Tawwus, or the Peacock Angel. Photo: Eric Lafforgue
Source::::The Hindu
Natarajan
Image: The Kudumbashree initiative has turned around the lives of lakhs of women in Kerala like Bindu, pictured above, who once could not afford even one meal a day.
Kudumbashree, the largest network of women in India, is a revolution worth copying wherever there are women in need of help.
Shobha Warrier/Rediff.com travelled to Thrissur, Kerala, to encounter the amazing success story of women who once lived in dire straits, but who now own homes, cars and make enough money to change their lives forever. All thanks to Kudumbashree.
Bindu’s story is as inspiring as it is astounding.
Bindu lives in Mullassery, a village near Thrissur.
There was a time in her life when she could not afford even a single meal a day. Today she can stock up rice for a year!
She didn’t own an inch of land. Today, she owns 22 acres of land!
She didn’t have a home of her own. Today, she has a two storey home!
She used to walk to the farm when she started, but today, she has bought herself a car and a scooter, and she uses the scooter to travel to her farm.
Because of poverty, she couldn’t study beyond Class 7, but today, her son is an engineering student studying computer science.
Bindu belonged to a large family of five brothers and three sisters. While her father toiled hard as a landless labourer, her mother sold tea. But the money they brought home was so little that the family didn’t even have one proper meal on most days.
“Though I was the 6th child, I knew how tough it was for my mother to give us at least one meal a day,” she recalls.
As her parents could not afford to send all eight of their children to school, she had to stop her schooling despite being a good student who had dreams of studying further. It was young Bindu’s duty to do the housework when her parents and elder brothers went outside to work.
Life went on thus until she was married off to Sathyan, who lived nearby, at the age of 18.
“From one poor house to another, that was my journey. With my husband making just Rs 800 a month polishing diamonds, two children, and his family on top of that to take care of, do I even need to tell you how difficult the days were? With both my children suffering from epilepsy, most of my days were spent visiting the hospital.”
In 1998, Kudumbashree started a group in her area, but Bindu could hardly find the ten rupees a week she needed in order to join the group.
“All of us were in such dire straits financially that it was not just me, but the other women too found it difficult to save ten rupees. If we didn’t pay the money for two weeks in a row, we faced eviction from the group. Somehow, I managed to continue with the group.”
Bindu and her friends used to listen to the block officers talk about starting farming but they never thought they would be able to do it.
“It was by accident that we became farmers. In 2000, we had gone to a studio to take a photo of ourselves together. The studio owner told us that he had some land that he wished to lease out for farming. He wanted us to tell some of our Kudumbashree members. We came home with the thought running through our minds. After a lot of deliberation, we decided to try our hand at collective farming.”
It was a major decision for Bindu and her friends — Sheeba, Sreeja and Mallika.
They decided to join hands and lease 8 acres of land that was overgrown with weeds.
The idea was to cultivate paddy.
Though they bought seeds at a discounted price from Krishi Bhavan, they had to take a loan of Rs 10,000 each from Kudumbashree’s informal bank, Rs 25,000 from its revolving fund, and some more from a normal bank.
There was no machinery to cut the weeds; so they used their sickles. When other workers went to their farms at 8 am, they started as early as 6 am.
Leaving their small children at home, these four women worked from morning till evening and yet couldn’t clear the land of weeds. So, they had to employ people. Again, the entire paddy cultivation was done by hand.
As they had no previous experience in farming, they had to take advice and help from others at every step. But they learnt well and fast.
Altogether, they spent Rs 200,000 on their first effort.
Once the harvest was ready, what they did first was not to sell the rice to make a profit. None of them had forgotten the days when they could not afford even a meal a day. All four of them decided to store some rice at home to last the entire year.
They sold the rice that remained, and used it to clear all the debts.
Bindu won the Best Farmer award from the Grama Panchayat that year!
After that, we didn’t feel like coming out of the paddy field,” says Bindu. “The result was beyond our wildest dreams. We started dreaming of owning our own land, and somehow we felt that was achievable.”
