Two Indians-Dr. Bharat Vatwani and Sonam Wangchuk-have been selected for the Magsaysay Awards of 2018. The Magsasay award is seen as the Asian version of the Nobel Prize and is usually awarded to people who have made a major contribution to society.
Dr. Vatwani is a psychiatrist who lives in Mumbai. For 20 years, he and his wife have been helping mentally ill people found abandoned on the street. In addition to treating them, they also helped re-unite them with their families. Often, people who are mentally ill get lost and do not know how to get back to their families. Thanks to Dr. Vatwani’s efforts more than 2000 such people have found their way back home.
Sonam Wangchuk has been awarded for his work in helping fix the school education system in Ladakh. When he returned from his university studies abroad, Wangchuk started an organization that set about changing the way schools were run in Ladakh. In addition to training teachers and helping students perform better, Wangchuk and his team also helped build solar-heated eco-friendly buildings in mountain regions like Ladakh, Nepal and Sikkim so that even in -30°C, solar-powered schools could keep students warm. These efforts have helped more and more students pass the Class 10 exams in Ladakh.
Wangchuk is said to have inspired Aamir Khan’s character in the movie ‘3 Idiots’.
Goodbye Mr. Karunanidhi
M.Karunanidhi, who was once the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, passed away on Tuesday night at the age of 94. He was the leader of the DMK, one of the two main political parties of Tamil Nadu. Karunanidhi was elected as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu five times. He started his work life however as a poet and writer of scripts for Tamil movies. He entered politics and went on to join the Dravidian movement that rebelled against caste and called for making people of all castes equal in society. In July this year, he completed 50 years as the head of his political party, a record in India.
Ranjan Gogoi To Be Next Chief Justice, Will Take Charge On Oct 3: Sources
Justice Ranjan Gogoi, the second senior most judge in the Supreme Court, will take charge as the next Chief Justice of India on October 3, sources have told NDTV. Chief Justice Dipak Misra will soon endorse Justice Gogoi's name as his successor, keeping with the tradition of naming the judge next in seniority as the chief justice, sources said. Justice Gogoi, sources say, will be the Chief Justice till November 17, next year.
This comes after the Law Ministry a few days ago asked Chief Justice Dipak Misra to recommend his successor. It is convention for the law ministry to write to the Chief Justice asking for his recommendation on the man who will replace him.
If the recommendation is cleared by the centre, Justice Gogoi will be administered the oath of office by President Ram Nath Kovind.
Justice Ranjan Gogoi was among the four judges who, in January, criticised Chief Justice Misra in a rare press conference and accused him of misusing his role of assigning cases as the Supreme Court's Master of the Roster. He is currently hearing the Assam National Register of Citizens or NRC issue.
Justice Gogoi's name is likely to be made formal when Justice Misra replies to the Law Ministry letter. He retires on October 2 and has to name a successor at least one month before that.
October 2 being a national holiday, October 1 will be the last working day of Chief Justice Misra.
Justice Gogoi, who was elevated to the Supreme Court in 2012, is known to be a soft-spoken but tough judge.
Born in 1954, Justice Gogoi joined the Bar in 1978. He was subsequently appointed as Permanent Judge of Gauhati High Court on February 28, 2001. Later transferred to the Punjab and Haryana High Court in September 2010, he went on to become the Chief Justice of Punjab and Haryana High Court in February 2011. He was elevated as a judge of the Supreme Court in April 2012.
CHANDRAYAAN 2 DELAYED
Chandrayaan 2, India’s second moon mission has been delayed again and may not happen until next year. The launch was originally supposed to take place in March-April 2018. Two satellite launch failures in the last 12 months have forced the Indian space agency, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to take a slower, more careful approach towards this project. Chandrayaan 2 is ISRO’s first mission to land a craft on another celestial body and it may not want to take any chances. As per the plan, an unmanned moving vehicle, a rover that will explore the Moon, is the centre-piece of the India's second lunar mission. Chandrayaan II and its rover will land near the yet-unexplored south pole of the Moon.
