७२ का जयराज और २५ की लक्ष्मी ( 72's JOYRAJ and 25's LAKSHMI )

Kaziranga National Park: He is known as "Kaziranga's Pride." But at the world-famous national park in Assam, Joyraj is quietly slipping away.

Vets who are treating him say the 72-year-old has just weeks to live. They conduct daily medical check-up and prescribe medicines to help him overcome weakness.

Joyraj, who weighed eight tonnes at his peak, and is now down to seven, retired about five years ago after a career studded with adventure and heroism.

He used to carry officers on his back to inaccessible areas in the sanctuary that did not have roads and even through water, hence helping them catch poachers and rescue other animals trapped in floods. He also helped tourists on their safaris around the 430 square km park, known best for its one-horned rhino.

"He never got angry or fought with any other elephant. There was no other elephant like Joyraj. Visitors to Kaziranga always asked for Joyraj," said Ranjit Baruah, a forest guard at the Kaziranga National Park.

There are 61 elephants who are housed at Kaziranga and are assigned different jobs.  Joyraj is the universal favourite among keepers.  He was brought here from a nearby village when he was six years old.   Before roads were developed in this hilly, forested part of Assam, food and other essential supplies were carried by him to remote camps where forest guards were staying. 

Others find it easy to offer eulogies for Joyraj.  But his mahout is a man of few words.  When asked to describe the elephant in his life, Mangal Karmakar pauses, then speaks slowly. "After Joyraj goes there will be no one else like him."

Rohtak: Lakshmi from Rohtak in Haryana has a new home. She is headed to Andhra Pradesh with a farmer who bought the prize buffalo for a whopping Rs. 25 lakh.

Lakshmi is a "Murrah," a special breed of buffalo known for high milk yield. Her owner, Kapoor Singh, of Singhwa village in Rohtak had bought her for Rs. two lakh two years ago and says she is "special." 

Ever since he named her Lakshmi for the Goddess of Wealth, says Mr Singh, she has brought him much money. The buffalo, the farmer claims, yields up to 32 litres of milk every day. She has also won many prizes at shows at the state level, earning Rs. three lakh in prize money. 

Among those who have praised Lakshmi at such shows are Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar and Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, he says. 

And now, he has earned a profit of Rs. 23 lakh with the sale to the farmer from Hanuman Junction in Andhra Pradesh. He says even Lakshmi's calf fetched him Rs. 3 lakh. 

The government veterinary in Mr Singh's Singhwa village says more farmers here are now breeding Murrah buffaloes. Haryana is known as the home of the Murrah, which are now bred all over the world. 

A Short Parsi Film-- AFTERGLOW

It is a 15-minute film “Afterglow”, made by a student director from the FTII Institute, India, a while ago. This was his graduation project.

It has been doing the rounds, at both national and international film festivals, and is doing quite well. 
So far they have won 3rd place at the London Film Festival, and the 'best picture' at the recent Calcutta Festival.

This is story about a middle-class Parsis family (complete with accents and mannerisms), in what I think is a very touching piece.

Do find the time to watch it! All you have to do is click on the link below and please do not forget to enter the password.
PASSWORD:   after11glow

http://vimeo.com/kaushaloza/afterglow

Autogrammar Is Coming to Autocorrect

REBECCA GREENFIELDAUG 7, 2013

As much humor as autocorrect's mistakes have bestowed on us, it would be nice if our "smart" phones understood the most embarrassing of grammar errors, changing our "its" to "it's" and correcting all those small, but incredibly frowned upon grammar crimes that we commit far too often. In addition to the standard word dictionary, some of us hurried texters would benefit from a grammar dictionary. It's not that we don't know the difference between "we're" and "were," but when texting it's hard to get all the way over to the character screen and sometimes we're rushing and things just come out wrong and who proof reads text messages, anyway? Sure, there's growing social acceptance of these mistakes, but we know some of you judge us by our typos. 

