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The Disappearance of Roddam Narasimha
Get PDFRoddam Narasimha (1933-2020), a great scientist and scholar, will be remembered in India for his contributions to the development of computing, aerospace technology as the initiator of the LCA programme, the space programme as the longest-serving member of the Space Commission, and in drafting the country’s nuclear doctrine
Time for Universal Public Distribution System: Food Mountains and Pandemic Hunger in India
Get PDFThe latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS 5) indicates that child stunting in India was severe and
has been deteriorating since 2015. This trend could have worsened since the pandemic and the stringent
lockdowns meant to contain it. There has been an acute increase in impoverishment as governmental
food policies have further exacerbated rather than mitigated inequalities. Families eligible under
the National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, have been provided with double food grain rations during
two waves of the pandemic. However, nearly 45% of India’s population without these ration cards
have been largely excluded from additional food relief from the central government. Simultaneously,
India’s food grain stocks in government granaries have accumulated to their all-time peak with 2 years
of bumper harvests. Therefore, in light of the acute distress faced by marginalised communities due to
the pandemic, this article analyses the availability of adequate food grain stocks and contends that the
time is opportune for the universal expansion of the public distribution system
The Social Life of Surveillance (NIAS Working Paper NIAS/SSc/IHD/U/WP/29/2021)
Get PDFThis paper provides a broad view of surveillance as a dynamic social process that is
located as an integral part of socio-cultural practices through the engagement of social
actors. It offers new possibilities of studying modes of subjectivity of how individuals,
groups and institutions situate themselves within surveillant practices
Growing up gifted: Class, social advantaging and schooling practices
Get PDF‘What made these children with extraordinary abilities misfits in a formal schooling system that encouraged and awarded high academic achievement?’. This and several such questions plagued me for the longest time while I was teaching a class of 11th and 12th graders, in an international school in Bangalore. With the quest to delve deeper into the lives of such children recognised as gifted, I embarked on the thesis journey. The ethnographic study largely began as an attempt to centre the voices of gifted children to get insights into how they use their agency to navigate their worlds. Through the study/fieldwork, I realised that the child’s voice was largely eclipsed by that of other social interlocutors such as parents, teachers, school management, and researchers of gifted education, by their diverse ways of ‘seeing’ giftedness in the child. Such insights from the field, based on over 18 months of fieldwork, shaped the analyses as an explication of how ‘giftedness’ as a concept was being produced and practiced on the child, in international/elite schools and enrichment centres, by members of a particular social class, who mostly dominated these spaces. As the complex nature of the concept became apparent in my study, I illustrate how class, social advantaging, and schooling practices played a large role in enabling children to ‘grow up gifted’. I argue that parents become early cultivators of ability, by reconfiguring their familial roles and through their ways of dealing with anxieties and challenges, negotiated advantages for their child. To such parents, the child came to be seen as a set of abilities, a project to shape the performance of ‘giftedness’. In the process, such collective performances led to the institutionalisation of one form of ‘giftedness’. Educational institutions such as enrichment sites and elite schools commonly recognised ‘giftedness’ as academic brightness, in particular STEM subjects, and they framed their practices to assess, train and improve these particular academic abilities, which were sometimes referred to as ‘gifted’. My study was mostly amongst the middle-class; a social class that navigated and standardised ‘giftedness’ in schools to advantage their children. I suggest that the means by which such advantaging was negotiated was by framing the project of ‘giftedness’ as producing tomorrow’s nation builders. The nation building discourse seemed particularly relevant for the middle-classes, as it provided legitimate justification for their project of ‘giftedness-making’ by nurturing excellence in STEM disciplines in their children. This thesis has contributed to the scholarship, that shows linkages between notions of intelligence/ giftedness and social class
Elephants on the Move: Implications for Human–Elephant Interactions
