Innholdsfortegnelse for 16 January 2023 i India Today

From the very first day of 2023, the Election Commission of India (ECI) has initiated the delimitation of assembly and parliamentary constituencies in Assam. The exercise, as mandated by Article 170 of the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act (RPA), 1950, redraws boundaries of legislative constituencies to reflect changes in population. It also reworks the number of seats reserved for scheduled castes and tribes, as provisioned by Articles 330 and 332 of the Constitution. The objective is to provide fair representation to all. While Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has claimed that the delimitation process would “safeguard Assam’s future”, Opposition parties have questioned the timing and intent of the exercise. Some have even dubbed it as a conspiracy to deny Muslims their political rights, as the ECI…

Several senior Congress leaders are upset with the timing of Rahul Gandhi’s interview with filmstar Kamal Haasan, which was released on January 2. The conversation focused on Tamil culture, as the Bharat Jodo Yatra crosses North India. Congress insiders feel that Haasan, whose party Makkal Needhi Maiam had a disastrous outing in 2021, is likely to gain more from the interview, as he has been trying to join the DMK-led alliance in Tamil Nadu, which includes the Congress. Rahul’s backers say a strong alliance with the DMK makes Tamil Nadu an important state—in 2019, of the 52 Congress Lok Sabha MPs, eight came from Tamil Nadu. Speculation is rife that Haasan may even merge his party with the Congress and become its face in Tamil Nadu.…

Chasing dreams of a pan-India presence, Bharatiya Rashtra Samithi (BRS) chief and Telangana CM K. Chandrashekar Rao is extending his footprint first in Andhra Pradesh. He has picked ex-bureaucrat T. Chandrashekar, a political light weight, to head the party there. In contiguous Karnataka, where his electoral strength will be tested earlier, he plans to join hands with Janata Dal (Secular) to contest seats with a big Telugu presence. KCR is yet to spell out BRS’s national agenda though.…

January is a very special month for the state of Tamil Nadu. The winter harvest is in, and the occasion is marked with the biggest festival of the Tamils-Pongal, a festival that Tamilians eagerly look forward to all year. Every year, Pongal is being celebrated from January 15 to 18. The month will also see the observance of Jallikattu—the traditional sport of bull taming and racing-usually held on January 16 each year. Not only that, January will see the unfurling of the 8th Edition of the Tamil Nadu International Balloon Festival (TNIBF), which is being held from 13 to 15 January, 2023 at Pollachi in Tamil Nadu. All in all, it's a packed festive calendar in January for Tamil Nadu. Pongal A multi-day harvest festival, Pongal is observed by Tamils…

HAPPINESS MANTRA “The trick of being happy is to be content in less and utilising this ‘less’ in the larger interest of mankind and nature” Happiness is the expression of a completely satisfied life. When an individual feels satisfaction in all aspects of life—personal, family, social, financial, professional—then he or she can feel happiness. One may find temporary happiness in materialistic things such as power, wealth, fame and reward but they cannot be the source of eternal and sustainable happiness. One can be happy even without acquiring any of these. Such physical attributes are important for living a comfortable life but are not the ingredients of happiness. For instance, if a person is not healthy, he or she certainly cannot be happy no matter how socially successful he or she…

Contentment is difficult to define, especially in physiological and material terms, because it has so many dimensions, layers, ingredients, juices and flavours. It is about the interactions of all of these and the net effect they produce. There is a soup of hormones that your body secretes to get there: Endorphins are neurotransmitters that are the body’s natural painkillers. They are powerful analgesics produced by the hypothalamus and pituitary glands of the brain in response to stress and pain. While running for a long distance, you may find yourself wanting to stop out of exhaustion. But if you endure, you feel a surge of energy. It’s called the ‘runner’s high’ or ‘the second wind’. When you do an activity beyond your threshold, endorphins are released, so that you can ignore…

SHEFALI SHAH, 49 Actress “Happiness to me is being with my loved ones, all of us safe, healthy and happy. There’s food, banter, laughter, music, dance…or just doing nothing at all. But all filled with love and laughter in unison. And the peace that comes with it. It’s the feeling of knowing all is well in my world. I experienced it recently while on a holiday in Africa. Watching these awe-inspiring creatures—whether the Big Five or the whale shark—in their natural habitat, some at close proximity of two to three feet. The silence, the occasional sound of my two boys bantering and laughing, and most importantly all of us together enjoying each moment to the fullest. Priceless.” RAVI KISHAN, 53 Bhojpuri actor and MP from Gorakhpur “For me, the meaning…

