Indholdsfortegnelse for May 10, 2021 i India Today

The darkest tale of a victory declared prematurely comes from Greek mythology. At the end of the Trojan War, the attacking Greeks abandoned a 10-year-long siege of the city-state of Troy and sailed away, leaving behind a giant wooden horse. The relieved defenders, falsely believing they had won, carted the horse inside the city. As the Trojans slept, Greek warriors slipped out of their hideout within the horse and opened the city’s gates to its destruction. It could well be a metaphor for where India was at the beginning of this year. As the first wave receded in February, we believed Covid had left for good and resumed our daily life, shedding masks and the social distancing protocols doctors and scientists had mandated, oblivious to the prospect of a second…

Last July, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath encouraged the state’s MLAs and his cabinet ministers to use laptops and tablets for their work. This February, he arranged for their training by the National Informatics Centre ahead of a ‘paperless’ presentation of the budget in the assembly. The legislators were also offered reimbursement for purchasing iPads. The trend seems to have caught on. Adityanath, who is recuperating from Covid, now uses a tablet to send instructions to his ministers every morning.…

The fodder scam exposed in 1996 the embezzlement, over many years, of around Rs 1,000 crore by the state animal husbandry department by filing fake bills to treat and feed non-existent cattle. Many top politicians and officials have been convicted in the case. The cases against Lalu include: › Withdrawal of Rs 37 crore from Chaibasa treasury. A CBI special court sentenced him to 5 years imprisonment in 2013. Secured bail in October 2020 › Withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from Deoghar treasury; 3.5 years in jail. Got bail in July 2019 › Rs 33.61 crore withdrawn from Chaibasa treasury; 5 years in jail. Got bail in October 2020 › Fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 3.13 crore from Dumka treasury. Two separate sentences of seven years each, to be served consecutively.…

Rivals is the third book and second novel from the pen of Dr Saad Shafqat, professor of neurology at the Aga Khan Hospital and Medical School in Karachi. He started writing with pieces about cricket and is the proud author of Javed Miandad’s autobiography (Cutting Edge) as well as a previous medicalthriller(Breath of Death).This book is set in the same “Avicenna University Hospital” (based on the author’s actual place of work) as his first novel, but the main protagonist in this one is not terrorists or terrorist hunters but doctors competing for a prestigious department chairmanship. The book opens with Dr Tanya Shah at her morning constitutional, and the author is clearly familiar with the world of Karachi’s rich and famous. As she puts on her Maria.B lawn suit and…

ALONGSIDE PHYSICAL ABILITIES, INDIAN ATHLETES ARE EQUALLY FOCUSED ON BUILDING THEIR MENTAL STRENGTH When the nationwide lockdown was announced last year, Deepika Kumari found herself stranded at her fiancé (now husband) Atanu Das’s home in Kolkata. The two archers had qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, but found their preparations had ground to an abrupt halt. For a few days, they tried yoga and indoor exercises. Deepika kept busy shooting at a target three metres away. She even attempted running on the rooftop, but stopped after suffering a back injury. Down in Chennai, paddler G. Sathiyan decided to follow a regime designed by strength and conditioning coach Ramji Srinivasan. He used water bottles, chairs and school bags to maintain fitness levels. Soon after, the lockdown was lifted and the athletes were…

Ray, for me, is a mythical being and that mythical quality reflects in his films. I discovered him quite late in life and am still understanding him. It was his Pather Panchali (1955) which changed my life and made me fall in love with cinema. The first time I tried watching it, I was in Class 5. My father had taken me to a theatre in Ichapur in 24 Parganas. I slept through it. During my second attempt, in Delhi, I, like my classmates, left the screening midway. Back then my passion lay more in sports. It was, finally, at my third attempt that I watched the film. That was at Siri Fort. I was howling by the end, especially when Durga died. I went home dazed, wondering how a…

Q. Ajeeb Daastaans’ Geeli Pucchi has been lauded for putting the perspective of a Dalit woman at the forefront, something not seen enough in mainstream cinema… In mainstream culture, we normalise the dominant caste narrative. It is boring to see only one kind of person represented on screen. We all have so many identities. I am a woman, a mother, an actor, a Bengali, an Indian, an atheist. It is amazing that Neeraj Ghaywan and [co-writer] Sumit Saxena wrote a story presenting an intersection of caste, gender and sexuality. Q. The short also generated plenty of conversation on social media. Is this indicative of the strength of the short format, do you think? You can tell this story in any form, [but] you have to want to tell it. You…

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has been rallying against central paramilitary forces throughout the assembly election in West Bengal. Of late, Mamata also seems deeply suspicious of the state police. Didi alleged in Behrampore on April 25 that the police were working under the instructions of the Election Commission. A day earlier, she claimed in Bolpur that the police were hounding and illegally detaining her party workers, and exhorted them to launch protests outside police stations.…

