Overall products including garments made in India have got huge potential in the global market, according to a senior functionary from USA-based Sourcing at Magic.
“Many are inclined to source their requirements from India, keeping in mind all advantageous factors like political relationship, cultural relationship, quality manufacturing, communication angle and above all dependability and responsibility,” Bob Berg, Director (international Business), Sourcing at Magic from USA has said.
Bob was recently in Tirupur to interact with knitwear garment exporters on ‘how to do business with USA’ and avenues to develop contact with buyers and brands in the world market through the fair, Sourcing at Magic, scheduled at Las Vegas from August 14 to 17, Tirupur Exporters Association (TEA) president A Shaktivel said in a statement today.
While discussing the share of US apparel imports from India, Bob said that India contributed four per cent of US imports, with a growth of eight per cent, whereas China registered only two per cent growth Year on Year.
The given import scenario in US apparently revealed that there was good potential available to increase imports from India, thereby giving more avenues for Indian knitwear and apparels to US markets, he said.
Stating that SOURCING at MAGIC is North America’s largest, most comprehensive sourcing event, reflecting the fashion supply chain at its most complete, Bob said it offered unmatched access to over 35 countries representing the world’s most important markets.
The fair was also a convenient space for retail buyers, global importers, licensees and brands to meet and conduct business with offshore manufacturers like India and contract suppliers from the international manufacturing countries.
Sakthivel said he had urged Bob to focus specifically on sourcing from India by highlighting the virtual facts to all leading buyers and brands during their visit to the particular fair. NVM APR ABK
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home / PTI / April 18th, 2016
Science, in Deepana Gandhi’s rural Ooty school, may have whetted her appetite for the great unknown, but it gave her no inkling of where it would lead her.
The 26-year-old, is today a member of Team Indus, the only team from India to have been shortlisted among 16 global teams for the $30 million Google Lunar XPrize competition, the race to land a privately-financed robotic craft on the Moon by December 2017.
Gandhi also happens to be the centerpiece of a documentary series that traces the competing teams’ backstories.
Titled Moon Shot, the series is produced by JJ Abrams, the co-creator of the TV series Lost and director of last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
“India’s changing. What I have been through is proof of it,” says Gandhi in the documentary, “Now there are women who are doing well in science and space studies. Soon, there will be an equal number of men and women (in these fields).”
Gandhi is part of the flight dynamics group at the Bengaluru-based Team Indus, responsible for controlling the spacecraft from the point it gets separated from the launch vehicle, till the touchdown on the moon.
Abrams’ documentary, directed by Oscar-nominated Orlando von Einsiedel, traces Gandhi’s story from her school days in Ooty to her present-day moon mission. She was fascinated with maths from a young age. “Maths mixed with science is beautiful,” she says, as the film shows her teaching children in a small-town school about space.
Gandhi was among those from Team Indus who travelled to the US to be part of the launch of the documentary series. “She’s incredible. When an American journalist asked her a technical question, she said, “Give me a whiteboard, I’ll explain it to you’,” says Sheelika Ravishankar, who leads Team Indus’ outreach and people programmes.
Gandhi’s inspiration was Kalpana Chawla, the Indo-American astronaut who became the first woman of Indian origin in space.
She went on to do her MTech at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, following it with an internship at ISRO. “People used to say you are a girl, you can sit at home and relax,” she says. But her family, her father in particular, supported her. “My dad always said a girl can do what a boy can. That kept me tryingAt last, I got the opportunity to prove myself,” she says about her stint with Team Indus.
Founded by IIT Delhi alumnus Rahul Narayan, Team Indus started out as the inexperienced and under-resourced underdog in the competition, but is now a frontrunner.
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Bangalore / TNN / April 24th, 2016
Forgotten Past: “I am most satisfied about discovering the voice of the Indian soldier.” Raghavan in his New Delhi office. Photo: R.V. Moorthy / The Hindu
India was an unwilling participant in World War II, but those years provided the foundation for the Independence struggle.