Some three months ago, two Class IV students at the Government Tribal School in Murikattukudy in Kerala’s hill district Idukki fainted during morning class. An inquiry revealed that the children had come to school hungry, without having breakfast. Shockingly, when the school did a headcount, some 120 students reluctantly admitted that they too were sitting in class hungry. Lincy George, a partially blind primary school teacher, had taken the lead in the inquiry. She was horrified when 12 of her wards admitted that they had been coming to school on an empty stomach every day. The parents of many of the students worked at the nearby plantations, and left home early for work. “I shared my concerns with the other teachers and headmaster,” says Lincy, “and we conducted a survey.…

As Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla walks through the narrow alleys of a slum in Kota, his parliamentary constituency, to enquire about the health of young mothers and their newborns, his stern facial expression—usually on display while he is chairing the House proceedings—gives way to a benevolent smile. Always up for promoting a public cause, from mobile kitchens to free clothes for the poor, Birla found a new mission when Kota’s JK Lone Hospital reported a high incidence of infant deaths in December 2019. “Often, a newborn is weak because of the mother’s poor health, which in turn is due to the lack of adequate medical advice during pregnancy,” says Birla, whose wife Amita, a gynaecologist, helped him understand that maternal and infant mortality in India are not always related…

Ajaysinh Solanki, a 21-year-old mechanical engineer, is hoping to welcome the summer this year with an air conditioner, a ‘luxury’ that until now hardly anyone in his village could afford. On the terrace of his modest one-storey house—Solanki's is a joint family of 20—in Modhera village in Gujarat’s Mehsana district are items that are common for a typical rural household in India: pickles and spices laid out under the sun, a clothesline, an occasional straw mat. Among these, however, are also four shiny solar panels of 1 KW each that the members of the house take turns to clean. Nobody is complaining, though. Installed just about a year ago—with no hefty down-payment—these solar panels are the reason behind an extra Rs 500 Solanki is now able to save every month…

In 2010, when Michelle Obama visited India, she was seen playing hopscotch and dancing to Rang De Basanti with a few orphaned children in Mumbai. The children were with the Mumbai chapter of Make a Difference (MAD), one of the largest youth-volunteer networks in India for orphaned children. That one meeting with Obama propelled MAD to nationwide popularity. For Jithin Nedumala, who founded MAD in 2006 when he was just 20 years old, volunteering with children was a coincidence. After losing a close friend at the age of 19, he began volunteering at an orphanage in Kochi to “escape his own pain”. There, focusing on someone else’s struggles helped him find deeper happiness. “I was able to focus on something larger than myself for the first time,” he adds. However,…

For legislators of the ruling Balasahebanchi Shiv Sena (BSS)-BJP coalition in Maharashtra, every day might bring reminders of that famous dialogue—“taarikh pe taarikh” (one date after the other)—from the 1990s potboiler Damini. That’s because these MLAs, in contention for ministerial berths in the proposed expansion of the Eknath Shinde government, are being regularly given fresh deadlines for this exercise. The new ministers were to be inducted before the winter session of the assembly at Nagpur, but this deadline too was missed. More to the point, it seems just a surface symptom: insiders say the delay points to simmering tensions between the allies on power-sharing and division of portfolios, with internal restiveness within each constituent adding to the unstable mix One sign of trouble within the ruling coalition: corruption allegations against…

On January 2, the Rajasthan BJP unit held one of its continuing Jan Aakrosh rallies in Jodhpur against the “misgovernance” of the Ashok Gehlotled Congress government, but much like the response in many other parts of the state, the turnout was poor. This despite the presence of Union ministers Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and Gen. (retd) V.K. Singh. Matters, it seems, had not improved since December 1 when BJP national president J.P. Nadda was confronted with a similar situation at the launch of the Jan Aakrosh Yatra. The state BJP’s woes have continued with the bypoll loss in Sardarshahar assembly seat in Churu, with the party losing by nearly 27,000 votes. With this, the BJP has lost six of the last seven bypolls held in the state (including two seats it…

