#human sagar hits

[truisticrhino28]

Insanity, by TruisitcRhino28

Prologue:

It is the year 3642 BBY. Revan has been freed by the Jedi Order, and the Sith Emperor lies dormant on Yavin 4. This information is a well-kept secret, though not well-kept enough, because a brash young Jedi Padawan finds out about the Emperor’s awakening…

  Chapter 1: Brashness and Secrecy:

Padawan Vold Sagar was very strong in the Force; however, he was also very, very brash and reckless. He often let his emotions get the better of him and never really liked to come up with a plan, often preferring to rush into things head-on and improvise as he went along. This made him frowned upon by many of the Masters in the Order, particularly on the Council. Naturally, this meant that they did not consider Vold a good example of what a Jedi Knight, and thus, refused to elevate his status from Padawan to Knight. Upon hearing this news from his Master, Claudios Brenthen, he felt mocked, insulted, and most of all, furious.

“How dare the Council deny me the rank of Knight?! How dare they, those conservative old fools! I worked my butt off to become a Jedi! I did everything the Council requested of me, everything! And now those staid archaic bastards refuse to promote me!”, Vold was yelling in a fit of rage.

“It is not a matter of personal grudges with the Council. The sole reason you were not promoted is because you are brash. You never think twice, never form a plan. You are impulsive, and impulsiveness can be a very dangerous thing.” “I do not mean these remarks as insults, for few things can be insults if they are true”, replied Claudios in a calm but serious tone.

“I know, Master, and you are not the one I am mad at. Everything is making me so mad, the Council, this war, the Empire, everything!!”

“Remember, there is no emotion there is peace”, Claudios reminded calmly.

“Yes, Master”, Vold said in resignation, knowing that trying to continue the argument was pointless. With that, Claudios left meditate on the Jedi Temple grounds. Vold however, was still very mad at the Council and was desperate to prove himself. As such, he naturally thought that the only way to prove himself worthy was to gain power, of a darker kind.

 Chapter 2: Hidden Power and Hidden Love:

Vold carefully made his way to his Master’s quarters and once he had entered unseen and knew he was secure, he began searching through the Force for his Master’s locked away Sith scroll. After a few minutes, he found it and retrieved it from its hiding place. As he carefully opened it and read the first words, he saw the name “the Sith Emperor”. Vold was fascinated by this, and began pouring through the text on the scroll, until he happened upon a location: Yavin 4. He was familiar with the location of Yavin 4; it had been the primary base of operations of the famous Sith Lords Exar Kun and Naga Sadow. What does the Sith Emperor want with Yavin 4? Vold then remembered that the Sith Emperor had previously been defeated at the hands of the Hero of Tython. Perhaps he is waiting until he regains his strength. That means he is weak, and ripe for the killing. Defeating the Sith Emperor once and for all will surely give the Council cause to promote me to a Jedi Knight. With this in mind, Vold realized he had taken up a large amount of time looking at the scroll and swiftly exited his Master’s quarters unseen, leaving everything in the condition it was in before he entered. He then headed to visit his lover, fellow Padawan Nehani Forrez. The two of them had trained together as younglings, and had begun to deeply care for each other, feelings that eventually blossomed into love. As he entered her quarters, they embraced and began making out, as they usually did when they saw each other. When they had finished, they stood holding hands and Vold began saying, “Nehani, I’ve finally figured it out.”

“Figured out what, Vold?”, Nehani asked in curiosity.

“I’ve finally figured out how I can become a Jedi Knight!”, exclaimed Vold excitedly. “I will go to Yavin 4 and once and for all defeat the Sith Emperor!”.

Nehani had many questions about this. “How did you acquire this information? Why are you doing this? Does your master know of this? How do you know this is even possible?”.

“I must become a Jedi Knight. I must prove myself to those staid old fools on the Council that I am truly strong enough. The only way to do that is to kill the Sith Emperor.”

