Babura village in Kaushambi district has become the first village in the state where e-governance will be provided with click of a button. The programme has been finalized under ‘E-village’ initiative.
Giving details, informatics officer of Kaushambi Daanish Faizan said: “Various types of services like making of income certificates, caste certificate, domicile certificate will be provided through E-village centre (Jan Suvidha Kendra) established at the Babura village. These certificates will be provided electronically over the counter at the time of filing the application. Any applicant can get the requisite certificate within five minutes.”
This initiative will soon be implemented in the villages all over the state.
This plan will be integrated with the other programmes in the state like public health centre, schools and public distribution system.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Lucknow / by Ashraf Jamal, TNN / June 07th, 2014
The basic concepts and challenges in robotics were discussed in the ongoing summer school on robotics by IIIT-Allahabad on Monday.
Delivering a lecture, Subir Kumar Saha from IIT-Delhi demonstrated his software Robo Analyzer which enables students learn the hard, scary and mathematics savvy topics in robotics, using this motivating software. Saha set the tempo at the very start of his lecture with fascinating display of amazing things robots do at the labs of IIT-Delhi. He dealt with robotic manipulators, or ‘intelligent’ movement of the robot’s arms and wrists.
Amar Banerjee from Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai talked about telepresence or the technology wherein one may see and feel the presence of dear ones miles away. He focused on robotic manipulators or robot arms.
The session was followed by a poster presentation by Somnath Biswas, director, IIIT-A. The participants were asked to present their work as posters to enable the participants delve into the core of the subject.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Allahabad / TNN / June 10th, 2014
Annu Rani of Meerut set a national record in women’s javelin as she threw 58.83 metres twice in the 54th National inter-State athletics championship in Lucknow on Saturday.
The 21-year-old Annu who had started her athletic career with the discus, bettered the national record of 58.64 set by Gurmeet Kaur in 2000.
For someone who had a previous best of 54.35 metres in the last Open National championship in Ranchi, Annu impressed with a series of 57.39, 55.31, 58.83, 57.42, 57.88 and 58.83, much to the joy of the locals.
Coached by Kashi Nath at the national camp in Patiala, Annu easily beat the meet record of 54.21 set by Gurmeet Kaur in 1999.
In the process, she also went past the selection criteria of 58.46 metres set for the Commonwealth Games by the Athletics Federation of India.
Interestingly, the selection norms were changed overnight in 16 events after they had been announced in the managers meeting on the eve of the championship.
The norm was brought down from 60.03 in women’s javelin.
Though the joy of host Uttar Pradesh doubled with the 24-year-old Dharamraj Yadav winning the men’s discus with a personal best of 56.73 metres, there was disappointment as the ‘best woman athlete’ of the last championship, the Asian Games gold medallist, Sudha Singh failed to finish the 3000 metres steeplechase.
Mayookha shines
Mayookha Johny who had already booked her ticket for Glasgow in long jump, asserted her good form by clinching the triple jump gold with a new meet mark of 13.72 metres.
Mayookha had a series of 13.38, 13.72, 13.64, 13.51, 13.53 and 13.67 as she sailed past her own meet mark of 13.68 set in 2010.
National record holder V.S. Surekha was in a flood of tears after her failed attempts to erase the meet mark of 4.00 metres set by Khyati Vakharia last year, though she was nowhere near the qualification standard of 4.20 metres in women’s pole vault.
The results: Men: 3000m steeplechase: 1. Naveen 8:42.29 (NMR, old 8:42.58); 2. Jai Veer 8:47.26; 3. Sachin Patil 9:01.12.
High jump: 1. Nikhil Chittarasu 2.20; 2. Jithin Thomas 2.18; 3. S. Harshith 2.14.
A reading of letters that offer snapshots of life in the city from 1903
The letters look at both mundane and political exchanges
Lucknow, the administrative and cultural hub of the nawabs of Awadh at the time of the British Raj, is today an amalgamation of the medieval and the modern. The centuries-old city and its past will be brought to life by Saman Habib and Sanjay Muttoo through an illustrated reading session of handwritten letters written to, or by, people living in Lucknow, in the Capital on Sunday and Tuesday.
Habib is a research scientist at the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow, and Muttoo is a freelance media professional.
Their performance, titled “Lucknow In Letters: Endeavours, Achievements, And Tragedies”, is structured around a historical timeline, with a commentary that contextualizes the letters. It is accompanied by photographs of the people who wrote and received them, images of original manuscripts, and a minimal soundtrack to enhance the sensory experience.
