Charles Correa

Noted Indian architect, Charles Correa recently passed away.

Charles Correa:

• He was an architect, an urban planner, an activist and a theoretician.
• He was chiefly responsible for the planning of township of Navi Mumbai in the 1970s, and in 1984 he established Mumbai’s Urban Design Research Institute, providing a forum for interaction between architects, urban designers and other professionals.
• He was named “India’s greatest architect” the same year, when he was awarded the Royal Gold Medal by the Royal Institute of British Architects.
• His important works include the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in Ahmedabad and the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Portugal. Other notable works: Gandhi Smarak in Ahmedabad, Kala Kendra (Goa), National Crafts Museum (New Delhi), Bharat Bhavan (Bhopal), and Jawahar Kala Kendra (Jaipur).
• In 1990 he became the third recipient of the Gold Medal from the International Union of Architects, while his many other accolades include the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and the Padma Vibhushan – India’s second-highest civilian award.

Sources: The Hindu.

Chowdary is new CVC; Vijai Singh new CIC

K.V. Chowdary : Central Vigilance Commission

Vijai Singh : Chief Information Commissioner

Government has appointed former chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes K.V. Chowdary as the Central Vigilance Commissioner (CVC) and Information Commissioner (IC) Vijai Singh as the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC), filling two vacancies that are key to the institutional framework for accountability.

• The CVC’s appointment is subject to the approval of the Supreme Court, which is hearing a public interest litigation petition for transparency in appointments to the post and that of vigilance commissioners.

CVC is appointed by the President of India on the recommendations of a committee consisting of Prime Minister, Union Home Minister and Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha (if there is no LoP then the leader of the single largest Opposition party in the Lok Sabha).

CIC is appointed by the President on the recommendation of a committee consisting of—

• The Prime Minister, who shall be the Chairperson of the committee;
• The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha; and
• A Union Cabinet Minister to be nominated by the Prime Minister.

Sources: The Hindu, Wiki, CIC, CVC.

R.C.Tayal appointed NSG chief

Senior IPS officer R. C. Tayal has been appointed the new chief of the elite National Security Guard.

About NSG:

• It is a security force of India constituted “for combating terrorist activities with a view to protect States against internal disturbances“.
• It was set up in 1984 as a Federal Contingency Deployment Force to tackle all facets of terrorism in the country.
• It is under the authority Ministry of Home Affairs.
• The force is a unique combination of personnel on deputation from Indian Army and Central Armed Police Forces.
• The two components of NSG are the Special Action Group (SAG), which consists entirely of Indian Army personnel; and the Special Ranger Groups (SRG), which comprises personnel drawn from Central Armed Police Forces and State Police Forces.
• The chief of the force designated as a Director General is an officer from the Indian Police Service.

Sources: The Hindu, Wiki.

Exhibition takes a journey to the roots of Jamini Roy’s art

Jamini Roy, the eminent Bengali artist, counted among the early modernists of twentieth century Indian art, is being featured in a new exhibition in Mumbai at the National Gallery of Modern Art.

• Titled ‘Jamini Roy (1887 – 1972): Journey to the Roots’, the exhibition is curated by art historian and comprises 200 artworks that chart the development of the artist’s unique aesthetic and visual language.

About Jamini Roy:

• He was born in 1887 in Beliatore village in Bankura, West Bengal.
• He was among the significant Indian artists to forge a visual style that was both modern in its sensibilities and resolutely Indian.

• He was trained in European naturalism.
• Roy adopted the simplification of the forms, the bold, flat colours and the medium, material and themes of local folk paintings.
• He discarded expensive canvas and oil paint and opted for the more inexpensive material and medium of the folk artist.
• He rendered images from Ramayana and Krishna Lila. He painted ordinary men and women from the village, reinventing popular images from the patua’s repertoire.
• Jamini Roy restricted his palette to seven colours- Indian red, yellow ochre, cadmium green, vermillion, grey, blue and white. These were mostly earthy or mineral colours.

• The Santhals, tribal people who live in the rural districts of Bengal, were an important subject for Roy.
• A series of works done a decade before World War II is a prime example of how he captured the qualities that are a part of native folk painting and combined them with those of his own.
• He fused the minimal brush strokes of the Kalighat style with elements of tribal art from Bengal (like that of the terracotta work found in the Bishnupur temple, where terracotta was often composed into elaborate, decorative units over portals and across exterior walls of the temples).

Sources: The Hindu, Wiki, ngmaindia.gov.in.

Bangladesh Liberation War award for Vajpayee

Bangladesh is set to honour former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for his outstanding support for the country’s independence from Pakistan in 1971 when he was a Lok Sabha member.

• Bangladesh is all set to hand over Vajpayee’s “Friends of Bangladesh Liberation War Award” to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the country from June 6.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina also approved a proposal to honour the families of the members of Indian armed forces for sacrificing their lives for the cause of Bangladesh’s independence.

The award is bestowed upon individuals and organizations who had extended support to Bangladesh during it’s independence struggle. The then Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was the first “foreign friend” to be conferred with the ‘Bangladesh Liberation War Honour Award’. Most of the subsequent recipients were also from India which extended the most crucial support for Bangladesh’s independence with incumbent President Pranab Mukherjee being one of them.

Sources: The Hindu.