Full of confidence, they were ready for a bigger attempt next year; this time they leased 15 acres of land.
Again, they made a good profit from the produce.
Every year, they started making more than a lakh (Rs 100,000) of rupees in profit. Last year, they made Rs 20 lakh (Rs 2 million) from paddy cultivation, with a profit of Rs 150,000 for each of them.
In between, they also cultivated vegetables on another plot, with Krishi Bhavan helping them once again with seeds and fertilisers. Once the vegetables were harvested, they hired a vehicle, drove the veggies to the market, and sold them at a profit of Rs 4,000.
In 2002, Bindu bought her first piece of land — 1 acre for Rs 22,000. The next year, all three of them together bought another 3 acres of land. Now that they turn over profits in lakhs of rupees, they cultivate paddy on 30 acres of leased land.
With the agricultural department promoting mechanised cultivation, this year, they had a bumper crop.
With the profit she made last year, Bindu bought herself a scooter, and her family a car.
There has never been any problems between the friends; no clashes either on money or ego.
The reason, they say, is this” “We make it a point to write down each and every paisa spent and saved. We also minute every visit and discussion we have. After the sales, all the four of us sit down to calculate how much we spent and how much profit we made. Not a single paisa is unaccounted for. That is how we have worked together for 14 years.”
When Bindu was made chairperson of her local Kudumbashree unit, she decided to complete her schooling, and passed the Class 10 exam with flying colours.
“I am not sure whether I should do it at this advanced age, but I want to get through my Plus 2 exams too!” she says.
Bindu also learnt to drive the tiller machine and also climb coconut trees.
The biggest change in the lives of these four women is the freedom they enjoy.
“There was a time when we were shouted at if we were a bit late coming back home. With the kind of success we have achieved, nobody questions us any more. Our lives have changed beyond all recognition. We never ever thought that we would have three proper meals to eat, a two storey house, a car, a motorbike, a scooter, jewellery, and above all, our children studying to become engineers.”
“But there is no life without farming for us. This is our livelihood, our life. We can only thank Kudumbashree for this miraculous transformation,” they say.
As the chairperson of 164 NHGs of Kudumbashree at the Panchayat level, Bindu goes out on her scooter to meet other women and motivate them to come out of their homes and be independent!
“That is one motto of mine; inspire more women,” she says.
Bindu’s is just one success story; there are thousands of Bindus out there in Kerala now; all because of an idea called Kudumbashree.
Source:::: Shobha Warrier in /Rediff.com
Related News: Kudumbashree , Bindu , Krishi Bhavan , Kerala
Natarajan
All have faith in the power of love. But how is this love to be fostered and developed? This question may arise in the minds of many. When people ask, “How can we develop our love for the Lord?” The answer is: “There is only one way. When you put into practice the love in which you have faith, that love will grow.” Because you do not practise what you profess, your faith gets weakened. A plant will grow only when it is watered regularly. When you have planted the seed of love, you can make it grow only by watering it with love every day. The tree of love will grow and yield the fruits of love. Often people today do not perform those acts which will promote love. When you wish to develop love for the Lord, you must continually practice loving devotion to the Lord.
This melodious hymn is also composed by Adi Shankaracharya. His complete works (in Sanskrit) are available at:http://www.samatabooks.com/
The words of this hymn in Devnaagri script and English transliteration alongwith the English translation is available athttp://www.stutimandal.com/new/poemge… andhttp://www.celextel.org/adisankara/kr…
To understand Sanskrit better, visit:http://sanskritdocuments.org/learning…
The audio recording is taken from the Cd Shyam Smaranam: A musical offering to the Eternal Lord Krishna, produced by Sri Aurbindo Society, Pondicherry, under the supervision of Dr.Sampadananda Mishra.
The Cd has two parts, with the same hymns. Part 1 is with the accompaniment of musical instruments and the second one is the traditional rendition, without the musical instruments, except one. The female voices in the Cd belong to Ujjvala Haldar, Chandrima Haldar, Durba Bhattacharya and Binita Shah.