Historian Srinath Raghavan in his latest book, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939-1945 (Allen Lane), details India’s contribution to World War II. The book explores the war’s impact on the Independence movement, how it was during this period that the Army saw its biggest expansion, and why this inquiry is important from a military history point of view.
Excerpts:
The book is called India’s war. Yet, not one Indian was consulted before Viceroy Linlithgow’s decision to enlist the Indian Army.
Even if India was an unwilling participant in the conflict, the conflict had huge implications for India. So, even if we were dragged into it kicking and screaming, those years turned out to be foundational for India in the Independence movement.
But still not India’s war. The Army was treated like bonded labourers, bundled off to fight without any say…
That’s not entirely the case. The Congress certainly opposed India’s participation because it wasn’t consulted, but others saw it as an opportunity. You had people like Ambedkar, who realised that for the Dalits, this was an opportunity for social mobility, to have their voices out. You also had Savarkar who said that this was a great opportunity for the Hindu community to get into the Army, which was dominated by the Sikhs and the Muslims.
Are you saying it was the war that gave these leaders and their ideologies their original prominence?
I think many of the ideological fault lines that we associate with 1947, in some sense, came to the fore during the war years, and that’s why we need to study them more closely. Because of what happens in the period 1935-1939 — you have the first elections under the Government of India Act, and Congress ministries are formed. It seemed as if the Congress was the most dominant force, and only Congress versus the British Raj played out. But then you had the war; the Congress was sidelined, and that cracked open the scenario for others who wanted their voices heard. So you had Jinnah coming into prominence with his demand, you had Ambedkar, you had Savarkar, and a number of others.
If you look at the books about India’s participation in World War II, especially Northeast India and the Malacca frontlines, they are titled the ‘forgotten war’ or the ‘forgotten Army’. Why is it important that they are not forgotten?
If you look at much of the way our history is taught, and the way the public imagines the 1940s, it is basically about the Congress party resigning, the Cripps Mission failing, and then you talk about post-war developments leading up to Independence. So the 1940s are remembered for this march to Independence and Partition that came as a cost of it. The war never really comes into focus. What I wanted to do was say, if you put the war in the front and at the centre and study its impact, then much of the 1940s becomes much clearer and explains why we ended up with what happened on August 15, 1947. Without the war, it is unlikely that the Muslim League would have gained prominence vis-a-vis the Congress in order to push through their demand for a separate country.
You don’t often refer to yourself in your books, but here you speak of your own regiment and how it fought. Do you think there is a bigger need to acknowledge this part of World War II as India’s war, for the Army’s sake?
To begin with, it is important from a military history point of view. This period marked the biggest expansion the Indian Army saw. For a generation of people, now forgotten, the war was foundational for their lives. They travelled abroad for the first time, served in very difficult conditions. I don’t think I would have even got into the subject but for my own military background; I may not have written it but for the fact that I served in the Rajputana Rifles regiment that features prominently in the book. When you have two and a half million Indians in uniform and many more millions recruited for war-related activity, how can we just forget that story? The Indian Army has got caught in the middle of this. If you are a ‘nationalist’, you will see the Army as an instrument of British control; a force of collaborators. But most of the Army was deeply nationalist. Others want to portray the anti-British movement as a subaltern revolution led by the peasantry, yet what was the Indian Army if not made up of the peasants and poorer classes? So, why ignore this side?
Finally, let’s remember that along with Partition, the Indian Army was partitioned as well. Companies that fought together in those wars were subsequently made to fight each other, beginning with the first Kashmir war. As a result, World War II dropped out of the picture. Because now both the Indian and Pakistani armies wanted to play up the stories of their valour against each other, to suit their independent national interests, and not some war that was a collaborative effort. One of the things I mention in the book is that there is a 25-volume official history of the war, and it had to be compiled by a combined inter-services effort from both India and Pakistan, right? But acknowledging this joint history has become very difficult, and very inconvenient, to both countries.