Four Indians among world’s 100 most powerful women

According to the Forbes’ 12th annual list, four Indians are among the world’s 100 most powerful women who are “transforming the world”.

• The list is topped by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The top 10 include:

1. German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
2. S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton.
3. Philanthriopist Melinda Gates. (wife of bill gates)
   
4. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen.
5. GM CEO Mary Barra.
6. IMF Chief Christine Lagarde.
7. Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.
8. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
9. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.
10. S. First Lady Michelle Obama.

Indians in the list:

• SBI Chief Arundhati Bhattacharya.

• ICICI bank head Chanda Kochhar.

• Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw.

• HT Media Chair Shobhana Bhartia.

Merkel has made it to the list 10 times over the past 12 years — nine times as No 1.

Sources: The Hindu.

“Dheepan” wins Palme d’Or at Cannes

French director Jacques Audiard’s “Dheepan”, a drama about a family of Sri Lankan refugees in Paris, was the surprise winner of Palme d’Or at the 68th Cannes Film Festival.

Other awardees:

• French actor Vincent Lindon was named the best actor for his role of a common man in “The Measure of a Man”.
• Emmanuelle Bercot was named the best actress for “Mon roi”.
• Laszlo Nemes’ Holocaust drama “Son of Saul” received the Grand Prix award, the competition’s runner-up prize.
• Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien won the best director award for “The Assassin”, a martial-arts drama set in ninth-century China.
• The jury prize went to Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos for “The Lobster”
• Mexican writer-director Michel Franco received the screenplay award for “Chronic”.
• The Camera d’Or for best first film was awarded to Cesar Augusto Acevedo’s well reviewed “Land and Shade”, about a Colombian family dwelling in a flame-engulfed farmland.
• French film director Agnes Varda was presented with the honorary Palme d’Or at the festival’s closing ceremony. She is also the first female filmmaker to ever receive the award.

2015 Cannes Film Festival- Quick facts:

• It was the 68th annual Cannes Film Festival.
• It is annually held in Cannes, France.
• It previews new films of all genres, including documentaries, from around the world.
• Founded in 1946, it is considered as the most prestigious film festival in the world and is one of the most publicised.
• The invitation-only festival is held annually at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès.
• The Palme d’Or (also known as Golden Palm) is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival.

Sources: The Hindu, Wiki.

John Nash

John Nash, the Princeton University mathematician and Nobel laureate whose towering intellect and descent into paranoid schizophrenia formed the basis of the Academy Award-winning movie A Beautiful Mind,” has died. He was 86.

Contributions:

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics to Nash, John Harsanyi of the University of California-Berkeley and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn in Germany for their work in game theory, which seeks to understand how people, governments and companies cooperate and compete.

Nash was honoured for his early insights, still widely used in economics, into how rivals shift or maintain strategies and allegiances. The Nash Equilibrium describes the moment when all parties are pursuing their best-case scenario and wouldn’t change course even if a rival does. It has been widely applied to matters including military face-offs, industrial price wars and labour negotiations.

Sources: The Hindu, BS.

£52,000 to save the bustard

Pramod Patil, a pune-based ornithologist,

has planned to help conserve the great Indian bustard ( Ardeotis nigriceps ) with £52,000 (about Rs. 50 lakh), which he got as the prize money with the Whitley Award for his work to save the critically endangered bird.

• The money will be channelled through BirdLife International, an international non-governmental organisation involved in conserving birds and their habitats.
• The bulk of the funds will be devoted to projects in the Thar desert as it is one of the last refuges of this great bird.

Great Indian Bustard:

The Great Indian Bustard is currently listed under the category of Critically Endangered birds, in the 2013 ‘Threatened Bird’ list by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

• There are less than 250 bustards left in the country.
• It inhabits arid and semi-arid grasslands with scattered short scrub, bushes and low intensity cultivation in flat or gently undulating terrain.
• In India it is legally protected and there are severe penalties for killing an individual.
• It occurs in the Indian Subcontinent, with former strongholds in the Thar desert in the north-west and the Deccan tableland of the Peninsula. It has been extirpated from 90% of its former range and is now principally confined to Rajasthan, with smaller populations in Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh.

Sources: The Hindu, Wiki.

BOOKER FOR Hungarian

Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai was given the Man Booker International Prize for 2015 at a ceremony held recently for his “achievement in fiction on the world stage”.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai (लाज़्लो क्रासज़नाोरकाई)

1. His first novel, Satantango (1985

Man Booker International Prize:

Awarded for      : Best original novel, written in the English language, and published in the UK

Location            : London, England

Presented by    : Man Group

First awarded    :1969

The literary prize, worth £ 60,000 is awarded to a living author of any nationality who has published fiction either in English or in English translation.

• Unlike the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction, the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded once in two years, is in recognition of a writer’s body of work and overall contribution to fiction rather than to a single novel.
• The award, which is sponsored by the Man Group, complements the Man Booker Prize and rewards one author’s continued creativity, development and overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.

INDIA IN MAN BOOKER AWARD

1997	Arundhati Roy	The God of Small Things	Novel	India
2006	Kiran Desai	The Inheritance of Loss	Novel	India
2008	Aravind Adiga	The White Tiger	Novel	India

Sources: The Hindu, Wiki.