The photos are random downloads from the web.
Source::::You Tube .com
Natarajan
What would it be like to view the Earth and the sky from the vantage point of the International Space Station? These three photos from ISS tell the tale.
First, the Plough or Big Dipper as seen from the International Space Station. You’d get a much clearer view from space, because there’s no atmospheric blurring.
Second, you could see stars ascending above the wide curve of the whole Earth. In this case, refraction due to Earth’s thin shell of atmosphere would often be an added bonus. Here is the southern half of Orion the Hunter with the three belt blue supergiant stars Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka visible in the Earth’s atmosphere. The blue supergiants Saiph and Rigel. Below the constellation of Lepus the Hare. To the lower left, the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog, with the bight stars, Sirius (the brightest object and one of the closest outside of our solar system), powerful blue giant Mirzam, blue supergiant, Adhara (one of the most powerful stars visible from Earth), the huge immensely powerful yellow supergiant Wezen (another one of the most powerful stars visible from Earth) and the blue supergiant Aludra
Third, you could see meteors from above. For all of you drowned out by the moon at the 2014 Perseid meteor shower, here is an August 17, 2011 view of a Perseid below the ISS. The ISS was approximately five times higher above sea level than the meteor. The dying orange giant star Arcturus is visible through the atmosphere on the Earth’s limb (edge), and the rest of the constellation of Bootes the Herdsman, along with Corona Borealis the Northern Crown and Serpens Caput the Serpent’s Head, are also visible to the left.
Bottom line: What would it be like to view the Earth and the sky from the vantage point of the International Space Station? These three photos from ISS tell the tale.
Source::::Earth skynews
Natarajan
Home-grown excellence in education remains elusive
We don’t need no education.
— Pink Floyd
On reading recently that the 2014 Pritzker Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, in architecture, was awarded to Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, my first thought was: why doesn’t an Indian win such prizes? The Pritzker Prize honours a living architect for excellence in architecture, ‘irrespective of nationality, creed, race, or ideology’. The list of winners shows that 23 of the 35 winners have been from developed and advanced countries. However, in the last 35 years of the prize, there was not a single person from South Asia, let alone India, who was nominated.
Critics may argue that the Pritzker Prize, like others for excellence in different fields, is a Western-dominated award. However, there have been winners from Brazil, China and Mexico. What may be a valid claim is that there is a greater chance for creativity and individuality to shine through in the education system in, for example, the United States, rather than India. As a product of the Indian educational system, I can say that studying logarithms in middle school and calculus in high school has scarred my life. What, may I ask, is the point of poring over indecipherable figures in translucent sheets? Ruining the eyesight? Yes. Learning life-enhancing skills? Probably not.
Some exceptions, of course, prove the rule. Take the example of Subhash Khot, the Indian-American theoretical computer scientist who last week won the International Mathematical Union’s Rolf Nevanlinna Prize. He studied in a humble school in Ichalkaranji in Maharashtra, doing his middle school and high school years there, then topped the JEE to gain admission to IIT Powai before leaving for the United States. The winner of the IMU’s Fields Medal, Manjul Bhargava, also has Indian origins, but was not educated in India.
India-born scholars winning top prizes in mathematics is indeed great news. However, even this re-emphasises the point. Although their educational foundation might have been laid in India, they are, in essence, Western-backed scholars who were exceptional but whose talent was nurtured to the fullest in the West and not in their home country. They might be ‘India-born’, but are not or ‘India-nurtured’ success stories.
The Indian educational system, from kindergarten to university, focusses on rote learning. Although the Central Board of Secondary Education has come up with a number of measures to alleviate the anxiety of students, this is surely not the case with the different Board systems followed by the different States. For example, in Tamil Nadu, there are virtually no application-oriented questions in the State Board examination, a life-altering event for many students that determines which college they would get into. All questions, barring the multiple-choice questions for just 25 marks out of 200, in the Mathematics paper are from the prescribed text BOOK: with no numbers changed, no names altered. It is actually possible to gain grace marks if a math problem is asked outside of the textbook or if the numbers are changed in the problem: it is conveniently considered as ‘out of syllabus’!