Drawn from far and near in India and abroad, each letter provides an authentic narrative of events as they happened—from M.K. Gandhi appreciating Jawaharlal Nehru’s role in the protests against the Simon Commission, appointed by the British in 1927 to look at governance reform, in Lucknow, to Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi’s letters to his close friend S.M. Mehdi; from sundry exchanges between cousins about the kitchen being repaired, to ones that talk about how secular Lucknow was till the mid-1950s. Among these, a few published and publicly available letters—the exchange between Ram Prasad Bismil and Ashfaqullah Khan, involved in the Kakori Conspiracy, a train robbery during the independence movement, for instance—will be featured too.
A letter written in 1903, by Hilda Seebohm from Lucknow to her home in London, describing the plague in the city, is the oldest of the lot.
This reading is one of Habib and Muttoo’s many endeavours to trace their cultural roots to Lucknow. “At the Mahindra Sanatkada Festival in February, our session on ‘Feminists Of Awadh’ elicited huge response. I read out pages from Ismat Chughtai’s autobiography Kaghazi Hai Pairahan and Sanjay read about Begum Akhtar. The crowd’s appreciation of the language and content got us thinking, and hence began our search for letters,” says Habib.
A host of humorous and poignant letters within her family served as starting material but a much larger and diverse set was needed for a more real representation of Lucknow. More letters from Habib’s cousins in Pakistan, and scanned published material, came in. “The most poignant line in the entire collection is in a letter from a person in Pakistan writing to his cousin in Lucknow saying, ‘My body may be in Pakistan but my soul lives on in Lucknow’,” says Muttoo.
“Lucknow In Letters: Endeavours, Achievements, And Tragedies” will be held on 25 May, 7pm, at Studio Safdar, 2254/2A, New Ranjit Nagar, Shadipur, New Delhi; and on 27 May, 4pm, at the National Institute of Immunology, Aruna Asaf Ali Marg, New Delhi. For details, call 25709456/26717121.
source: http://www.livemint.com / Live Mint & The Wall Street Journal / Home> Leisure / by Arunima Mazumdar / Thursday – May 22nd, 2014
What happens when a large number of literati gather under one roof? Well, a lot of discussion on topics ranging from politics to literature. And that’s what happened at one such recent event organized at a city club by Lucknow Expressions.
Hosts for the evening, Jayant Krishna and Kanak Rekha Chauhan looked after the arrangements and the guests.
However, despite all intellectual discussions, all eyes and ears remained on novelist Krishna Kumar. But he was given competition in attention-grabbing by Ram Advani, who celebrated his 61st wedding anniversary the same day. Advani was surrounded by guests congratulating him when Jayanat Krishna announced the same.
Also spotted were Padma Shri Runa Banerjee and Urvashi Sahni. The two wasted no time in meeting their friends at the do.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> Entertainment> Events> Lucknow / by Akash Wadhwa, TNN / June 05th, 2014
Girls outperformed boys in the Class 12 exams of the Uttar Pradesh Board, results for which were declared in Allahabad today.
A total of 30.48 lakh students had appeared in the examinations held earlier this year, and 28.10 lakh of them secured the required pass marks, said state Director of Secondary Education and Chairperson of Madhyamik Shiksha Parishad Shail Kumari Yadav.
The overall pass percentage this year was 92.21, a drop of 0.47 per cent from the previous year.
The drop in pass percentage was mainly on account of the girls’ pass percentage falling by a significant 1.19 per cent, even though the pass percentage of boys rose by a modest 0.02 per cent.
Nevertheless, the pass percentage of girls (95.31) remained significantly higher than that of the boys (89.81), in keeping with a trend that has been discernible for past few years now.
There was, however, an overall deterioration in the quality of performance as the percentage of those securing a first division fell sharply by 5.56 per cent while the proportion of those getting second division fell by 0.01 per cent.
However, there was an increase of 1.62 per cent in the proportion of those managing a third division.
Basti (97.41), Sultanpur (96.56) and Ambedkar Nagar (96.53) emerged as the best performing districts, while Ghazipur stood at the bottom with a pass percentage of 85.58 only.
Interestingly, none of the districts known for academic achievements like Allahabad, Varanasi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Aligarh and Agra figured in the list of the 10 best-performing districts in the examinations.
According to Yadav, 4.9 lakh more students appeared for the examinations this year as compared to last year.