“But you’ll die!”, Nehani objected in concern. “To try and do that is utter insanity! Have you never heard the stories? The tales of absolute cruelty the Emperor committed on its victims? If you failed, then you would go insane, and constantly wish for and be denied the glorious privilege of death.”

“No matter what happens to me, as long as the Sith Emperor lies dead, I will have proved myself at last.” Nehani had no further words. Vold gave her one last kiss on the cheeks before leaving, satisfied he had explained his point. “Do not come for me, nor mourn my death. Your future as a Jedi is too important”, he finished. He then left Nehani and headed in secret for his ship, the Passionate Champion.

 Chapter 3: The Hunt for The Emperor:

As the Passionate Champion exited hyperspace, Vold was overtaken momentarily by dark imagery. Mental images of agony, screaming, and death flooded his mind. And at the source of all of it was the Sith Emperor. For most, this would have immediately deterred even the most mentally strong-willed being. But for Vold, this was only further motivation and reason that the Sith Emperor was a soulless monster that must be destroyed. He landed and exited his ship and began meditating in search of the Emperor. Once he’d found the Emperor’s location, he headed there at speeds unheard of to the human mind simply by using Force Speed. Once he’d happened upon the temple, he stopped, and cautiously sensed for any possible threats in the surrounding area. Once he felt it was safe, he ignited his lightsaber and entered the temple. Not soon after he had entered, he began to feel weakened and groggy, and eventually collapsed unconscious on the floor. When he woke up, he didn’t know where he was in the temple. Seeing his lightsaber, Vold tried to get up and use the Force to retrieve it, but he was snapped down to the ground, like an invisible presence had pushed him back. Next, he was bombarded with an assault of terrible images, similar to the ones he’d been bombarded with as he’d entered the atmosphere. Except this time, Vold was seeing a blurred vision of his future. He saw a person killing and murdering all life on Yavin 4. A person with dark eyes. A person that looked very similar to himself. A person he realized… was himself!  No! It... can’t be! How is this possible? How? Vold then went unconscious again, and when he woke up, he found himself outside the Temple and empowered with a new strength, something far, far stronger. A power, he felt, one that would bring him victory. Then, as he looked at a tree, he saw not a tree, but the image of the Emperor. Driven by nothing but mad rage, he brutally slaughtered the tree. Vold then thought that he had defeated the Emperor, but then saw his image on another tree, so he cut down that tree, and another, and another, and more and more trees until he had cut a sixth of the forest, he was standing in. Losing sanity more by the second, he screamed a yell of dark rage that could be heard across the galaxy.

 Chapter 4: The Call Heard Across the Galaxy:

Claudios was meditating in his quarters when he sensed a grave disturbance in the Force: his apprentice was in trouble. He was going to exit his quarters when he noticed something off, something he hadn’t noticed before. It appeared as if something had been left open. He opened his library cabinet, and nothing had been stolen, but one thing had been opened. As he opened the scroll about the Emperor, he read the entire scroll, and came upon a clause of the scroll regarding the Emperor’s horrific abilities to take control of people. It mentioned Revan, along with some other examples, but one part of this read of how the Emperor could drive people insane by making them see infinite projections of himself. He then thought back to his conversations with Vold. Realizing the terrible danger Vold was in, he rushed to his starship, and headed to Yavin 4, completely unaware that Nehani had boarded the ship in secret.

   Chapter 5: Unheard Pleas and Failed Persuasions:

Claudios’s ship exited hyperspace and immediately he was hit with disturbing Force visions, but he ignored them by projecting a field of light side energy around his ship. As he landed on the planet and exited his ship, he was in shock of the pure dark energy on the world. He realized however that this would do nothing but stall for time, so he quickly went in search of Vold. After a decent bit of traveling, he eventually ran into Vold brutally slashing trees and wildlife all around him. He realized this would be much more difficult than he had originally anticipated.

Vold was on a killing streak murdering everything within his path of sight that he thought resembled the Emperor. By this point, the dark side was so strong in him it was like a hypotonic blood cell about to explode. Suddenly, all of his focus was concentrated on one singular being standing a good 200 meters away from Vold, in the midst of the forest fires and destruction Vold had caused. He recognized this being as his Master, however, all he could see was the image of the Emperor in his mind.