IT may seem odd to be talking of happiness when the world has barely emerged from the immense grief two-plus years of the Covid pandemic inflicted on us. Or seen much strife, including the debilitating war in Ukraine that, if allowed to fester, could end up as the war of the worlds. Or to usher a new year with joy when there are dire predictions of a global recession that could lead to massive job cuts, high inflation and heightened misery. Yet it is precisely why we should be searching for answers to the secrets of happiness. For, as Mahatma Gandhi put it, “Strength does not come from winning. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength.” So it is with the quest for happiness—how…

HAPPINESS MANTRA “Do not accept an unhappy state of mind as normal. Jealousy, anger are not normal, love, peace are” Happiness is a state of mind. But today we believe happiness is what we achieve or what we buy, that it is dependent on external situations and achievements. The truth is, happiness is our nature, our way of being. When the mind is calm and stable, it is in a healthy state and that health of the mind is happiness. Being in that healthy state of mind is in our hands. For instance, if I am stuck in a traffic jam, I can choose to create stress or be stable. When things do not go my way, I can choose to get hurt or remain healthy. Happiness is a healthy…

Growing up in Ajmer Dargah Sharif, an incredible 800-year-old historical neighbourhood, one got to witness people from all parts of India coming to seek blessings, people of varied faiths and religious backgrounds, who spoke different languages and had different traditions and cultural practices. Serving all those who come to the Dargah Ajmer Sharif brings us the greatest happiness. The spiritual elders of the Khuddam-e-Khwaja Sufi community have always taught us never to ask the name, religion, faith or the native land of anyone who comes to the dargah. If one had to ask a question, it is how can we serve these seekers who flock to the Ajmer Dargah Darbar Sharif? One of the most profound teachings of Khwaja Gharib Nawaz Moinuddin Hasan Chishty is that true happiness is in…

On a residential lane sheltered from the bustle of the Banashankari market in south Bengaluru, three young boys wait around a storefront in the late afternoon. Next door, in a tiny house with a tin roof, is the Buguri Community Library, their after-school oasis. Around 4 pm, librarian Pushpalatha S. rides up on her scooter with her toddler in tow and unlocks the grill door—bristling with energy, the boys follow her in. Soon, more readers walk in. Buguri means a ‘spinning top’ in Kannada and the library was started in 2016 by the non-profit Hasiru Dala, which engages with waste workers, as a way to connect with children from these communities. “We focus on socio-emotional learning by inculcating a habit of reading and telling them stories,” says Sathwik N.N., director…

Her ties with Kashmir began long before she moved there. Originally from Patiala in Punjab but settled in the garrison town of Udhampur in Jammu, Deepa Soni’s family would for decades buy Pashmina shawls and papier mache articles from an itinerant merchant whom they knew as Farooq Baba of Tangmarg. The tradition had run in his family for several generations, and his greatest fear was that it would die with their generation. The youngsters had neither the interest nor the patience to carry forward the legacy. An artist at heart, Soni would always be moved by Baba’s story, and wanted to do something for artisans like him. Her opportunity came when her government servant husband was posted to Srinagar in 2021. Soni began conducting free workshops for skilled and amateur…

It’s a cold morning at the government school in Deoria district’s Banghata block, and a group of 30 students are listening to a girl not much older than themselves. She is 19-year-old Pinki Chauhan, who runs Pinki ki Pathshala, as part of an awareness programme on ‘Kala Azar’ or ‘black fever’, a vector-borne disease caused by the protozoan parasite, Leishmania donovani, which can be fatal if not treated. A victim of Kala Azar herself, Pinki has now become a household name across Uttar Pradesh’s Deoria district for the informal classes she takes in government schools to raise awareness about the disease in the region. She not only gives details about the disease, but also engages students through a series of games so that she can effectively drive home her mission…

Fourteen years ago, S. Vishwanath was getting on his motorcycle somewhere in south Bengaluru when a man tapped him on the shoulder, asking if he wanted a well. That’s right, a water well. A rainwater harvesting enthusiast, Vishwanath was nonetheless flabbergasted by the random question. In the conversation that ensued, he started to learn of the numerous open wells in Bengaluru up until the mid-1980s when borewells began to take over. And how the Mannu Vaddar community that made a living from digging these open wells was gradually finding itself out of work. The idea of a campaign to dig a million wells for Bengaluru was thus born. “If we have a million wells, Bengaluru will never run short of water,” says Vishwanath, an urban planner who was on a…