Consequently, the number of examination centres (10,546) also saw an increase this time.
source: http://www.ndtv.com / NDTV / Home> All India / by Press Trust of India / May 25th, 2014
On Sunday, Yusuf Pathan won his 2nd IPL trophy in 2 years, and his 3rd overall, becoming the first cricketer to win 3 IPL trophies, featuring in the winning XI. Yusuf was an important contributor in Rajasthan Royals’ inaugural season title, and has gone on to win it with Kolkata Knight Riders in 2012 and 2014.
In the final, after Kings XI Punjab scored 199/4, he hit a crucial 22-ball 36 for KKR, keeping the momentum provided by Manish Pandey alive. Having come under criticism for his prolonged no-show ever since joining KKR, Yusuf played some brute innings for his side at the business end of this season, including a 22-balll 72 against Sunrisers Hyderabad, which pushed his team to No.2 in league stages, ahead of Chennai Super Kings.
“I am very proud of the way the team performed today. I am glad for this win and yes, hope I have made my family proud by being part of an IPL win thrice,” he said after the match. “I think I made pulses race when I got out. I could have finished the match earlier.”
Yusuf ended the tournament with 268 runs in 12 innings – at an average of 29.77 and a strike rate of 162.42.
Manvinder Bisla has also been part of three IPL title winning squads. He won two with KKR and won one with the now defunct Deccan Chargers back in 2009 when he wasn’t a regular member of the playing XI.
source: http://www.sportskeeda.com / SportsKeeda / Home> News> Cricket/IPL / by Raj / June 02nd, 2014
What was the course of river Ganga thousands of years ago? Was there a communication link between the Indus Valley Civilisation and Gangetic belt? In an attempt to find answers to questions like these, Allahabad Museum would carry out exploration at the 20-kilometre tract of land between Allahabad-Varanasi after the monsoon.
Earlier, discovery of fossils and tools at the Gangetic plain had revealed existence of habitat prevalent in the neolithic age. Experts claimed that the exploration is expected to detect the deposits that the shrinking river left thousands of years ago. This in turn would help find places where early civilization used to live at the banks of the river.
Several scholars and archaeologists would be participating in the exploration which is expected to be conducted with the help of satellite mapping and coordination from India Space Research Organization (ISRO).
“The stretch of land covering the two civilizations has been a subject of curiosity for excavators and archaeologists as the cultural resemblance between the two societies has till now not been identified. We would be focusing on exploring whether there existed any communication link between the two cultures,” said Allahabad Museum director Rajesh Purohit.
The exploration which was conceptualized last year is slated to start after the rainy season when the upper crust of the land softens, making it easy for explorers to execute the job.
The teams which would be taking part in the explorations include assistant curators and archaeologists Dr Sunil Gupta, Arun Wankhade and Dr Sriranjan Shukla along with the director.
“The stretch between Uttar Pradesh and Balochistan has always drawn the curiosity of archaeologists who are still studying about the root cause of differences between the two societies,” added Purohit. At present, paper work to seek permission from Archaeological Survey of India is being completed.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Allahabad / by Vinod Khanal, TNN / June 04th, 2014
Three girls shared the top position in the city in the UP Board high school exam, results of which was declared on Friday. Smita Singh of St Anthony Girl’s Inter College along with Sakshi Pandey and Viplaw Yadav of Brij Bihari Inter College secured 94.83%.
With Kalpana Chawla and A P J Abdul Kalam emerging as the foremost role model for city toppers in high school examination this year, the message was clear that selfless service was the key to achievements and winning admirers across the globe.
Sharing her success mantra with TOI, one of the three toppers from the city, Smita Singh said, “One should be honest in his or her endeavours in any field to court success. However, one must not forget that at least 6 to 7 hours of round the year regular studies can fetch you top rankings in the exam.”
Daughter of a section officer of Utter Pradesh Public Service Commission, Smita aspires to become a successful surgeon after completing MBBS from a prestigious medical college. Giving credit for success to her parents who always remained by her side to provide the much needed guidance, the topper said: “Just like Kalpana Chawla students should be creative and focused in their studies.”
Hailing from a modest background Viplaw Yadav, daughter of primary teacher at Phaphamu, aspires to be an IAS. Pledging to follow former president’s footsteps, Viplaw said “I also want to become a renowned scientist like Prof Kalam and take my country to the pinnacle of glory in the field of science and technology”.
Similarly, Sakshi Pandey has no words to express the contribution of her parents who worked tirelessly to ensure quality education to their children.