“You, whatever you are, you are not my Master! This is a trick! A deceit shaped by the Emperor to make me think you are not him! But I see the truth! His deceits may have gotten me before, but not anymore! I see you are him! And now, you will die.”

“Vold, listen to me! You are not yourself. The Emperor is driving you mad. Come with me and we can free you of his influence and the corruption of the dark side.”

“Lies! All lies! I know this is another deceit to throw me off track, but it will not work! I have become too powerful to be deceived by such trickery again.”

“Vold! This is not you! Please, I implore you, do not do this. If you continue on your current path, I will be forced to end your life, which is a deed I very much do not wish to commit.”

“These lies will not work! The opaqueness of you is nonexistent, for I am transparent to your true self! Now, you must die!”

With deep regrets, Claudios concluded, “It is with the deepest of rue that I am forced to fight you. I am sorry for not protecting you from the corruption of the dark side better. Such flaws are the signs of a bad teacher, and a withered old fool. With that, Vold launched toward Claudios in fury, and he was barely able to defend the pure hatred of the first strike. Defend it he did though, and he proceeded to use a Force push to lift Vold off of his feet, in hopes of possibly knocking him unconscious. This only momentarily disrupted Vold however, and once he’d gotten back up on his feet, he used the Force to send waves of fire toward Claudios. Claudios responded to this attack by raising water from a nearby marsh to counter this. However, this gave Vold the opportunity to strike. Catching Claudios off guard, he threw his lightsaber at Claudios, forcing him to redirect his focus for a mere millisecond, causing fire to seep through his defenses and cause him critical burns. Wincing from pain, Claudios tried to use a Force Wave to push Vold away and give himself time to recover. However, Vold merely brushed past this, and instead threw his full strength into a single Force Wave, forcing Claudios to counter the interaction, an interaction which he lost. The sheer power of the Force Wave shattered many bones in Claudios’s body, leaving what was left of him barely alive and scrunched up, like a crumbled piece of paper. Vold then made the finishing move and killed him without a second thought. Then, at this very moment, Vold was released from the control of the Emperor, and everything was replayed in his head, the incineration of trees, the mindless slaughter of the life, and the murdering of his Master. Completely overcome with emotions and with no time to process them, he entered a state of insane grief and thrashed at everything around him, at which point he was again put under control of the Emperor, and even madder now he began brutally annihilating the flora and fauna at an alarmingly more intense level than before.

Nehani had been overtaken by the dark imagery, and had struggled to recover, but once she had, she’d carefully followed Claudios out of sight and had cried when she had seen Claudios die. That said, she knew she probably had one last chance to plea for Vold before he destroyed the entire planet.

 Chapter 6: Insanity:

Nehani made her way toward Vold in nervous strides. Vold, sensing her through the Force, stopped and dashed to confront her.

Nehani began by yelling, “Vold! This isn’t you! I know you! The real Vold would have never killed his Master like that.”

Vold would hear none of it, and countered by yelling back, “You, you evil, cursed wretched being!! You made me kill my Master!! I will decapitate you; I will choke you but make sure you still hold breath, I will make sure you bleed, but still do not bleed dry. I will make you suffer like no being has ever suffered before!!” And with that, Vold began to choke Nehani all the while slowly cutting open parts of her skin. She tried to resist, but to no avail. She couldn’t scream at the pain, for she was too busy merely struggling for air. This continued for another 3 hours, at which point Nehani finally crumbled and died. It was at this point that the Emperor lost interest in Vold, and released control of him so he could go back to lying dormant. This shattered Vold’s mind utterly and completely, and this compounded with him mentally replaying the recent events caused him to collapse in remorse, and as he ignited his lightsaber for a final time and stuck it through his chest, he let out a final cry that released the last morsel of sane present within him, leaving him a corpse of his own insanity.

