Students from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Hyderabad, emerged winners along with two other teams from Amrita College of Engineering, Bangalore and IIT Mumbai in the recently concluded Microsoft’s national college hacking contest ‘Build the Shield’, a statement said.
The Microsoft contest provided students a competitive hands-on experience on information security and risk management coupled with real-life scenarios, wherein the team defends attacks from servers of competitors to emerge as the winner. Close to 290 teams and over 1,000 students participated in the online qualifiers stage in January 2015.
Nearly 50 teams were shortlisted for the national finale at Hyderabad who battled for the top three positions. The winners received pre-placement interview offers from Microsoft along with Xbox One and Lumia phones.
“The contest was quite competitive and a great learning experience for all of us,” said Agam Agarwal from IIT Hyderabad.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Hyderabad / by Special Correspondent / Hyderabad – March 26th, 2015
A lecturer from Zaheerabad Degree College, B Maruthi Rao Patil is eyeing World Record by teaching Taxation and Accounts non-stop for 150 hours from morning of March 9 to afternoon of March 15.
The earlier record is that of a person from Haryana for 139 hours continuous teaching. So to break the old record and create the new record, Maruthi Rao decided to teach continuously for 150 hours.
He had previously taught for 17 hours continuously. According to the rules of the Guinness World Records, five minutes rest will be given after every one hour.
Thus one gets almost two hours rest in a day and he wants to use that time for his daily activities like food and other things. Avadhuth Maharaj from Bardipur Ashram is going to inaugurate this programme.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Telangana / by Express News Service / March 09th, 2015
The state government wants Lions Club International Foundation and Lions Clubs in Telangana to play a bigger role in reaching out to the rural areas.
Chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has suggested to them to help the tribal people in Adilabad district who suffer from malnutrition. “Lions Clubs can do service to these tribals which will be a great help to them,’’ Rao said adding that they (tribals) had superstition and did not take medicine and the Lions Club can motivate them to take medicines.
Rao was interacting with Lions Clubs International Foundation Chairperson Barry J Palmer who along with Lions Clubs past and present presidents of Secunderabad and Hyderabad and other parts of Telangana met him on Thursday and briefed him about their activities all over the country.
Palmer told Rao that the Lions Club would like to have a relationship with Telangana government and would like to take up projects in rural Telangana. Palmer enquired about the priority areas of the state government in the fields of education, sanitation and others. He said that Lions Club is the world’s best NGO.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Telangana / by Express News Service / February 27th, 2015
Ten-year-old Gade Parineetha seems to have a special ability. She can identify or read from flash cards when blindfolded, by smell and sense. She has set a world record by doing so with as many as 101 flash cards in a matter of 60 seconds and entered the Limca Book of World Records, Unique World Records, Wonder Book of Records and four more book of records.
She set these world records, a couple of days ago, in front of a full house of guests and luminaries like justice Challa Kodanda Ram of Hyderbad High Court; GD Priyadarshini, director of department of agriculturem S Kumar, BJP Telangana state secretary and several others at Ravindra Bharati here. The technique is simply called Mid-Brain Activation. “Mid-brain activation gurus Hitesh Satara and Dr B Sai Kiran have been training over 5,000 students in this technique. They realised that Parineetha has special talent. She has been training only for about three weeks,” says her father Pawan Kumar Gade, who is a High Court Lawyer.
G Parineetha performing mid-brain activation skills blindfolded while her father G Pawan Kumar looks on at a function in Hyderabad | NEERAJ MURALI
A class 5 student of Johnson Grammar School in Habsiguda, Parineetha says the new found ability has helped her in her studies too. “What I do now is only a first level. In a few months, I should be able to identify a card from a distance, without touching or even summarise a book by just flipping through it,” says Parineetha who aspires to become a scientist.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Hyderabad / by Express News Service / February 23rd, 2015
Nicholas Graves looking at one of the photos inside the carriage used by the Nizam State Guaranteed Railways at Lallaguda on Tuesday.– Photo: By Arrangement
With just pension saving details dating to the era of last Nizam, Scottish national Nicholas Graves embarked on a search for his maternal ancestors at Lallaguda Railway Carriage Workshop.
On Tuesday, Mr. Graves looked for anything that could reveal information about his great grandfather from his maternal side, James Theodre, who worked for the Nizam State Guaranteed Railways (NSGR) as a loco fitter in 1932 at Lallaguda.