Well, lucky for us less-than-careful texters, the developers over atNuance — the company that invented T9 (the predictive text used on dumbphones which guesses, for instance, whether you wanted D, E, or F when you press the 3) and now provides predictive typing software for most of the major phone makers other than Apple — are working on just such a technology. It's called "future context" and it will look at an entire sentence, or a sentence fragment, and if it thinks that, say, an "its" should be an "it's," a little underline will show up, prompting the texter to change it.

As of right now, smartphone texting programs work off of what is called an "Ngram" model of language, which uses an algorithm to figure out likely strings of words. "You just basically have a big huge dictionary that lists all of the words from highest frequency to lowest," Aaron Sheedy, vice president of the Tech Input and Mobile Group at Nuance, told The Atlantic Wire. "So you have a way to algorithmically go through the tap sequence — there's a very complex algorithm trying to figure out which word you're going for." 

So, if you write "I pledge," for example, the software has a pretty good indication that "allegiance" might come next, especially if you type "al," so it will autocorrect to that. That type of program can also account for certain aspects of grammar. Like, if you type "I" it will know to use the singular of a verb, like "am" instead of "are." 

But, it doesn't work for anything that needs more context like "its" versus "it's" "'Its' is heavily dependent on whats about to be written, not what's already written," added Sheedy. The computer can't know the right version of the word without the full sentence. "Once we've written 'it's going to be a great day' versus 'its my thing,' then we know and then we can correct it."

That capability is exactly what Sheedy and his team are hoping to accomplish with the future context software. Using the same Ngram model, Nuance hopes to broaden its capabilities to take entire sentences into consideration. "We're working on how to take the Ngram to look at the right and left of any given word," says Sheedy. 

For all of you language snobs lamenting the end of "proper English" due to all the typing on the Internet, don't worry: autocorrect for grammar will continue to degrade the mother tongue. This new and improved phone dictionary will only suggest proper grammar, not automatically correct it. And, if it learns that you like to subvert the stodgy old rules of standard English, it will conform — just as it always has — adding your unique usages of "its" along with those l8rs and lols. "Learning your own personal style of language is, for us, more important than adhering to a prescriptive model of language," added Sheedy. Good, because some of us like it that way. 

Photo by Intel Free Press via Flickr.

MySnaps : Mandu, recently

More and more children are being raised by grandparents

The silver-haired safety net

Jul 6th 2013 |From the print edition

BARACK OBAMA was raised by his grandparents for part of his childhood. He remembers his grandmother as being “tough as nails”. Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court judge, was raised by his grandparents because his mother could not make ends meet. He called his grandfather “the greatest man I have ever known”. Grandparents have always reared children when need arose. Most have done it well. A few have done it badly—the late comedian Richard Pryor, who was raised by his grandmother in a brothel she owned, was constantly beaten.

What is new is that, as the nuclear family frays, grandparents are taking more and more of the strain. Of the 75m children in America, 5.5m live in households headed by grandparents, a number that has risen by almost a million since 2005, according to the Census bureau. Beware stereotypes. Child-rearing grandparents are disproportionately black, but in absolute terms most are white, live above the poverty line and own their own homes. When a parent loses a job or cannot pay the mortgage, many families move in with grandma. Sometimes, however, the parents have disappeared: an estimated 900,000 children are being raised solely by grandparents.

Pemberton Park is purpose-built for grandparents raising youngsters in so-called “skipped generation” families. Its publicly subsidised apartments are reserved for those over 55 or under 21. Like most retirement homes it is a matriarchy: of its 36 households, all but three are headed by women. The complex opened in 2011, joining about a dozen similar projects across America, from the Bronx to Arizona. More are expected.Pemberton Park, an apartment complex in Kansas City, Missouri, caters to such families. The hush of the retirement home hangs over its brightly lit corridors and snail-slow lifts. Yet there are signs of youth everywhere: Girl Scout notices in the activity room, pop-star posters on apartment walls. Local donors have dropped off food to feed growing bodies: sacks of apples, pallets of yogurts, gallons of fruit juice. There is a computer lab, a children’s library and, outside, a playground, regularly patrolled to keep drug dealers away. The complex has a part-time social worker, charged with everything from mediating school disputes to overseeing a sexual-abstinence programme for teenagers.