[divorceadvocatesinbangalore]

How to select pleasant divorce advocates in bangalore courtroom

Job at a PSU is the very last dream of  check this  someone with little ambition, one who's check this  satisfied with little paintings, no competition and foolproof job safety. However for the reason that the median age of the Indian populace is within the early 20s so the opposition for each put up each seat could be very stringent. Thus it permits if you could piggyback on a excellent university or college. PSUs recruit human beings through either a written check (open the employment newspaper and you'll find out myriad of jobs with their examination schedules) OR thru direct recruitment from campus. The profits are remarkable right here in PSUs with lot’s of privileges.

It is honestly useful to choose the sector of regulation in the 4th Year of your law college (like, securities regulation, tax, IP regulation, Litigation and so on.) and artwork excellent on that. After deciding on the precise field, start interning in agency/ advocates and senior advocates who deals only with that detail so you can sharpen that skills by way of way of the prevent of the 5th yr. This will will let you crack an interview with out troubles and fetch a assignment proper after college if you hone the expertise properly. Avoid deciding on awesome fields as it will stress you out and you could become with nothing reachable.

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Top Law Firms In India

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[screwdriver-cd]

New bug fixes and features - August 2022

Latest Updates - August 2022

Screwdriver team is pleased to announce our newest release which brings in new features and bug fixes across various components.

New Features

Collections supports sorting by: last time a job was run in a pipeline or build history based on number of failed events/jobs. To sort by one of these fields, click the up/down caret to the right of the field names.

Collections supports displaying a human-readable alias for a Pipeline (in List view). To set the alias for a pipeline, go to your pipeline Options tab. Under Pipeline Preferences, type the alias in the Rename pipeline field. Hit enter. Go to your Collections dashboard to see the new alias.

Screwdriver Admins can perform Sync on any pipeline from the pipeline options UI

If there is no pipeline admin, periodic build jobs will not run and Screwdriver will notify(if Slack or email notifications are configured)

Pull Request Comments are now supported from individual PR jobs

Support for self-hosted SonarQube for individual Pipelines

Meta CLI

Meta CLI can now be installed as homebrew formula

Allow shebang lua commands to have parameters with dashes in them

Updates

User preference to display job name length has now been moved under User Settings. Now you can configure your preference globally for all pipelines. Click on your username in the top right corner to show the dropdown, select User Settings. (Alternatively, navigate directly to https://YOUR_URL/user-settings/preferences). Under the User Preferences tab, click the arrows or type to adjust preferred Display Name Length. 

Before:

After:

Bug Fixes

API

Pull Requests jobs added via a pull request should work

Prevent disabled Pull Request jobs from executing

Prevent API crash for Pipelines with large number of Pull Requests

queue-service

Prevent periodic jobs getting dropped due to API connection instabilities and improve error handling

UI

Even in PR workflow-graph job states show up

Build not found redirects to intended pipeline page

Improve the description of the parameter

More consistent restart method when using listViewDisplay message when manually executing jobs for non-latest events

Emphasize non-latest sha warning when manually executing jobs

Use openresty as base image for M1 use

Show error message when unauthorized users change job state

Gray out restart button for jobs that are disabled

Modify toggle text to work in both directions

Collections and pipeline options improvements

Launcher:

Add SD_STEP_NAME env variable

Internals

sd-cmd:

Create command binary atomically

Add configuration to README.md, local configuration improvements

Fix sd-cmd not to slurp all input

buildcluster-queue-worker:

Upgrade amqplib from 0.8.0 to 0.10.0

Compatibility List

In order to have these improvements, you will need these minimum versions:

API - v4.1.282

UI - v1.0.718

Store - v4.2.5

Queue-Service - v2.0.40

Launcher - v6.0.165

Build Cluster Worker - v2.24.3

Contributors

Thanks to the following contributors for making this feature possible:

Alan

Anusha

Haruka

Ibuki

Jacob

Jithin

Kazuyuki

Keisuke

Kenta

Kevin

Naoaki

Pritam

Sagar

Sheridan

Tatsuya

Tiffany

Yoshiyuki

Yuichi

Yuki

Yuta

Questions and Suggestions

We’d love to hear from you. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out here. You can also visit us on Github and Slack.