Mr. Graves has his ancestor’s pension saving details, couple of photographs of his maternal grandmother and grandfather who were married at a church in Lucknow, along with their marriage certificate.
“It started eight years ago when I developed interest in my ancestry. Researching my paternal ancestry, I have been able to track it back to four centuries. But I know very little about my maternal side,” Mr. Graves said during his tour of the workshop.
His ancestor James Theodre was born in India in 1897. The pension book with Mr. Graves shows that James earned Rs. 52 in 1932. His daughter and Mr. Graves’s maternal grandmother, Phyllis Margret Champion, was also born in India and later married an army man from England in Lucknow.
“After they got married in 1938, there is no record of my maternal grandparents visiting India or any clues about their parents, including James Theodre,” he said, pointing to an incomplete family tree he has put together.
Mr. Graves’s grandparents died when he was a child and there isn’t much he knows of them.
His mother and his aunt could only offer him the artefacts he has with him. But he knows it’s not much to go on.
His resolve to uncover his ancestry was motivated by Londoner Duncan Hart, who posted a video detailing his visit to Hyderabad to learn about his grandfather’s past more than two years ago. Though he did not meet Mr. Hart’s success at the workshop on Tuesday, Mr. Graves is optimistic.
Should he decide to persist with his search, Mr. Graves’s next stop would be St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Lucknow, where he hopes to get details about his grandfather and grandmother, which would later help build a bigger picture of his maternal ancestry.
Nicholas Graves, a Scottish national, is in the city in search of his maternal ancestor who worked for the Nizam State Guaranteed Railways in 1932 at Lallaguda
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Hyderabad / by Rohit P S / Hyderabad – February 18th, 2015
The first-ever Photonics Valley in the world will come up in Telangana soon. A memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed by state IT secretary Harpreet Singh and PhotonIC Corporation’s CEO Birendra Raj Dutt in the presence of chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and IT minister KT Rama Rao here on Saturday.
According to sources, the proposed Photonics Valley will have not one single industry but many related to the field, making investments to the tune of ` 7,000 crore. Once the project is ready, it is expected to provide employment to around 50,000 youths. The Valley would be operationalised in four years, sources said.
PhotonIC is a company having its registered office at Los Angeles in California, US. The PhotonIC International Private Ltd, Singapore is a technology company and sister company of PhotonIC Corporation that has evolved an expertise in photonics.
The company is executing various projects for the US military including defence advanced research projects and naval air systems command. The company has evolved state-of-the-art technology which encompasses development and operation of design, modelling and testing capabilities in support of standard and novel processing technology for commercial prototyping of photonic integrated circuits and related devices.
PhotonIC Corporation develops, fabricates, and manufactures highly-integrated photonic and electronic devices that promise to revolutionise conventional electronics by overcoming the inherent limitations of copper circuitry.
To achieve this, PhotonIC will establish silicon and CMOS processes to integrate optical and electronic components on a single substrate, thereby reaping the benefits of reduced power consumption and vastly increased bandwidth at significantly lower costs.
Both the state government and PhotonIC agreed to collaborate on setting up an ecosystem to facilitate the institutionalisation of all processes related to photonics. They have also agreed to evolve, test and produce the next generation chips by using Silicon Photonics and compound semi-conductor photonics technology.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> States> Telangana / by Express News Service / February 15th, 2015
Credited with spreading awareness about breast cancer to a large extent in the State, Dr. P. Raghu Ram is set to receive the Padma Shri
Talk Breast Cancer and the one name that will come to mind is Dr. P. Raghu Ram. Right from talking about the rarely discussed ailment to creating a high awareness about ‘Breast Cancer month’ every year in a bid to spread awareness and organising the star-studded Pink Ribbon walk, the oncoplastic breast surgeon has made tremendous headway in breast health care in the state in the last decade. And it’s in recognition of his contribution towards improving awareness about breast health care that he will be conferred with the Padma Shri this year.
“It’s humbling and a great honour to be chosen for this award. I am very happy and I think God placed me at the right place at the right time,” he smiles, between sips of lemon tea as he continues to go about his work.
With not too many medical practitioners choosing to work in the area of breast health, Dr. Raghu Ram chose to take the road less travelled and specialised in the field after his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002. “Awareness about breast cancer was in its infancy back then and there were no advanced screening programmes either. There was no such concept of a dedicated breast health surgical society either. I wanted to change that,” he says.