Some of the observed rise in grandparent-headed families is simply down to their becoming more visible, as informal arrangements of the past clash with modern red tape, notably when registering children at school or seeking medical treatment. But something is happening, and on a scale that is drawing policy responses. It is not just that public-housing authorities are building playgrounds outside retirement homes. To avoid long custody cases, more states are creating guardianship laws, allowing grandparents to register children with schools or doctors without formally severing ties with missing or hostile parents.

Visiting Pemberton Park inspires both hope and gloom. On a positive note, resident grandmothers describe tireless efforts to bring stability to the lives of their children’s children. Lois Powell, wheelchair-bound at 59, has been raising her teenage step-granddaughter since she was a baby. She is “really old-fashioned” with her, stressing the need to finish school. Rose Stigger, 61, twice went to court to win custody of her granddaughters, fearing for their welfare with an errant mother and a father (her son) in and out of prison. Miss Stigger longs for her girls to attend college, as she never did. Pemberton Park is a support group in bricks and mortar, she beams: the grandmothers “have each other’s backs”.

On a bleaker note, the grandmothers describe a society in bad shape. Miss Stigger has worked her whole life and still does. Coming generations may never know such stability. Too often, it is “babies having babies”, she says. That creates parents too young or poorly educated to land a job that pays enough to bring up a family: “Then they drop them off at Mom’s.”

Hang about, look out for Supergran

The grandmothers struggle with modern schoolwork (mathematics is a special trial), modern morals and sheer exhaustion. Absent parents drop in for disruptive, fleeting visits, flashing cash and shiny possessions. Most youngsters want to do Grandma proud, says Latoya Walker, Pemberton Park’s resident counsellor. But they also see her as “the person who nags all the time”.

Samuel McHenry, a legal-aid lawyer, has worked with grandparents for more than 20 years. He can list the crises that send them to his downtown office in Kansas City, anxiously seeking guardianship of a child. Perhaps one in ten cases involves a parent’s death. Those are simple, unless competing grandparents start fighting, sighs Mr McHenry, a gentle, world-weary sort. It is not unusual for military parents to grant temporary guardianship to grandparents when they are deployed. About a third of his casework involves parents jailed for drugs or too addicted to cope with raising children. Roughly half of the time, parents “just took off”. Here too drugs are usually suspected. Some big changes jump out: the grandparents in his office are getting much younger, with a median age in the late 40s now. More are repeat clients, seeking to take care of multiple babies by different adult children, four or five years apart. Fewer of these adult children ever marry.

Mr McHenry’s clients are poor, but he sees plenty of private lawyers at court, representing more affluent grandparents in similar straits. What all have in common is that they are trying to save their families, after earlier disasters.

That, perhaps, should nudge the onlooker towards wary optimism. Kansas City’s grandmothers inhabit a society under great strain. But they head families of amazing resilience, built on a faith in second chances buttressed by hard work. That is not nothing. Wish them luck, them and the children they are raising.

Granny Skypes her way to MA in Sanskrit

BANGALORE: There's no age bar in education, feels 80-year-old TPShantaBai, who received a cash prize for securing the highest marks among senior citizens at the Karnataka State Open University's13th annual convocation.

Shanta Bai, who is from Kolar district and is based in Bangalore, is keen on learning new subjects and languages. After her retirement from the department of minorities in 1991, she started attending Sanskrit classes.

"I couldn't teach Sanskrit to my granddaughter who was doing her SSLC in 1994. This prompted me to learn Sanskrit. But after some years, I felt I should study the language under a teacher. So I joined an institute," she explained.

She's currently attending the Vidhyuth Uttama Alankara course in Bangalore. While attending the classes, her friends forced her to apply for MA in Sanskrit offered by KSOU and attended its contact classes in Bangalore. "I was the seniormost in the course - they were in 30-50 age group. We used to discuss a lot about the lessons. My grandson helped me use Skype to discuss lessons with my friends. I'd study in the morning for the exams," Shanta added.