Author Alan Dong, Sr Software Dev Engineer, Yahoo

[gamehayapkmod]

Cytus II

Cytus II

Game Cytus II là dòng game Music

Giới thiệu Cytus II

"Cytus II" is a music rhythm game created by Rayark Games. It's our fourth rhythm game title, following the footsteps of three global successes, "Cytus", "DEEMO" and "VOEZ". This sequel to "Cytus" brings back the original staff and is a product of hardwork and devotion. In the future, humans have redefined internet development and connections. We can now easily sync the real world with the internet world, changing life as we have known for thousands of years. In the mega virtual internet space cyTus, there exists a mysterious DJ legend Æsir. His music has an irresistible charm; people fall madly in love with his music. Rumor has it that every note and beat of his music hits the audiences in the depths of their souls. One day, Æsir, who had never shown his face before, suddenly announced that he will be holding the first mega virtual concert —— Æsir-FEST and will invite a top idol singer and a popular DJ as opening performances. The instant the ticket sales began, an unprecedented rush occurred. Everyone wanted to see Æsir's real face. On the day of the FEST, millions of people were connected to the event. At one hour before the event started, the previous world record for most simultaneous connection was smashed. The whole city was on its feet, waiting for Æsir to descent from the skies... Game Features: - The unique "Active Judgement Line" rhythm game playstyle Tap the notes as the judgement line hits them to achieve a high score. Through five different kinds of notes and the judgement line that actively adjusts its speed according to the beat, the gameplay experience is further combined with the music. Players can easily immerse themselves in the songs. - A total of 100+ high-quality songs (35+ in base game, 70+ as IAP) The game includes songs by composers from all across the world, Japan, Korea, the US, Europe, Taiwan and more. Through the characters, players get to play songs from different genres including but not limited to: electronic, rock and classical. We are confident that this game will live up to the hype and expectations. - Over 300 different charts Over 300 different charts designed, from easy to hard. The rich game content can satisfy players of different levels. Experience exciting challenges and enjoyment through the sensation of your fingertips. - Explore the virtual internet world with the game's characters The one-of-a-kind story system "iM" will lead the players and the in-game characters to slowly piece together the story and world behind "Cytus II". Reveal the truth of the story with a rich, cinematic visual experience. --------------------------------------- ※ This game contains mild violence and vulgar language. Suitable for users age 15 and above. ※ This game contains additional in-app purchases. Please purchased base on personal interest and ability. Do not overspend. ※ Please pay attention to your game time and avoid addiction. ※ Please do not use this game for gambling or other illegal purposes. Cytus II 3.4 Free Character: Bo Bo - Just a simple gift... who would've thought it'd affect Rin and Sagar's relationship... Main story adds content - Deep memories of falling from great heights and an ethereal opening to the oceans of data. At a loss, Ivy prepares to leave her last record… 5 free songs added - Adds 2 Sdorica collab songs - Adds 2 main story songs - Adds 1 new CAPSO song New song pack - BM song pack "Marvelous Mix vol. 4" includes 5 new songs for purchase

Download APK

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[xtruss]

DECODER

The 3 Most Polarizing Words in India, the Fascist & Terrorist Regime of Fucked-up Hindus!

“Jai Shri Ram” was meant to be a celebration of a Hindu deity. But the phrase is turning into hate speech—and a dog whistle for attacks on Muslims.

— By Snigdha Poonam| February 13, 2020 | Foreign Policy

“Jai Shri Ram!” Those were the words 25-year-old Kapil Gujjar shouted as he pointed his semi-automatic pistol at hundreds of unarmed women and children at Shaheen Bagh, a predominantly Muslim colony in New Delhi, on Saturday, Feb. 1. It was a cool, smog-infused afternoon, and Indians from all walks of life had gathered in a peaceful protest against a controversial new citizenship law that especially affects the country’s poor, women, and, perhaps most of all, Muslims. Gujjar fired three bullets in the air. The crowd scattered. Later, while being handcuffed by the police, Gujjar explained his motive: “In our country, only Hindus will prevail.”