Settled in the UK at the time, he decided to move back to Hyderabad. “I debated if I would be able to achieve the goals I had set for myself. But my wife was very supportive and we made the move. When I began meeting people here and talking to them about breast health I was laughed at. Slowly but steadily I was able to make headway and spread more awareness about the condition. In 2007 we established the Ushalakshmi Breast Health Centre, a free standing place, at KIMS,” he says.
Ever since, Dr. Raghu Ram has successfully conducted several awareness campaigns including the Pink Ribbon Walk and roped in celebrities like Marcia Barrett, Gautami and Kamal Haasan and Pamela Yash Chopra to create more awareness about breast cancer. “My next step was to set up a community-based screening programme; it was implanted in 2013. We train health care workers to examine women between the ages of 35 and 60 to detect breast cancer in the early stages. I hope some day soon Telangana and Andhra Pradesh will become benchmark states for community programmes like this,” he says.
He also set up a support group as part of the breast cancer foundation to help patients deal with the emotional baggage that cancer entails. Apart from his medical practice and awareness programmes, he is also heavily into academic work, having penned several chapters on the topic for various publications and also teaches students. Given his vast body of work, the oncoplastic surgeon has been in the past bestowed with several awards and has been invited for talks and lectures by various international bodies of breast health surgeons.
While his work is his passion, Dr. Raghu Ram also prioritises family time. “My kids bath time was always my time with them. Now that they’re older I make it a point to spend at least an hour with them each evening. I’d like them to imbibe values like honesty and stay grounded at all times. While we don’t expect them to be the best in everything, we do encourage them to give whatever they’re doing the best,” he says.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Ranjani Rajendra / Hyderabad – February 09th, 2015
A photo of Bangalore Nagarathnamma from the frontispiece of the 1910 edition of the Radhika Santwanamu. / by Special Arrangement / The Hindu
In light of the Perumal Murugan incident, here is a look at the case of Radhika Santwanamu, which was banned on grounds of obscenity 102 years ago.
The script that has played out in the Perumal Murugan case is all too familiar. A creative person offers his/her work to the public. It survives peacefully for sometime before certain vested and intolerant interests wake up to it. Protests and demands for the work’s proscription follow. The administration proves only too eager to scuttle the creation in the interests of ‘peace’. A long debate follows, which then plays on till the media keeps reporting it. What is left is a lot of heartburn for the creator. The intolerant elements tighten their grip on society and the administration pats itself on the back for preventing any untoward incident over the matter.
To students of history, these incidents have played themselves over and over again always to the same script. Remember M.F. Husain? We had similar depictions of goddesses in our temples, in art and even in hymns, for centuries. Nobody bothered about those but when Husain painted goddesses in a particular style, well… At the recently concluded Lit for Life, we had A.R. Venkatachalapathy telling us that the State enacted the Madras Dramatic Performance Act in 1954 only to gag M.R. Radha.
Interestingly, the very first case under the Indian Penal Code for the proscription of a work on grounds of obscenity happened 102 years ago and the book was Radhika Santwanamu. If Perumal Murugan’s Madorubagan sold for a year before it came to the notice of its detractors, the Santwanamu had been in existence for over two centuries! The creation of Muddu Palani, the concubine of the 17th century Maratha ruler Pratapasimha (r1739-1763), it holds the distinction of being one of the very few erotic classics written by a woman.
Saved from oblivion by the Telugu scholar C.P. Brown, it was published for the first time in 1887, and once again in 1907 by Venkatanarasu, an associate of Brown’s. The first edition was included in his 1887 compilation of Telugu works by the scholar and social reformer Kandukuri Veeresalingam Pantulu. In it, while he praised the ideal admixture of Telugu and Sanskrit in the work, Veeresalingam claimed to be shocked by its contents. He also added that this was not surprising as the work was that of an ‘adulteress.’
All would have still been well had not the powerful singer, courtesan and woman of letters, Bangalore Nagarathnamma brought out a new edition of the book in 1910. This was chiefly out of a desire to weed out errors that had crept into the published versions and also partly to expose Veeresalingam’s hypocrisy. Pointing out in the preface of the book that while denouncing Muddu Palani’s work, Veeresalingam had edited similar books by men with far more graphic descriptions of sex, Nagarathnamma questioned if an erotic work became shameless only if written by a woman. She also lampooned Veeresalingam for recommending similar works written by men be included in the syllabus of the Madras University.