Though she received support from her children and grandchildren, she did not inform her husband H R Mukund Rao, a retired officer from the central excise department, about her course. "I feared he would scold me. But like other family members, he too supported me, when he got to know about it," she said.

Shanta completed BSc from University of Mysore in 1952, BEd from Osmania University and MA in mathematics from Banaras Hindu University in 1962. She has learnt French too. "I want to translate Sanskrit works to French," she added.

Living in India

Living in India is like having an intense but insane affair,

 

​- ​

writes expat 

​​

Catherine Taylor

 

TONIGHT, as I waved my high heel in the face of a bewildered taxi driver, I thought suddenly: I am absolutely nuts in India. It's a thought I have often. Someone or something is always going nuts, and quite often it's me.

I was trying to get a taxi driver to take me home, a mere 500 metres away, but it was pouring with rain and my shoes were oh-so-high, and it was late. He, of course, was having none of it; no amount of shoe-waving and sad-facing from a wild-haired firangi was changing his mind, when suddenly I remembered the magic trick - pay more than you should. "Arre, bhai sahab, 50 rupees to Altamount Road? Please?" And off we went.

I have lived in Mumbai for almost three years. It was my choice to come - I wanted offshore experience in my media career and India was the only country looking to hire - and I wanted a change. I needed something new, exciting, thrilling, terrifying. And India gave that to me in spades. In fact, she turned it all the way up to 11. And then she turned it up a little more.

To outsiders, living in India has a particular kind of glamour attached to it, a special sparkle that sees people crowding around me at parties. "You live in India? My God, really? I could never do that. What's it like?" The closest I have come to answering that question is that it's like being in a very intense, extremely dysfunctional relationship. India and I fight, we scream, we argue, we don't speak for days on end, but really, deep down, we love each other. She's a strange beast, this India. She hugs me, so tightly sometimes that I can't breathe, then she turns and punches me hard in the face, leaving me stunned. Then she hugs me again, and suddenly I know everything will be all right.

She wonders why I don't just "know" how things are done, why I argue with her about everything, why I judge, why I rail at injustice and then do nothing about it. She wonders how old I am, how much I earn, why I'm not married. (The poor census man looked at me, stunned, then asked in a faltering voice, "But madam, if you're not married then… who is the head of your household?") I wonder how she can stand by when small children are begging on corners, how she can let people foul up the streets so much that they are impossible to walk along, how she can allow such corruption, such injustice, such A LOT OF HONKING.

But she has taught me things. She has taught me to be brave, bold, independent, sometimes even fierce and terrifying. She has taught me to walk in another man's chappals, and ask questions a different way when at first the answer is no. She has taught me to accept the things I cannot change. She has taught me that there are always, always, two sides to every argument. And she was kind enough to let me come and stay.

She didn't make it easy though (but then, why should she?). The Foreigner Regional Registration Office, banks, mobile phone companies and rental agencies are drowning under piles of carbon paper, photocopies of passports (I always carry a minimum of three) and the soggy tissues of foreigners who fall to pieces in the face of maddening bureaucracy. What costs you 50 rupees one day might be 500 rupees the next, and nobody will tell you why. What you didn't need to bring yesterday, you suddenly need to bring today. Your signature doesn't look like your signature. And no, we can't help you. Come back tomorrow and see.

It's not easy being here, although I am spoiled by a maid who cooks for me, and a delivery service from everywhere that ensures I rarely have to wave my shoes at taxi drivers. I buy cheap flowers, trawl for gorgeous antiques, buy incredibly cheap books; I have long, boozy brunches in five-star hotels for the price of a nice bottle of wine at home, I have a very nice roof over my head … on the face of it, it would seem I have little to complain about. But then, I am stared at constantly, I have been spat on, sexually harassed, had my (covered) breasts videotaped as I walked through a market, had my drink spiked, been followed countless times. I have wept more here than I have ever in my life, out of frustration, anger, loneliness, the sheer hugeness of being here. But the longer I stay, the more I seem to relax, let go, let it be.