This is an example of how memory power and handwriting skills are the only pre-requisites for gaining good scores and getting into a good college. However, once a student goes through the motions of getting a university degree, which again is only slightly different from the school examinations, in that you have to mug up and throw up twice a year as opposed to once a year, the student is then thrown into the ‘real’ world.
And this is where the Indian system decides to abandon him or her and perform the disappearing act. The new GRADUATE, with consistently high scores in school and university, is unable to find a job. Even if he or she does, the candidate will find it difficult to come up with solutions to real-world problems at work or home, or think out of the box. After all, how do you expect a person to think out of the box after the ‘education’ that he or she has received precisely was about stuffing him or her into a box every day? This explains why India churns out engineers as China churns out plastic souvenirs. Most Indian graduates in the job market are unemployable; whether they really wanted to be what they studied for is a different story. They do not have the requisite communication skills to express their ideas and they have not been trained to think (the upside is that they have an amazing memory).
So, back to the question: will an Indian these days ever receive the Pritzker Prize (or any prize that recognised creativity and innovation, for that matter)? And when I mean ‘Indian’, I mean an Indian who lives and bases his or her work in India, not the countless Indian-origin American, British and Australian citizens whose achievements we are quick to borrow without permission and brand them ‘Indian’ success stories. The Indian diaspora might have affinity toward their motherland, but we Indians have no right to brag about their achievements. It was probably because of a lack of a motivational and nurturing environment, and a society that places one’s caste before one’s capability, that the Indian diaspora became a diaspora, in the first place.
So well, here’s my answer: I really do not think the Indian educational system is going to change much. A possible solution is to abolish all State Boards and put in place an autonomous Indian educational board that provides uniform, inspired education cutting across different regions. Minor changes could be made to accommodate State-specific preferences, for example, in languages. But as long as we follow a system that stifles creative thinking and individuality, the Pritzker Prize, and all other prizes for that matter, will be a distant dream for the desi Indian.
There is a paradox in the way we treat talent in India: on the one hand, parents rarely allow their children to pursue research careers in pure sciences, and the educational system is structured to hone memory, not talent. On the other hand, we are quick to ‘claim’ Indian talent that has shined outside the country as our own achievement.
There have also been a handful of other celebrated global-level achievers over the decades, but except in the case of an innate genius such as Srinivasa Ramanujam, how many of them were shaped and moulded by the educational system prevalent in India?
div.srik@gmail.com
Source:::: Divya Srikant in The Hindu
Natarajan
One of the meanings of the name ‘Krishna’ is: ‘The one who cultivates the land of the heart’. Krishna draws people, sows, grows and harvests love in broken hearts, conferring supreme delight. Lord Krishna loved cattle and tended the cows. While His brother Balarama had the plough as his inseparable weapon. The plough is not a destructive weapon; it is a tool that helps agriculture that feeds humanity. So both of them give themselves to all living beings. The message for you is: “Apply your knowledge into practice and harvest essentials that elevate all beings.” Always question yourself: “How have I contributed to the happiness of my fellow beings?” Expand your heart; let your love enfold everyone. Maintain self-respect. Develop self-confidence. Krishna is also worshipped as Gopala (Go refers to living beings). So when you serve fellowmen and all beings with selfless love and compassion, you are offering to Krishna the worship He most gladly accepts and He will bestow grace on you.
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Can you truly know a city? Possibly — if your job entails a lot of travel or if your home is in the southern part and your school somewhere up north, and you have friends in the east and family in the west. But this is rare, and to most of us, celebrating a city really comes down to cherishing the parts of the city we know. But of this, there can be no question. If you’ve spent your growing-up years in a city, even if only in these parts, then that city is your home — all of it. And Madras Day is as good a time as any to think about what Madras means to us — well, at least to me.
