Jharkhand’s many tongues: rich heritage! Ranchi: languages in India continue to evolve and develop by receiving recognition through the self-assertion and rise of the suppressed segments and tribes. This has a great potential for the creation of great literature, adding to the immense Indian inventory of narratives and images. In what seems an exciting development, UNICEF has supported the making of a dictionary for the tribal languages of Jharkhand. The dictionary, called Meri Bhasha Mein Meri Duniya, is theme-based and will visually depict items that people come in contact with in... 

  By Ratnakar Tripathy What happens: when the balance breaks? I  always looked at corruption as looting by the rich. The reason may be my class and caste. I am middle-middle class. I am Brahmin. None of it helps while getting a simple job done at a government counter or even a private company counter [on the same day in late 1990s in Delhi I was asked for ‘commission’ by a government TV channel and a private TV channel executive for the airing of a documentary serial]. It seems I must go to the decrepit shed nearby and deposit some cash after which a phone call would get made, and my... 

  Jaduguda: affected by Uranium mining! Ranchi: a three-day festival, which kicked off at Central University, Brambe, on Tuesday, travelled to the RIMS campus on Wednesday. Students and teachers of the premier medical college, film lovers and social activists watched six documentaries and short films that highlight the ill effects of uranium mining. The films screened were Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, Ranchi-based film-maker Sriprakash’s Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda and Jadugoda: The Black Magic, Galina Laskova Sanderson’s (Belarus) To Whom It May Concern, When the Dust Settles by Australian... 

An earthen dam in Jharkhand Gunia (Gumla): when you look at typical development news in the papers or the TV channels, one third of the news may be about the planned projects, another one third about what has been implemented with uncertain results and the rest about what has NOT been done. In sum, the citizen is always waiting for the fatherly-motherly state to come to her rescue and get her out of the mess. Not always though! Once in a while people decide not to wait and take their fate in their own hands. This is of course possible when the solution comes through relatively small development... 

    Dhyan Chand: the glorious days of Indian Hockey! New Delhi:  India’s obsession with cricket has been moving at a rapid rate from wide-eyed fascination to disgust in the eyes of many. The national idiosyncrasy now seems like a pathological monomania to many who back away from the endless and forever ongoing national conversation on cricket. Forget about the players or the performers as they seem to matter the least, except as the newly emerging heroes from the newly emerging towns, Kasbahs and villages of India. It is the spectator who is the king in a ‘karaoke-ized’ world of... 

  Jadopatia paintings of Dumka Jamshedpur: His proximity to the folk artists of tribal community, as a forest officer, unknowingly got him engaged in the promotion of the tribal folk paintings but his zeal to preserve one of the primitive art forms propelled him to document the glorious history of the otherwise dying art. The documentary titled “Vision through Images” which also speaks in details about the measures to be taken to guard the future of these tribal folk paintings, has earned him recognition at the international platform. “I am glad on receiving this honour but... 

Girls wearing jeans/without dupattas face acid attack in Ranchi!   Ranchi: the warning! Girls who wear jeans or forget their dupattas will now face acid attack in Ranchi. Their families will not be spared either. The chilling warning comes from Jharkhand Mukti Sangh, an unknown group whom the police have dismissed as mischief mongers. But the handwritten posters put up on Tuesday morning at Ranchi’s Albert Ekka roundabout, St Xavier’s College and the registry office, created panic. Though the police removed the posters from all three locations, the news spread like wildfire. St. Xavier’s... 

RTI without Information Commissioners: Hazaribagh protests!   Hazaribagh: the Indian state plays the dubious role of first putting in place a Right to Information Act , and then making the process so cumbersome that only the very gutsy are able to go through the exercise of obtaining information from the various departments. If that is not bad enough, when the RTI activists come under attack from the affected parties, there is often no one to protect them. This is as much true of Bihar as many other states, not to mention the centre. The idea is to maintain the RTI as a sort of showpiece... 

Mysterious crow deaths in Bihar: Bihar poultry under threat!   Patna: Bird flu or avian influenza is threatening Bihar’s poultry industry and an SOS has been sent to the central government on tackling the deadly H5N1 virus as the state lacks the resources to do so, a Bihar minister said. The SOS was sent after the Bhopal-based High Security Animal Disease Laboratory (HSADL) attributed the deaths of a number of crows across the state to the H5N1 virus, Animal Husbandry Minister Giriraj Singh said. “In January, samples were sent to HSADL. Last month it found bird flu of H5N1... 

स र र र रा!A very happy Holi to our readers!

A time for freedom from care, grudges and everything negative!

A time to turn all the blacks and whites into splashes of colour!

 

A time to indulge the non-serious, the funny and the frivolous!

A time to let the child in us have free play!

In brief – स र र र रा!

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