In his memoirs, President Pranab Mukherjee writes that he was against attending commemorations for World War II because it was an insult to the Independence movement, and particularly to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, whose Indian National Army fought against British forces.
I very strongly disagree with that view. Netaji and the INA’s effort were quite important, no doubt. I do bring out in the book that the INA’s importance was not really about military contribution, but political impact. It had about 25,000 soldiers, prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, who went over to form Netaji’s Army. The Indian Army was about a hundred times larger, 2.5 million Indians. So why should we only valorise 25,000 people and try to say that recognising the others is somehow a denigration of national history? That’s the lens I am trying to move beyond. Just because some people were in the Army doesn’t mean they wanted British rule. Many fought simply because it was a job; others needed access to food.
There’s an interesting point in the book when Chiang Kai-shek comes to meet the Indian leadership and asks them to support the war because the soldiers won’t be able to fight if they feel they do not have the country’s backing. Why was that significant?
One of the other forgotten parts of our history is that one of the biggest alliances was that of the Indian and Chinese armies during the war. Once the Japanese captured Burma, the land routes were cut off, much of the Indian Army’s mandate was to enable the nationalist Chinese Army to be supplied to fight. Much of the aerodrome-building across Northeast India was to supply the nationalist Chinese. Given the turn we took later, we must realise there is a pre-history too. India and China both emerged from the crucible of World War II. The idea that Asian nations which have come out of colonialism will have a shared future goes back to then. Of course, things didn’t work out that way, and we tend to forget this.
Most wars end the empire of the defeated side. Would you say that World War II was unique because it ended the empire of the winning side, the British?
I think it was clear even at the time that World War II would change the world forever… I think the key point is that the British lost the empire not just because they were weakened by the war, but because they lost the Indian Army’s support by the end of it, which was their instrument of control. That’s what the impact of the INA mutiny was, to show that the British could raise this massive Army, but that it could turn on them too. People like Churchill had even questioned the expansion of the Indian Army and said: “Someday it is going to shoot us in the back”.
You are now seen as a master of the archives through each of your books. What was the biggest challenge during your research for India’s war?
To be honest, I began this book thinking I could do most of my research in India itself. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. I found that the National Archives don’t even have a clear record of the war period. They don’t even have a catalogue for the military department during the war, so a lot of the military details came from the British Library and other archives. But what I feel most satisfied about was my effort to discover the voice of the Indian soldier.
suhasini.h@thehindu.co.in
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Opinion> Comments / by Suhasini Haidar / April 10th, 2016
P. Selvam, a faculty member of the International Research Centre, Kalasalingam University, Krishnankoil, has been made a Fellow of International Society for Noni Sciences by International Society for Noni Sciences.
The fellowship is in recognition of Dr. Selvam’s contribution to research in medicinal plant Morinda Citrifolia L Noni and its ability to cure cancer.
Chancellor K. Sridharan, Director Sasi Anand and Vice- Chancellor S. Saravana Sankar congratulated him for the recognition, according to a release.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> National> Tamil Nadu / by Special Correspondent / Virudhunagar – April 07th, 2016
The women weave about two baskets a day; everything from cutting to colouring is done by hand.
Chennai :
What do a handwoven palm-leaf basket and issues of deep-seated negligence and heritage have in common? In this case, it is the small hamlet of Pulicat, where these baskets are made. The baskets are woven by local women and marketed in the city by organisations like AARDE Foundation, an NGO working towards the conservation of natural and built heritage in Pulicat.
What’s interesting is the two-fold purpose of these colourful handicrafts: besides being an important form of livelihood for the town, AARDE founder Xavier Benedict’s goal is to draw attention to the issues facing Pulicat through these handicrafts.
“Pulicat is a unique place and has three kinds of heritage — cultural, manmade and the natural heritage. Though all are important, cultural heritage, including crafts, is the only factor that can easily be made attractive to visitors and marketed to improve the economy, ” explains Xavier. “Most of them rely on fishing and boat-making. Boating for tourists used to be an additional source but it was banned after a boat capsized. Alcoholism is also a problem. So women are the crucial link to improving livelihood.”