A silver for Sindhu
India’s star shuttler PV Sindhu lost to Spain’s Carolina Marin at the Badminton World Championships final played in Nanjing, China recently. This is the second year in a row that Sindhu has lost in the final. Sindhu was in tremendous form in the tournament, defeating Japanese players like Nozomi Okuhara and Akane Yamaguchi in earlier rounds. But in the final she fell in two games, 19-21, 10-21. This is Marin’s third World Championships victory and she has become the first women's singles player to win three world titles. The loss must have been a bitter pill for Sindhu who has lost several key finals in the last two years. She lost the Olympic final again to Marin while in 2017, she lost the Badminton World Championships final to Nozomi Okuhara. As she said after the loss, “It is very frustrating to lose again. Last time also I had played the finals. It is quite sad and I have to come back stronger and get back to the sessions and prepare for the next tournament.”
Despite the loss, the fact is that Sindhu is one of India’s greatest players. She the only Indian to have won four world championships medals (two bronze and two silver). Add to that an Olympic silver medal and a clutch of other tournament wins over the last five years, and one realizes that this young girl from Hyderabad is truly one of the greats.
40 lakh people in Assam now have to prove they are Indian
One day you are a citizen of India, the next day, you aren’t... Is that possible? Yes, if you live in Assam and your name has been left out of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that was published for the state of Assam recently. The NRC list was drawn up on the instructions of the Supreme Court and the idea was to identify those who may have illegally crossed over into Assam from neighboring countries like Bangladesh. In the draft list released last week, over 40 lakh people have been left out. These people will have to resubmit their information to the government and prove that they or their parents/grand-parents/ancestors lived and voted in India before 1971. The NRC list has divided families. Husbands are in the list, wives are out. Children made it to the list, their father didn’t. For all these people, their worst fear is that they will be declared foreigners and thrown out of India. Although the government has said that last week’s list was only a draft and not the final list, that hasn’t made people any less afraid. Starting August 30, they will line up at government offices to prove that they are indeed Indians.
FLOOD OF THE CENTURY HITS KERALA
Heavy monsoon rainfall led to massive floods across the southern state of Kerala last week, literally sinking some parts of it. The state has been reeling from heavy rain and floods since August 8, which led to the death of more than 200 people. Over a million people have had to abandon their homes and move to camps and shelters. This is the worst flooding that the state has seen in 100 years. For one, in the week following August 8, it poured and poured. It rained 2-3 times more than normal as a result of which all the dams in the state filled up. With the dams threatening to overflow, the government opened the gates of 35 of its 39 dams. Water from these gushed down rivers flooding a state that was already drowning in the rain. Stone quarries and constructions on river beds that blocked the natural flow of water added to the disaster.
What lies ahead for the people of Kerala:
• Rebuilding the lakhs of homes that have been damaged
• Repairing hundreds of kilometers of roads that have been destroyed by water
• Preventing epidemics and diseases that spread through water It will be a few years before things go back to being normal in the state.
INDIAN-AUSTRALIAN MATHEMATICIAN WINS FIELDS MEDAL
36 year old Indian-Australian mathematician Akshay Venkatesh has won this year’s Fields medal. The Fields medal is regarded as the Nobel Prize for mathematics and is awarded every four years to the most promising mathematicians under the age of 40. This year four young mathematicians including Akshay Venkatesh were awarded the prize.
Born in New Delhi, Akshay Venkatesh moved with his parents to Australia at the age of 2. In school he excelled in physics and math, winning medals in the subject Olympiad competitions. He went to high school when he was just 13 and graduated from college by the time he was 16. His chosen field in college was math. By the time he turned 20, he had obtained a PhD and now at the age of 36, teaches at Stanford University in the United States.