The Veeresalingam faction could not bear to see their idol treated thus. The Telugu magazine Sasirekha carried a scathing review of the Nagarathnamma edition denouncing it as a grossly obscene work written by one prostitute and edited by another with descriptions that would corrupt the young by “by suggesting to their minds thoughts of the most impure and libidinous character”. Everyone overlooked the fact that the book had been around for years and jumped into the act immediately.
In order to make it appear that this book alone was not being targeted, the police in their raids on the publisher Vavilla Ramaswami Sastrulu & Sons, seized several titles, including some of Veeresalingam himself. These were later removed from the list and a final set of eight books was submitted to a committee to study their merits and see if any needed to be proscribed.
Radhika Santwanamu by Muddu Palani / by Special Arrangement / The Hindu
It was in vain that Nagarathnamma, several scholars and Telugu aristocrats protested. Some even called on the Governor, Sir Arthur Lawley in Ootacamund to lobby against the ban. G. Venkataranga Rao, Secretary to the Landowners Association, asked if the Government would in the same light consider banning age-old English works such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape Of Lucrece. But all of this was to no avail. The inspecting committee gave its verdict by end 1911. All other seven titles could be released from proscription. Radhika Santwanamu alone was to be banned, its chief crime being that it was an erotic work written by a woman. The Government moved quickly thereafter, and on July 4, 1912, passed an order to that effect.
It remained banned till Independence. During the brief period in 1947-48 when T. Prakasam was Chief Minister of Madras, he rescinded the order, stating that he was restoring a pearl to the necklace that was Telugu. Should we live in the same hope that Perumal Murugan will one day return to writing?
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Books> Literary Review / by Sriram V / January 31st, 2015
Foreign students in a celebratory mood. / Photo: V. V Subrahmanyam / The Hindu
A sports meet was organised for foreign students in Hyderabad
A few days after Makara Sankranthi, a festive mood still lingered at the Nizam College Grounds though for a different reason: it was to host the first-ever sports meet for foreign students studying in and around Hyderabad, organised by the Sports Coaching Foundation (SCB), Masab Tank.
Conceived and conceptualised by K. Sai Baba, general secretary of SCF, the whole idea was to not only let the foreign students showcase their skills,(most of them are regular footballers at the floodlit SCF) but also to gently remind city students of the need to engage in some sport.
Not surprisingly, foreign students latched on to the opportunity and enjoyed the ambience.
With S. Rajesh Kumar of Athletics Association, and V. Satyanarayana, Director of Physical Education, OU, taking care of the technical conduct of the meet, there were little hiccups.
It was an onerous task for the organisers as about 1500 students participated in the three-day sports meet which was marked fby the camaraderie and true sportsman spirit during competitions in cricket, basketball, volleyball, football and some select events in athletics.
Iraq and Afghanistan
Teams from Iraq dominated team events like basketball, football and volleyball while students from the war-hit Afghanistan showed great spirit to clinch key events in athletics.
In individual events, Ruby Babak of Afghanistan cornered glory with a ‘double’ winning the women’s 100 m and the 200 m events in style.
S. Venkata Chalam, vice-chairman of Telangana State Council for Higher Education, gave away the prizes at the valedictory function where well-known broadcaster G. K. Marar, an alumnus of Nizam College which was celebrating 150th year of its inception was also felicitated.
Five high school students from Hyderabad got a unique chance to compete in the TiE Young Entrepreneurs (TyE) global business plan competition for their innovative project ‘TICH’, which will provide online services even to those who don’t have access to the Internet.
Keshav, Rishi Reddy, Neha Acharya, Yagna Agarwal and Zayaan will compete in the global competition where the winners will be awarded a cash prize of $10,000. The best project will also receive funding from top corporate companies, according to Safir Adeni, president of TiE Hyderabad. The children earned this rare opportunity for developing a professional business plan for an innovative idea to provide online services through a call centre.
According to the plan, a call centre will be set up where customers can call and seek various services. This will process the requests of the customers and send the results to them. The services include online shopping, ticket booking and applying for jobs and admissions.
This project was developed by the children as part of the TYE Hyderabad business plan competition where the best team was selected to be sent for the global competition.
Other participants in the Hyderabad competition have also come up with innovative business ideas which included app-based services to manage booking of playgrounds in the city and a techno-glass which is similar to the Google glass. Around 25 children, who participated in the competition in Hyderabad, were mentored by experts from prestigious institutes like Indian School of Business (ISB) and International Institute for Information Technology and some experts from industry. During the 16-week course they were trained in several business-related topics such as conducting market research.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Hyderabad / by Express News Service / February 02nd, 2015