But I do often wonder why I'm here, especially when I'm tired, teary and homesick, my phone has been disconnected for the 19th time despite promises it would never happen again, when it's raining and no taxis will take me home. But then a willing ride always comes along, and we'll turn a corner and be suddenly in the midst of some banging, crashing mad festival full of colour, where everyone is dancing behind a slow-moving truck, and I won't have a clue what's going on but a mum holding a child will dance up to my window and point and smile and laugh, and I breathe out and think, really, my God, this is fantastic. This is India! I live in India! She hugs me, she punches me, and she hugs me again.

Yet I know won't ever belong here, not properly. I know this when I listen to girls discussing what colour blouses they should wear to their weddings - she's Gujarati, he's from the south, she's wearing a Keralan sari. I know when my friends give me house-hunting advice: "Look at the names of the people who already live there, then you'll know what kind of building it is." (Trouble is, I don't know my Kapoors from my Kapurs, my Sippys from my Sindhis, my Khans from my Jains). I know this when my lovely fruit man (who also delivers) begs me to taste a strawberry he is holding in his grubby hands and I have to say no, I can't eat it, I'll die… I know I will never belong because, as stupid as it sounds, being truly, properly Indian is in your DNA. I marvel at how incredibly well educated so many of them are, how they can all speak at least three languages and think it's no big deal, how they fit 1000 people into a train carriage meant for 300 and all stand together quite peacefully, how they know the songs from every Hindi film ever made, how they welcome anyone and everyone (even wild-haired, complaining firangis) into their homes for food, and chai, and more food.

I've seen terrible things - someone fall under a train, children with sliced-off ears, old, old men sitting in the rain nursing half-limbs while they beg, children covered in flies sleeping on the pavement, beggars with no legs weaving themselves through traffic on trolleys, men in lunghis working with their hands in tiny corridors with no fans in sky-high temperatures. I've read heartbreaking things, of gang rapes, corruption, environmental abuse. I've smelled smells that have stripped the inside of my nostrils, stepped over open sewers in markets, watched a goat being bled to death.

I've done things of which I am ashamed, things I never thought I would do. I have slapped a starving child away, I have turned my head in annoyance when beggars have tapped repeatedly on my taxi window, I have yelled at grown men in the face. I have been pinched and pinched back, with force. I have slapped, I have hit, I have pushed. I have screamed in anger. I have, at times, not recognised myself.

I've yelled at a man for kicking a dog, and yelled at a woman who pushed into a line ahead of me when I wasn't at all in a hurry. When a teenage beggar stood at the window of my taxi, saying "F… you madam" over and over, I told him to go f… himself and gave him the finger; once on the train I let a kid keep 100 rupees as change. I am kind and I am cold-hearted, I am fair and I am mean, I am delightful and I am downright rude. I am all of these at once and I distress myself wildly over it, but somehow, India accepts me. She has no time for navel-gazing foreigners; she just shoved everyone along a bit and made room for me. She has no time to dwell on my shortcomings, she just keeps moving along.

And then, and then. I've been to temples where I've sung along with old women who had no teeth, I've held countless smiling ink-marked babies for photos, I've had unknown aunties in saris smile and cup my face with their soft, wrinkled hands, I've made street vendors laugh when I've choked on their spicy food, I've danced through the streets at Ganpati, fervently sung the national anthem (phonetically) in cinemas, had designers make me dresses, I've met with CEOs and heads of companies just because I asked if I could. She hugs, she punches, she hugs again.

In short, I have been among the luckiest of the lucky. She keeps me on my toes, Ms India, and I have been blessed that she let me stay for a while. She wanted me to succeed here and she gave me grand opportunities and endless second chances. She willed me forward like a stern parent. She welcomed me. And when I leave, because I know I will one day, I will weep, because I will miss her terribly. And because I know she won't even notice that I am gone.