Madras, to me, is the beaches of my childhood, the mornings filled with huffing walkers and the distant tang of fish being hauled in and, above it all, a sun that rises as it does nowhere else, over water that mirrors its every mood — a sight that quite adequately compensates for the desecration of the nearby sands by the clutch of ugly, deserted stalls that, in the evenings, will tempt visitors with roasted corn and balloons waiting to be shot.
Madras is the stainless steel davara-tumbler of freshly decocted coffee, the ritual of pouring the frothing liquid from one container to another as imperative as the taste.
Madras is the irritation when any visitor to the city thinks only of filter coffee when asked what they like most about Madras, along with jasmine flowers and Kanjivaram saris and idlis, which are almost always described as humble, as if anyone ever ran into a vainglorious idli.
Madras is the suppressed snicker from watching non-Tamils come here to cover the Music Season and struggle to say ‘Margazhi’, as if gargling through a mouthful of marbles.
Madras is the sight of Kalakshetra dancers cycling to class or back home in hoicked-up cotton saris worn over salwars. It is also the sight of a Carnatic musician singing his heart out to 12 people in the audience, at least two of whom have buried their noses in The Hindu crossword.
Madras is The Hindu crossword.
Madras is the twinge whenever you come down Gemini Flyover and glance to the left and see the rubble that was once Safire Theatre, with that proudly cursive ‘S’ on the outside, and, inside, the names of every single film that played in these premises, beginning with Cleopatra.
Madras is the look of horror whenever you have to meet a friend or keep an appointment in T. Nagar, especially when it’s around the stretch that sells clothes and jewels, and more clothes and more jewels, and you finally know what it’s like to be a lone fish in a shoal that’s being swept along in a surging current.
Madras is the tennis ball that lands at your feet when you are walking past a playground where boys are playing cricket. Madras is the cry, “Uncle… ball!”
Madras is the realisation that to this city whose streets you scoured as a footloose kid you are now an “uncle”.
Madras is the Tamil that only people from Madras can tolerate, even love, even they’ve only heard this Tamil in Kamal Haasan’s comedies.
Madras is the eternal question: “Are you a Rajini fan or a Kamal fan?”
Madras is the guilt at having gotten used to calling it ‘Chennai’.
Madras is the anger that, somehow, the rapes and robberies that happen here are less visible to the national media than the ones that happen in Delhi and Mumbai. It is the sad awareness that the spectacular heart-run that saved one life, minutes after another one left this world, a logistical marvel that involved everyone from traffic cops to ambulance drivers to alert medical professionals, would have been 24×7 headline news had it happened elsewhere.
Madras is the mild impatience whenever an elder in the family goes into raptures about the Peach Melba at Jaffar’s Ice Cream Parlour, at New Elphinstone theatre, which now exists only in those memories.
Madras is the annoyance whenever someone from Delhi or Bangalore or Mumbai comes down and sighs that there are no good bars or hangout joints. Madras is the belief that one has to earn the right to mock a city by living in it, not just by dropping in for a weekend.
Madras is the radio station that wakes up with ‘Gaana’ Bala and goes to sleep with Ilayaraja. It is the TV set with a hundred Tamil channels and not a single movie worth watching on the rare afternoon you’re at home. It is the feeling when you return after a trip abroad and walk into a small restaurant, one of those nondescript ‘Bhavans’, and tuck into a nei roast, listening to the people around you chattering in Tamil, smiling softly at the occasional English, and keeping an eye on the clock because you have an auto waiting, along with a driver who’s sure to complain about how long you took, and expect an extra Rs.10 or 20.
Keywords: Madras Week celebrations, Madras Day, Madras history, Madras 375
Source::::The Hindu
Natarajan
The historic Maine lighthouse against the gorgeous backdrop of the Milky Way, by Manish Mamtani Photography.
John Quincy Adams commissioned the Pemaquid Point lighthouse in Bristol, Maine in 1827. The lighthouse was built that same year. Due to poor workmanship (salt water in the mortar mix), the lighthouse began to crumble and was replaced in 1835. Today, it’s a popular spot for photographers and sightseers.
Source::::::Earth sky news
Natarajan
Take off with Natarajan 