Jai Shri Ram literally translates as “Victory to Lord Ram,” a popular Hindu deity. But while this seemingly harmless phrase originated as a pious declaration of devotion in India, it is today increasingly deployed not only as a Hindu chauvinist slogan but also as a threat to anyone who dares to challenge Hindu supremacy.

Gujjar’s message was aimed at India’s 200 million Muslims —the largest religious minority in a mostly Hindu population of 1.3 billion people—who have become unwitting targets in an us-versus-them culture war waged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The latest catalyst for tensions is the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which discriminates on the basis of religion. The law grants citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who are Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, or Zoroastrians—but not Muslims—as long as they entered India before 2015.

Jai Shri Ram is today increasingly deployed as a threat to anyone who dares to challenge Hindu supremacy.

Activists point out that the CAA goes against the secular principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Jai Shri Ram is today increasingly deployed as a threat to anyone who dares to challenge Hindu supremacy. And when coupled with a proposed national registry of citizens that could force people to prove their citizenship, the government’s plans could hurt the many millions of poor and illiterate Indians who don’t possess any documents to further their claims. Mass protests have seized the country’s cities and towns since the CAA was passed on Dec. 11; in scenes unprecedented in modern India, thousands of demonstrators have been forming human chains, singing the national anthem, and reading the constitution aloud. Shaheen Bagh, where hundreds of local Muslim women have staged a sit-in since the start of this year, has become the center of the national movement as more and more Indians—students, professionals, activists, singers, artists—join them every day.

Two days before Gujjar walked into Shaheen Bagh, another young man, a teenager, produced a pistol near the area and shot at anti-CAA demonstrators, injuring one and terrifying hundreds. The juvenile shooter, whom Indian law prohibits the media from naming, had apparently been prepared to become a martyr in what he perceived as a war for Hindu supremacy. In a Facebook video he recorded while on his way to Shaheen Bagh, he had left instructions for his fellow warriors: “On my final journey, cover me in saffron clothes and chant Jai Shri Ram.” The phrase has provoked terror in the capital since the beginning of this year: On the night of Jan. 5, a group of masked attackers affiliated with the Hindu far-right cried “Jai Shri Ram” as they entered Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, a hub of left-wing politics, and brutally beat up students who had been protesting against a recent fee hike.

People take part in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, on Feb. 2, the day after a shooter fired on protesters there.

Ram, the popular Hindu god, is the protagonist of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, said to be written sometime between the seventh and third centuries B.C. In modern, mainstream depictions of the Ramayana, Ram is extolled as the embodiment of the perfect man: an exiled prince who rescues his abducted wife and destroys an evil empire before returning home to assume his rightful throne. Ram is always described as just, brave, self-sacrificing, and righteous. His followers even justify the fact that he later abandoned his wife, Sita, after commoners questioned her purity—after all, they argue, Ram’s role as king superseded his duties as a husband. He was likely only following the social mores of his era.

Ram is always described as just, brave, self-sacrificing, and righteous.

In Hindi-speaking regions, Hindus have invoked Ram’s name for more than a century in regular greetings, in exclamation, and in folk songs. The deity’s political influence goes back even further. In the 12th century, a “sudden rush of temples [were] built for Ram” in response to the establishment of the first sultanate in Delhi in 1206, the journalist Shoaib Daniyal points out in Scroll.in. “In the 17th century, for example, two Marathi Ramayans were written, one which compared Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb to Raavan [Ram’s nemesis] and the other to Raavan’s gluttonous brother Kumbhakarna,” he writes.