Born Vinay Singh Rajput in 1977 in the Kondagaon district of Chhattisgarh, the third-gender crusader endured decades of abuse as a child and student in her small hamlet of Pharasgaon. “I was not sure of my own identity. I was unable to think like a boy. I felt I was a woman trapped in a man’s body,” she says. Her effeminate behaviour as a boy made her the target of ridicule. She was often locked up in bathrooms by the boys in her school, was urinated upon and sexually assaulted. Even her own family was bereft of the sensitivity to understand her. Unable to take it anymore, Vidya fled her village in 1998 to Raipur where she began working as a steward at a hotel. There she met two more…

Amrit Baishya was a brilliant student at the Kendriya Vidyalaya he studied in at Noonmati in Guwahati. The only son in a middle-class family, he was highly pampered, every wish of his fulfilled as soon as he uttered it. That his father ran a successful travel agency business and mother worked as a government school teacher also helped. Being among the toppers in every class, he also gave his parents no reason to complain. Nothing seemed off limits, even drinking with senior school students when he was in Class 10. When his parents did intervene, he would flaunt his marksheet at them. He was in Class 11 in 2010 when Amrit decided it was time to graduate to something bigger. He first experimented with drugs out of the Rs 500…

It all started at the CPI(M) state committee meeting on December 22 that unanimously passed a ‘rectification charter’ aimed at weeding out “undesirable characteristics” and elements within the party. The document, with a typically stone-faced title (‘Contemporary politics and the party’s immediate responsibilities in the organisational sector’), charts out a plan to, ostensibly, improve the quality of leaders and cadre. Explaining to the media, CPI(M) state secretary M.V. Govindan Master said, “Corrective steps will be taken and no one will be exempt. From the state secre-tariat to the lowest unit of branch members, all party workers will be subject to an elaborate process of self-criticism and scrutiny.” Those terse lines speak of a degree of inner tumult the party does not usually admit to. If sources are to be believed,…

Atechnical lapse could prove to be the undoing of the BJP’s carefully cultivated OBC strategy in Uttar Pradesh. The cornerstone of successive victories for it stood in peril on December 27 as the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court ruled that the state proceed with its urban local body elections without reservations for OBCs. Reason? The state government’s failure to comply with the Supreme Court-mandated ‘triple test’. The Yogi Adityanath regime seems to have faltered on the very first step of the three laid down by the apex court in its March 2021 ruling—that is, to set up a dedicated data commission to assess backwardness insofar as it pertains to local bodies. The state instead relied on the old procedure of conducting a rapid survey to determine OBC populations…

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, who earlier said that he was not invited to join the Uttar Pradesh leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, has now conveyed his best wishes to Rahul Gandhi for the same on Twitter. However, he won’t take part in it. Nor will any other SP leader. Congress functionaries in UP claim that ties will improve before the Lok Sabha election, but sources close to Akhilesh say he is annoyed with the Congress for two reasons. One, nobody from the Gandhi family attended his father Mulayam Singh Yadav’s funeral in October. And two, the memory of the party’s unfruitful alliance in the 2017 assembly polls remains all too fresh.…

Myron, in the ancient history, was worshipped as a peerless sculptor with an astounding style which made indelible impressions on the sands of time. The captivating curves on solid rocks created by his magical chisel dazzled the world of aesthetics unleashing timeless beauty. Heeding Myron's uniqueness entwined with phenomenal instinct in carving out an exclusive grandeur of his own, Myron Homes adopted his name to foray into the spectrum of REAL ESTATE. From the very outset Myron Homes started believing in ethical and moralistic structure of values in all the transactions with fellow society that would last long and eventually succeeded in demonstrating its predominance to a market that thrives on self-aggrandizement and selfish profit making. With a concrete code of honesty, commitment and trust, Myron Homes gradually penetrated into…

When the state of your mind changes or is negative, even the best of things stop giving pleasure and happiness. But when the state of mind is right, even the simplest things can bring joy. So, the mind can turn heaven into hell or hell into heaven. We need to learn about how to deal with the mind, and how to master our thoughts, emotions and feelings. When we are constantly looking at others or are being compared to others, we start feeling inadequate. We start feeling we are not enough. That pressure and stress to feel more than enough and trying to be somebody else has taken away the authenticity of life. The problem arises when we get into the mode of looking at others constantly. The more you…