Ishika Singh of St Anthony Girl’s Inter College and Prajjwal Saxena of SBM Intermediate College, Naini jointly stood second with 94.67% while Ashwani Singh also of SBM Intermediate College secured 94.50% to bag third position.
The fourth ranker was Preeti Yadav, 94%, Vijay Shankar Patel bagged fifth position by securing 93.50%, Jyotika Agarwal was sixth with 93.50%.
Shalini Singh and Neha Yadav shared the seventh spot with 93%, Komal Prajapati, Sanjana, Sadaf Bano, Swati Singh all bagged eighth position by securing 92.83%. Similarly, Sachin Tewari and Sheelu Singh shared ninth spot with 92.67% and 10 position spot was bagged by Shivam Singh who secured 92.50%.
Trans-Yamuna, trans-Ganga regions perform better
This year schools situated in the blocks of trans-Yamuna and trans-Ganga regions have churned out majority of city top 10 rankers. Barring St Anthony’s Inter College and Brij Bihari Sahai School, others belong to remote areas of Meja, Karchana, Naini and Amilo Deeha.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Allahabad / by Vinod Khanna, TNN / May 30th, 2014
The two-storied hospice ‘Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan’ hosts the elderly who wish to spend their last days in the search for spiritual liberation.
Shanti Devi, 85, lies wrapped in bed sheet in one of the 10 rooms of the temple-cum-building. Her corner room, lit with incense sticks, is next to a small temple inside the premises, which is most active at the time of dusk and dawn.
Devi, who travelled all the way from Newada in Bihar, mostly chants mantras near her room’s window. A priest, one appointed for every patient, comes regularly in her room to check in on her.
Barely able to speak with her tooth-less mouth, Devi says, “I become restless with the passing of every hour. My family is here who are helping me gain Moksha and I do not want to disappoint them. I know Kashi will take me inside her peacefully.”
Established by the Dalmiya Charitable Trust in 1958, the Bhawan does not charge anything from the people who come here for a purpose.
The trust bears all the expenses from the stay in the house, to all the rituals of the day, to the cremation after “the soul leaves the body.”
“This is a holy place, and charging money means we are into a business. We do not want to be labelled that way. Our Trust bears all the expenses from food to rituals because we believe in providing spiritual satisfaction,” says 60-year-old Bhairava Nath Shukla, says the Bhawan’s manager.
“Not only India, but devotees from England, Japan and Mauritius have spent time in our shelter to understand the concept of Moksha, life and death,” adds Shukla.
Varanasi is famously known for being the ‘religious capital of India’ where thousands come for various spiritual purposes. Some come for the last rites, some to conduct their new born’s’ birth ceremony and some, to die peacefully.
“People who are about to die or are on death bed, and believe in ‘Moksha’ come to this house for spiritual satisfaction. And Kashi is one such place where attaining Moksha is easy,” says Sukhla.
“This spiritual house had been serving the old for the last 45 years,” he says.
Before being given a room, the priests assess the health and life expectancy of patients.
If the patient fails to die within 15-20 days or so even after days of ‘Yagya’ and ‘Tapasya’, the stay is extended for few days.
“In most of our cases, the patient attains moksha. Till now there have not been a single case where the patient had to go back,” says the manager.
For Shanti Devi “it will be unfortunate if at this age” she fails to attain Moksha. She still has 15 days left with her.
Her family members feel that it is not the matter of “life or death, but that she must attain what she came for.”
“I want my mother to attain what she came for. I want her to end her journey peacefully no matter how much time she takes,” says Devi’s son.
Nearly a half kilometre from the Bhawan, on the banks of river Ganga, falls the primary and most sacred cremation ghat in Varanasi, Manikarnika Ghat.
When the soul leaves the material body, it is tightly wrapped in a white cloth on a slim bamboo cot, as per Hindu tradition says a priest at the Ghat.
About 32,000 bodies are cremated here every year, he points out.
“Earlier women were not allowed here to see or participate in the cremation. But nowadays women are seen here,” he says.
Shukla feels that there is nothing “horrific” about the place. The house, instead, must be seen as “a road to heaven”.
“Most of the tourist come here because of the nature of the place. Because the uniqueness attracts them,” he says.
He feels that the process of ‘Moksha’ must be seen as “immortal soul changing bodies, similar to us changing clothes.”
(Agencies)
source: http://www.post.jagran.com / Post.Jagran.com / Post / Home> States News / by Jagran Post News – Jagran Post Editorial / June 02nd, 2014