But the phrase’s cultural relevance changed markedly in the last four decades, when it began to take on a different meaning. I first heard the words while watching the late 1980s television adaptation of Ramayana that aired on the national broadcaster Doordarshan. The program became a Sunday ritual in Hindi-speaking parts of India, and it depicted Ram as an ideal, pious man with a beatific smile—until he encountered evil, which he slew on sight. But Ram never used his special powers unless it was warranted. “Attacking the weak or the innocent to show your arrogance or your might doesn’t count as the dharma [duty] of the brave,” Ram’s spiritual mentor, Vishwamitra, advises while awarding him with celestial weapons.

Some purported followers of Ram now seem to have a different interpretation of dharma. Last year, across several incidents, dozens of poor and innocent Indians were attacked because they refused to say the words Jai Shri Ram. On June 18, a 24-year-old man was lynched in Jharkhand; on June 20, a 40-year-old cleric was hit by a car in Delhi; on June 23, a 25-year-old cab driver was beaten up in Thane near Mumbai; and on July 28, a 15-year-old boy was set on fire in Uttar Pradesh. In each of these attacks, the victims were Muslim, and they were asked to chant Jai Shri Ram by as few as three and as many as 30 Hindu assailants.

The slogan is deployed as effectively in violence as it is in entertainment. Last July, as Muslims were being forced to intone Jai Shri Ram, the country seemed gripped by a viral music video (now deleted) on YouTube titled “Jo Na bole Jai Sri Ram, bhej do usko kabristan” (Those who don’t say Jai Shri Ram, send them to their graveyards). The reference to cemeteries made clear that the message was directed at Muslims and Christians. Four people involved in making and uploading the video were later arrested. There is no stopping the messages of hate, however. On YouTube, one can now find dozens of songs glorifying Ram and denigrating minorities. Most of them mix Hindi hate speech with electronic beats. Some are so popular that they are requested at weddings and played in clubs. “Hindu Blood Hit,” for example, has been viewed more than 3.8 million times. Between psychedelic repetitions of Jai Shri Ram, the singer warns India’s Muslims that their time is up. Other viral songs can be geopolitical: “Jai Shree Ram DJ Vicky Mix” calls for a future in which “there will continue to be a Kashmir but no Pakistan.”

Arun Govil as Lord Ram and Deepika Chikhalia as Sita in Ramanand Sagar’s TV adaptation of the epic Hindu poem Ramayana.

The 1980s television show of the Ramayana reached millions of Indians right as the BJP accelerated its project to unite Hindi-speaking Hindus around the figure of Ram. This was a bold political experiment. Although widely known as the hero of the Ramayana, which has been published in multiple languages and dialects, Ram was worshipped only selectively in India. In some parts such as Tamil Nadu, his worship elicits hostility by those who see the Ramayana’s narrative as racist toward Dravidians, the ancestral inhabitants of southern India. In West Bengal, where the majority of Hindus worship the goddesses Durga and Kali, Ram’s name doesn’t resonate widely.

Ram’s imprint has spread in the years since the BJP chose him as the mascot for its project to build and cultivate a Hindu base of voters.

But Ram’s imprint has spread in the years since the BJP chose him as the mascot for its project to build and cultivate a Hindu base of voters.Ram’s imprint has spread in the years since the BJP chose him as the mascot for its project to build and cultivate a Hindu base of voters. The center for this project was the city of Ayodhya, where a 16th-century Mughal mosque occupied what some believe to be the site of Ram’s birth. Around the mid-19th century, regional Hindu organizations attempted to claim the site and build a temple to Ram on the mosque’s grounds. But then, in the 1980s, the BJP and its ideological allies turned the local demand for a Ram temple at the site into a sweeping Hindu nationalist movement. The slogan for this movement, which was led by BJP leader and then-Home Minister L.K. Advani, was Jai Shri Ram. The words were chanted, loud and clear, as the foundation for the temple was laid next to the mosque and bricks were loaded into trucks and trains headed for Ayodhya. And the same words tore through the city on Dec. 6, 1992, as thousands of Hindu volunteers pounded the mosque with hammers and axes. In a matter of hours, the building was razed; riots sparked throughout India. Jai Shri Ram now had an additional meaning: an expression of Hindu dominance and the BJP’s rise.