The journey began with post-tsunami relief work at Pulicat. Performing arts like kattaikoothu and textiles like kalamkari, muslin and palm-leaf weaving were a part of the vanishing cultural heritage. Besides, this is the built heritage. “There are lakhs of monuments that are not protected by the Archeological Survey of India. When we went to Pulicat, we saw the numerous abandoned structures that are dilapidated. So we began working on documenting and raising awareness,” says Benedict.
Sadly, even as such attempts were going on, one of the structures, Our Lady of Glory Church, built in 1515 AD by the Portugese, was demolished in 2009 to be replaced by a new church. A few years later, another beautiful temple, the Adi Narayanana Perumal Temple was also demolished to make way for a new temple. “The temple had a unique construction style that was uncommon in South India. Today, it is gone,” he says. “The protection is often arbitrary — some structures are protected under the ASI but some are being destroyed. We are asking for the entire town to be made into a heritage site.”
Natural heritage is equally important, with the Pulicat Lake being the second largest brackish water lake in India, supporting lakhs of migratory birds and also crucial for draining of excess water during rains.
The lake is under threat from pollution and development, and activists like Benedict are trying to petition to protect it under an inter-governmental treaty for wetlands called Ramsar. Since such concepts of conservation are not easy to convey, he believes that tapping a craft like palm-leaf weaving, can help especially when you add colours and make new designs, and market the product.
Around 85 women between ages 25 to 60 years are employed by AARDE, and work every day at a workshop in the town. “Initially, some of the women, most of them Muslims, were hesitant to come out. But now, many come. Last week, we even had our first set of products woven by a man,” says Sophie, Benedict’s wife, who handles the marketing.
The women are paid a monthly wage, and all proceeds go to the women except overheads like transport and raw material. Usually, the women make one or two baskets a day depending on the complexity. Everything is done by hand, from cutting to colouring. “One woman is now 70 and says she will not reveal her special technique even to her daughter until she retires. The women have also taken to technology, and send me pictures from their children’s phones every night through WhatsApp,” she smiles.
Baskets, boxes and trays
Palm-leaf weaving is a part of cultural heritage in Pulicat. It is marketed by AARDE and the profits go directly to the women. The range includes baskets, boxes, pouches and trays. Bulk orders for functions are also taken. For details, visit www.aarde.in
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Cities> Chennai / by Archita Suryanarayanan / April 02nd, 2016
Veteran playback singer P. Susheela. File photo: Thulasi Kakkat / The Hindu
‘The queen of melodies’ has been officially credited by Guinness Book of Records for singing 17, 695 songs in 12 Indian languages.
Renowned playback singer P. Susheela Mohan, who has won many awards and earned accolades in a career spanning five decades, has added two more to her awards cabinet.
She has now been recognised by both the Guinness Book of World Records and Asia Book of Records for singing most number of songs in Indian languages. The usually reticent singer met journalists in Chennai on Tuesday to celebrate her new award.
While Guinness Book of Records has officially credited her for singing 17, 695 songs (solo, duet and chorus backed songs) in twelve Indian languages, Asia Book of Records has recognised her for singing close to 17, 330 songs.
Speaking about the awards, P. Susheela reminded everyone present that the adjudicators had only considered songs she had song from 1960s. “Please remember that I started singing from 1951,” she said.
None of this would have been possible without the work of her fans, who, by setting up psusheela.org, painstakingly catalogued the songs that she has sung over the last few decades and sent it to the adjudicators of the award.
Reflecting on the recognition, the singer said that she views it as an acknowledgement of her hard work. “There is a lot of hard work that has gone behind this achievement. Today, with so many television channels and newspapers, a talented singer can shine through quickly. But when I was singing, it was very slow and I had work my way up , step by step,” she said.