HAPPINESS MANTRA “Being happy is important. Only when you are happy can you make others happy” Just like any other decision, happiness is also a decision. You need to tell yourself that whatever happens in life, you will be happy, you will be strong, because you are not alone; the whole universe, the power of God is with you. Whether we laugh or cry, the days will pass. Happiness is our true nature. So, whether it is you or anyone else, happiness is everything, it is the very purpose of life. It is purely subjective, but its outer experience comes when we cultivate a mind that remains unperturbed, no matter what changes take place in the external world. We ourselves are the only source of happiness in the world. If…

Happiness is something that every human being yearns for, be it healthwise, wealthwise, in personal relationships or in social positions. No one wants to be unhappy. Whenever our dreams are fulfilled, our plans materialise, our needs are met, whether emotional or material, we experience happiness. But from a Christian perspective, happiness is deeper than this, which our Lord Jesus Christ has revealed to us. In fact, what our Lord Jesus Christ has spoken of is joy, rather than happiness. He has said, “My joy may be in you and that your joy may be full.” HAPPINESS MANTRA “True happiness is not in self-centredness. Switch your focus to others. How can I bring joy to others…how can I help and uplift others” What Jesus our Lord has given to us is…

Aastha, a Class 3 student at the Government Upper Primary School in Hasudi Ausanpur village in the Siddharthnagar district of Uttar Pradesh, had heard from her grandparents that an old lady on the moon runs a mill there. Then, she saw the moon through the telescope of the space lab set up in her school. Excited, Aastha now tells her friends that there are only potholes on the earth’s natural satellite. She can also tell them about aeroplanes, drones and the solar system besides all the satellites to be launched in the country by the year 2030 and what they will do. Not just Aastha, but students from more than 100 other government schools have found out whether all the stories they have heard about outer space are actually true,…

Bit by bit, Sushanta Giri’s mother wasted away, as the deadly liver ailment progressed. The family, who live in the remote Baikunthapur village in the Sundarbans in West Bengal, had no means to take her to the nearest subdivisional hospital at Joynagar, 49 km away, for treatment. Giri’s eyes well up as he recalls those nights when his mother suffered acute pain, and how he frantically did the rounds of village quacks for some palliative. Giri’s mother passed away the day he wrote the final paper of his school-leaving board exam. Back from the funeral, the 18-year-old resolved to help improve the living condition of the people who live in these coastal backwaters—the very margins both geographically and socio-economically—so that they could access the basic needs of life. For thousands…

After 16 years of working at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in Wayanad, Kerala, it was a 2010 visit to a piece of land Meera Chandran’s family owned in the district that changed her life. She found that Lantana weed, an invasive species that kills native plants, had taken over the land, thereby upsetting the ecological balance. For three years, Chandran worked tirelessly—manually uprooting the weeds so that they don't grow back—to clear the area and restore native plant species. Around the same time, the endeavour made Chandran want to work on conservation on a larger scale, and thus, the Forest First Samithi was born. After four years of juggling TCS and Forest First, she finally quit her job and devoted her entire time to conservation. “Forest First was started with…

I am yet to make up my mind, but I want to become a policeman,” says Kiran Chandrakant Kale, a Class 10 student, as portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam stare at him benignly from the walls of his classroom. Kale is not just another student spelling out his career goal. He is among the underprivileged street children being educated at a ‘signal shala’, a school located under a flyover at the busy Teen Haat Naka in Thane. The students in this unique school belong to migrant families from de-notified tribes. They once sold flowers and trinkets or even begged at the traffic signal. Out of the educational mainstream, they ran the risk of being sucked into a vortex of substance abuse and crime. The school,…

On the rooftop terrace of a villa near Bengaluru’s tech corridor in Marathahalli, an art class is in progress, where a group of young adults are engrossed in a curious endeavour—to draw and colour using their less-preferred hand. There’s a great deal of bonhomie, and every once in a while someone breaks into a whoop, while others concentrate on such things as forming a heart shape. The good cheer communicates itself to the mothers accompanying them. The session is being conducted by The Art Sanctuary (TAS), a platform for ‘neurodiverse’ youngsters to showcase their creative skills. Neurodiverse is a term used to describe individuals with intellectual disability from conditions such as autism, Down’s Syndrome, cerebral palsy or dyslexia. “Just because today we don’t understand what cognitive impairment is, it cannot…