The World Health Organization (WHO) data on ‘Landscape of candidate vaccines in clinical development’ says that 91 Covid vaccines are in clinical phase of development. While 11 of these vaccines have already reached the market, at least 17 new ones are in final stage of trials globally, including three from India. If the Johnson and Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines in the market are already pre-booked by developed nations and are unavailable for import, there are other options. The major US-European vaccines in final clinical trial stages include German biopharmaceutical company CureVac’s mRNA-based vaccine candidate CVnCov, US biotech firm Inovio’s DNA vaccine, a protein subunit vaccine from Sanofi-Pasteur and GSK, and a similar vaccine from the Clover Biopharma-GSK-Dynavax combine. Besides this, a consortium of three biotech companies in Europe—ReiThera, Leukocare…

With BARC, it is working on in vivo research with camels to develop single-domain antibodies for treating thyroid cancer and tuberculosis in humans Production of Camelid anti-venom with S.P. Medical College, Bikaner and with Premium Serum, Pune, commercial scale development of novel camelid anti-venom, used in snake bites by Echis sochureki (an Indian viper variety) With Kolkata University, the centre is developing stable single antibodies against Staphylococcus aureus and allergen specific IgE in allergic asthma With BITS Pilani, it is developing lipid-based nanoparticles of Quinapyramine and Isometamidium salt for treatment of life threatening trypanosomiasis in camels NRCC is working with the National Institute of Fibre Engineering & Technology, Kolkata, to use camel hair with jute. The combination could be a replacement for polythene in making plant grow bags. The dung…

Bajrang Punia The first India wrestler to win three medals at the World Championships, Bajrang Punia returned to competition with a bang, bagging gold at the Matteo Pellicone Ranking Series in Rome. He is one of the top contenders in the 65 kg freestyle category. Manu Bhaker At the World Cup in March, shooter Manu Bhaker picked up a gold, silver and bronze each in the Olympic events, while picking up five medals overall. At 19, she could be India’s youngest medal winner at the Olympics. Sakhom Mirabai Chanu Injuries have hampered Sakhom Mirabai Chanu’s progress, but after a rehabilitation and training stint in the US, she now hopes to make her mark at the Olympics. With North Korea’s withdrawal, Chanu is now the second-best lifter in the 49 kg…

Some of the most stimulating moments in film history have occurred at a point where documentary and constructed narrative intersect or blur into each other. Nearly a 100 years ago, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North—about the Inuit people of the Canadian Arctic—introduced viewers to a world they knew little about; but doing this entailed a certain degree of artifice and use of scripted scenes. A century on, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which won best picture, best director and best actress at the Oscars this week, also melds reality with a fictional narrative while chronicling lives outside the mainstream: in this case, the van-dwelling “nomads” of modern-day America who live on the road and form communities and camps to help each other. Some scenes here could easily have come out of…

Jhumpa Lahiri, in the introduction to Ties, her award-winning translation of Domenico Starnone’s ironic, wry yet emotionally fraught novel Lacci, notes a particular passage that “stopped me in my tracks”. A passage that “lays bare the flawed human impulse to endure.... The disquieting message of Ties is not so much that life is fleeting, that we are alone in this world, that we hurt one another, that we grow old and forget, but that none of this can be captured, not even by means of literature”. Not that such knowledge stops writers from trying to express the inexpressible on the page, from trying to give form to the unruly spill of our lives. “Contained” is a word often used to describe Lahiri’s style, her characters trapped in a doomed effort…

CRIME Stranger A prosecutor and a detective team up to investigate a murder only to unearth more sinister secrets. The show has two seasons, which are not closely connected by plot but feature the same characters SLICE OF LIFE Reply 1988 Set in a street in Seoul in the year 1988, the show follows five families, focusing on the five teenagers who have been friends since they were kids. This is nostalgia for the 1980s at its sweetest ROMANCE Crash Landing on You This ovary-busting romance—hello Hyun Bin—between a South Korean businesswoman and a North Korean soldier is the cross-border romance Bollywood should have given us in an Indo-Pak setting, but failed to do BOSS LADY Hotel del Luna Singer-actor IU, as the undead owner of a hotel for the…

Q. How did you manage fitness during the lockdown? We set up video calls with our coach [Tamas Eszes] and did fitness sessions twice a day—one on the bike and the other in an indoor gym at home. Q. How important is the mental aspect of sailing? How have you been working on it? Sailing is about being aware of your environment—the wind, the weather—and the other boats. There is constant decision-making involved. If you don’t have the right attitude and the right focus at each moment, you will make the wrong decisions or not make decisions at all. I have been working with a psychologist from Israel to build self-confidence. It has made a huge difference in being consistent. That’s how I was able to qualify before the medal…