No full textAsian elephants often traverse large areas to gather food and water. However, the environment in which they live is dynamic (changing with the seasons). Some of these changes in the environment, however, are accelerated due to human-induced factors. To survive and persist in fragmented, human-dominated landscapes, especially in the Anthropocene, elephants often need to modify their behaviour. Some of these modifications may be short-term adaptations that include altering their time-activity budgets in response to changing local ecological and anthropogenic settings, while others could be long-term shifts in home ranges in response to large-scale changes in land use and global climatic events. In this chapter, using empirical data, the authors assess the behavioural adaptability of elephants, as determined by their innate biological variables, such as age, sex and grouping patterns at the population level. They also discuss the impacts of global climatic changes on the behaviour and distribution of Asian elephants, as evidenced through studies conducted on these aspects. They discuss how elephants, in general, avoid areas of high human use. In addition, their recent studies suggest that elephants may be altering their social systems and forming all-male groups-a novel social unit in Asian elephants-in highly human-dominated landscapes in order to persist and at times successfully exploit resources. The issues highlighted in this chapter may be significant for the future management of human-elephant conflict and the conservation of Asian elephants, as most management strategies do not take into account variability in elephant behaviour or impending climate change in implementation
Scientist and mentor
Get PDFDeeply immersed in acquiring and creating knowledge, Roddam Narasimha enjoyed the bliss of pursuing research with meticulous attention to detail, and could masterfully communicate that enjoyment to inspire young minds
Time-Reversibility, Causality and Compression-Complexity
Get PDFDetection of the temporal reversibility of a given process is an interesting time series analysis scheme that enables the useful characterisation of processes and offers an insight into the underlying processes generating the time series. Reversibility detection measures have been widely employed in the study of ecological, epidemiological and physiological time series. Further, the time reversal of given data provides a promising tool for analysis of causality measures as well as studying the causal properties of processes. In this work, the recently proposed Compression-Complexity Causality (CCC) measure (by the authors) is shown to be free of the assumption that the "cause precedes the effect", making it a promising tool for causal analysis of reversible processes. CCC is a data-driven interventional measure of causality (second rung on the Ladder of Causation) that is based on Effort-to-Compress (ETC), a well-established robust method to characterize the complexity of time series for analysis and classification. For the detection of the temporal reversibility of processes, we propose a novel measure called the Compressive Potential based Asymmetry Measure. This asymmetry measure compares the probability of the occurrence of patterns at different scales between the forward-time and time-reversed process using ETC. We test the performance of the measure on a number of simulated processes and demonstrate its effectiveness in determining the asymmetry of real-world time series of sunspot numbers, digits of the transcedental number π and heart interbeat interval variability
Real estate politics in India
No full textThis article uses as its entry point the empirical phenomenon of what we call ‘real estate politicians’ in India; that is, politicians whose main source of wealth is real estate. We argue that the rise of real estate politicians is situated within deeper processes of ‘labour voter contradictions’ in low-wage democratic societies of the global south. On the one hand, countries like India largely compete in the global economy based on their cheaper labour costs, but on the other hand, the condition of electoral democracy makes it imperative for politicians to meet the consumption, including housing, needs of their low-wage but electorally mobilised labour voters. As real estate politicians mediate the negotiated access of unorganised and surplus workers to informal land and unauthorised housing, the delinking of housing struggles from labour struggles leaves processes of capitalist agglomeration unchecked. This, we argue, blunts the potential of land struggles to emerge as sites of radical labour politics
Parents: Beware of Digital Demons
No full textTelevisions, smartphones, internet, social media are all horribly addictive and the Covid pandemic has doubled the online presence of children. The WHO says, ‘Digital disorders are hugely under-recognised in India’. According to Rajesh Sagar of AIIMS Delhi, ‘It is fast emerging as India’s newest lifestyle disease’. Digital games, advertisements and reality shows are dangerous for a growing mind. The Government of India has banned online games like PUBG, Blue Whale, sites like Tik Tok. The Government of Karnataka has even banned online classes for children up to class five. This book is an attempt to flag the dangers and provide some suggestions on how to combat digital dependence. No teaching formula or A1 model can accommodate multiple diversities at the grassroots level. The National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience offers a SHUT (Services for Healthy Use of Technology) clinic for internet addiction. This needs to be created across the nation. The advertisers know the young are consumers. They are not bothered about how the ad impacts children, especially when there is no actual regulator and no parental bodies, nor teacher groups. No ‘Truth about Technology’ lobbies here. Rules need to be implemented. If Daag achche hain, then why teach children to be neat and clean