Crediting her husband for her success, she said that her husband, a doctor, was a corner stone in her life. “He fell in love with my voice and sacrificed his life so that I have a great career in playback singing,” she said.
She was candid in her response when asked why she had never considered a career in acting. “I was offered a chance to act by several directors, but I refused saying that I wouldn’t want to act even if I was paid a crore,” she said, adding, “My heart was in music.”
When asked why she is not singing anymore, the singer said that she would love to sing in movies if someone offered a good song. When she was nudged by journalists to sing her favourite song, she ended the press conference by singing Ennai pada sonnal, enna paada thondrum from Pudhiya Paravai, a hit song of 1964.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Entertainment / by Udhav Naig / Chennai – March 29th, 2016
Celebrating women icons, Raindropss conducted its 4th annual women achiever awards on Saturday at a ceremony presided over by its brand ambassador and music composer AR Raihanah.
Raindropss is a youth-based social organization.
It gave away awards to project director of Agni and ‘Missile Woman of India’ Dr Tessy Thomas, first Indian woman fire officer Meenakshi Vijayakumar, musician Sudha Ranganathan, acid attack fighter and model Laxmi Agarwal and film director Sudha Kongara. tnn
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Chennai / TNN / March 28th, 2016
Mention of an outer main-belt asteroid now brings to mind an endangered bird. It has been named after Akikiki, a critically endangered Hawaiian honeycreeper bird.
Prakash Vaithyanathan
The credit for this goes to Prakash Vaithyanathan, a science teacher from the city. Mr. Vaithyanathan said he had written to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) suggesting that new planetary bodies and other objects in space could be named after endangered or extinct animals, birds and plants. “In class, I keep speaking to my students about endangered and extinct flora and fauna and also encourage them to give each other nicknames based on such species. Most new planetary bodies and other objects discovered in space are given complicated names through a scientific protocol of the IAU and I wrote to ask them if they could name objects in space in the manner,” he said.
Mr. Vaithyanathan wrote to them on May 29, 2015, and received a reply the same day from a database manager with the IAU stating that they would be interested in implementing his idea.
“They contacted me again and asked me to suggest a name and I went with ‘Akikiki.’ The reason for choosing the name of the Hawaiian honeycreeper was because the IAU annual conference was happening in Hawaii in May,” Mr. Vaithyanathan said. Nearly ten months after his suggestion, the IAU implemented this and named an asteroid ‘Akikiki.’
In the small body database on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory website of the California Institute of Technology, credit for the name ‘7613 akikiki,’ assigned to an outer main-belt asteroid, is given to Mr. Vaithyanathan. It says: ‘name suggested by Indian high-school teacher P. Vaithyanathan, on the occasion of the 2015 IAU General Assembly.’
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Chennai / by S. Poorvaja / Chennai – March 23rd, 2016
This disturbing book, which almost wrings the life breath out of you, is this year’s best non-fiction so far. Searing, unapologetically noire, inhabiting the cusp of life and death, second generation American doctor Paul Kalanithi’s account of his young life and his progress towards death takes us to the brink of our own lives. Writing till a few weeks before he died of lung cancer, with the concluding description of the days leading to this death written by his wife Lucy, it is a story of life, death, science, the meaning of life, and the various existential queries it throws up as we traipse through life as if we are born not to die.
Paul Kalanithi
Kalanithi was the brightest young neurosurgeon that the US medical system produced in recent years. Wooed by all universities, offered jobs that anyone would, well, die for, Kalanithi was consumed by lung cancer despite the best medical treatment available and despite the fact that the victim himself knew how to keep away death.
Kalanithi was the third son of a Tamil Christian father and his Hindu wife who eloped to get married. In the US, his father became a well-known surgeon. After New York, his father moved the family to the far outreaches of Arizona where “spaces stretched on, then fell away into the distance”.
Out of there emerged this brilliant writer-doctor on who the US medical system too had pinned great hopes. But science hadn’t accounted for nature’s dark humour.