The Fields medal recognizes Venkatesh’s work in areas such as ‘dynamics theory’, which studies the equations of moving objects to solve problems in number theory (see box). Venkatesh works in many areas of math such as number theory, arithmetic geometry and topology. He has contributed to so many fields of mathematics that he is that rarest of breeds-a “universal mathematician” with a mind that “can think about anything”, as one of his fellow mathematicians put it. Others mathematicians point to Venkatesh’s abilities to get to the core of any topic he puts his mind to before explaining them in the simplest way possible to others.
VAJPAYEE PASSES AWAY
Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was Prime Minister of India three times, died last week on 16th August at the age of 93. He belonged to the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Vajpayee was the first Prime Minister of India from a political party other than the Congress. Although his first two terms were very short-13 days in 1996 and 13 months from 1998-99, his party went on to win the elections in 1999 and he was our Prime Minister until 2004.
Important events in India’s history happened when he was the Prime Minister. In 1998 he went ahead and tested a nuclear bomb which made India one of the few nations in the world to own one. Vajpayee was heavily criticized for it by many other countries as the testing was expected to create problems between India and Pakistan. Sure enough, Pakistan too tested its own bomb and a year later war broke out on the India-Pakistan border at Kargil in Jammu & Kashmir.
But he was also a Prime Minister who made sincere efforts to build a better friendship with Pakistan. In 1999 he boarded a bus to Lahore in Pakistan across the border from Punjab state, becoming the first India Prime Minister to do so. In 2001 he also hosted the then leader of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, at a two day conference in Agra. Although the meeting ended without an agreement, Vajpayee will always be remembered for the steps he took towards India-Pakistan friendship.
Vajpayee retired from politics in 2005. In 2014 he was given the Bharat Ratna, the highest award that can be given to a citizen of India.
Aretha Franklin no more
Aretha Franklin, one of the greatest English music singers ever, died last week at her home in the United States. Not only was she the queen of pop, she was also a symbol of the American civil rights movement (for rights of African Americans) and the fight for women’s rights.
Her father was a priest and her mother was a gospel singer. So it was in her father’s church that Aretha Franklin began singing and playing the piano. She was a child prodigy who recorded her first music album at the age of 14. Her song ‘Respect’ became the anthem of the American civil rights movement and the feminist movement. She won countless musical awards. In 2009, she sang at Barack Obama’s Presidential inauguration, the ceremony in the US when the President is officially appointed. A rich career that lasted more than 60 years came to an end last week.
THREE INDIAN ASTRONAUTS WILL BE IN SPACE WITHIN 40 MONTHS
Three Indian astronauts will get the opportunity to spend 5-7 days in space as part of Indian space agency ISRO’s manned space flight programme. The launch will happen in the next 40 months. The Gaganyaan Mission is ISRO’s first to send humans into space. Only three countries-the United States (US), Russia and China-have so far launched astronauts into space. The Indian astronauts will orbit (go around) Earth in space at a height of 400 kilometres above our planet.
ISRO has begun the astronaut selection process. They would most likely be pilots of the Indian Air Force. The astronauts will spend around a week in space and will conduct microgravity experiments.
Microgravity refers to an environment where people experience weightlessness. As astronauts travel away from Earth, they pull free of the Earth’s gravity (the force of attraction that keeps us on the planet instead of floating in space) and experience ‘zero-g’ or weightlessness. So instead of walking around the spacecraft, they simply float. The experiments will help us understand microgravity better.
Ahead of the manned flight, two unmanned Gaganyaan missions would be carried out, one within 30 months and second within 36 months, ISRO has announced.
IMRAN KHAN TAKES CHARGE
Cricketer Imran Khan became the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan last week. He was officially appointed in a ceremony attended by former Indian cricket player Navjot Sidhu. Imran Khan’s political party is one of the youngest in Pakistan and it is hoped that having a new person in charge will improve relations between India and Pakistan. Cricket perhaps? The two teams have stopped playing each other in India or Pakistan but cricket lovers should take cheer from what the new Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chief Ehsan Mani said about restarting cricket ties.