In When Breath Becomes Air, the young surgeon deals deeply with issues which confront all of us. First was his passion for literature and philosophy, and he imbibed the larger glories of Eliot, Whitman etc. He found Eliot’s metaphors “leaking into his own language”. And then “throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning”. Kalanithi resolved his inner conflict by finally choosing medical science where the “moral mission of medicine” lent his med school days a “severe gravity”. Here he explored the relationship between the meaning of life and death.
In his short life Kalanithi achieved greatness in both showing an academic life few can surpass—MA in English literature and BA in human biology from Stanford, MPhil in history and philosophy of science and medicine from Cambridge, graduated cum laude from Yale School of Medicine, inducted into the Alpha Omega Alpha National Medical Honour Society, postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience and the American Academy of Neurological surgery’s highest award for research. He was just 36.
In his death, two of his greatest passions converge—medicine and literature. Even as he groped, incised, cauterised, sutured and brought people back from the jaws of death, he himself was being eaten away by cancer. Often there was hope that the first defence against his lung cancer, Tarceva, “that little white pill” would do the trick. For six months, it seemed the cancer was in retreat. Kalanithi started work, fighting against tiredness and nausea. Then in one of the routing scans appeared a moon-shaped tumour. He couldn’t avoid chemo any longer. He fell back on literature during this difficult phase looking for meanings of death and life. “Everywhere I turned, the shadows of death obscured the meaning of any action.”
This young doctor on the threshold of death fought bravely. But there is little science can do about determined nature. Detaching himself brilliantly from impending death, Kalanithi takes us through his final weeks of turmoil. Most tearful is the last operation he would ever do as he decides to give up surgery, and go home and wait for death. He watches the soap suds drip off his hands after his last surgery. He saved one more life but his was nearing the end.
Here there is no redemption. Death is the winner from page one. It is only literature, this book, that outlived him. He has left back a poignant memoir of life and death that many will find succour in life as well as when they near death.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> LifeStyle> Books / by Binoo K. John / March 19th, 2016
An Indo-Canadian trio has put together a video timeline featuring 20 of Tamil cinema’s eternal favourite songs
Nothing is better than listening to the classics; some hits are immortal, even as pop, rock and hip hop continue to top the charts. It’s the same when it comes to Tamil film songs. No matter what the latest composers dish out, it’s the oldies that bring us together.
In an effort to pay homage to their roots, Thakshikah Sritharan, Kavistuthy Thavanesan and Saikavin Sritharan, an Indo-Canadian trio, has put together a nostalgic six-minute video called Tamil Mime Express, tracing the history of film music.
Thakshikah, a classical dancer, talks of the inspiration behind the video, saying, “We were fascinated by a video called Mime Through Time by SketchShe; so we decided to do the same with Kollywood, trying to make it as appealing and innovative as possible. We thought that a timeline of Tamil songs shown through dance would be a fun way for everyone to remember and enjoy some of the songs they grew up listening to.”
Throughout the video, which is shot entirely in a car, the three of them sport various outfits with élan — shirts with rolled-up sleeves, popped collars, saris, lehengas — which is what has caught the fancy of many viewers. “We invested a lot to acquire the perfect costumes to match each song,” they say.
Starting from ‘Naan Aanaiyitaal’ from Enga Veettu Pillai, all the way through ‘Chikku Bukku Rayile’ from Gentleman to ‘My name is Billa’ from Billa, the video concludes with the latest ‘Thara Local’ fromMaari.
“We initially listed about 150 songs, but narrowed down to just 20 spanning all genres,” says Thakshikah. The trio credits their parents, as well as G Design Labs and Yashtra for their support in the video’s production.
Thakshikah and Kavin have only been to India four times, but concur that, “The food is absolutely amazing. The best trip was our visit to Agra and the Taj Mahal.”
They’re currently working on a couple of projects but are keeping them under wraps. A timeline of Bollywood music, perhaps?
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Features> MetroPlus / by Justin Dominic / Chennai – March 12th, 2016