Last June, cries of Jai Shri Ram echoed through the Indian Parliament after the BJP was reelected with a sweeping majority, winning 303 of 543 parliamentary seats in an ugly, polarized election. The words were used to heckle Muslim legislators as they took their oaths to uphold the Indian Constitution. Five months later, India’s Supreme Court settled the country’s longest-running property dispute by ruling in favor of a Ram temple to be built in Ayodhya at the same site where the mosque was demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992. The Muslim petitioners were granted 5 acres elsewhere in the city to build a mosque. On Nov. 9, as the government commenced arrangements for building the temple, Modi tweeted his response to the court verdict: “May peace and harmony prevail!” But those words seem lost amid the dog whistles sounded by senior leaders and amplified on social media with impunity. It is no surprise then that the devotees firing bullets at Shaheen Bagh have different intentions.

[jellyontheroad]

Mauritius

Our first breakfast at Chantauvent guest house turned out to be an interesting affair. A large continental buffet was laid out and we sat at a table overlooking the sea and inner reef. The weather was poor with onshore winds creating large breakers over the reef which were quite spectacular. The inner lagoon was calm and swimmable, which some guests took advantage of. No sooner had we sat down when we were joined at our table by an uninvited guest, a gecko. It was beautifully coloured with greeny blue and red striped running the length of its small body. The gecko moved lethargically into the table and sat there eyeing up the breakfast. The red strawberry jam caught his attention and he walked over and started licking what must have seemed like a monstrous pile to it. In all the years of travelling and seeing geckos at no time have l ever seen this happen. This gecko has learned to have breakfast with humans, amazing. He showed no fear and was quite tame. Barbara a white haired lady from Athens in Greece started to chat to us across the tables. She had just come from Madagascar and just loved the place. Her pictures of lemurs and Chameleons were great. The rain forced us into driving around the island for a look. First we went to a local town to get a bank. Parked up, we walked into the centre where lots of well dressed ladies in rainbow saris looked to be waiting on a bus. It never occurred that the scene we just passed through would later transform into something spectacular. Western union is always a safe bet for foreign exchange, so in we went and after talking to some Germans out we popped into the street again. Wow, ina few minutes the street had gone from a quiet little town street to a carnival atmosphere. A huge Hindu religious parade had assembled and a cacophony of bands filled the air with what sounded like a brass band tuning up. Asking around we found it it was a once a year event for local Hindu to celebrate. The parade started up the road with great fanfare. People of all ages were adorned in colourful attire, the main point seemed to be suffering and pain. Large wooden structures were held up above women, children and mens heads. They were large and cumbersome but beautifully decorated with flowers and greenery. Attendants walked alongside their bearers to lend a helping hand lest they weary. It looked painful and the men seemed to compete for who could suffer the most pain. Loin clothed men had two main choices of pain, holding these monstrous flower gardens above their heads or dragging flower gardens behind them. The catch was that the gardens were attached to the men by fish hooks driven deep through their skin. You could see the skin stretch out of shape as they dragged the wheeled gardens behind them. It looked like the hooks in the skin would tear out at any moment, but they were well anchored. Body piercing was the other main theme. People had large rods, up to a metre long piercing through their mouths at each corner of the lips. The ends had spear tips on them. Others had limes, all 50 of them dangling from their bodies attached by fish hooks, still others had silver leaves dangling from their skin making it look like a decorative coat of armour. One man walked by with shoes on that were a bed of nails, ouch. Yet another floated past on the back of a truck lying on a bed of nails, bet he felt it when they hit a pothole. Drummers, brass bands, singing and chanting filled the air. Devotees offered gifts to their gods along the way and in turn were blessed with ashes from the burning fires pushed into their foreheads. Half an hour and a lot of fun later the procession snaked away and we left to explore the island further. We took the coast road which had a dramatic back drop of towering sharp verdant slopes covered in forest. Local fishermen had sailing boats which used a very rudimentary wooden mast made from a less than straight piece of a tree branch. They were adept at hoisting this mast and it came down just as easy. Most of the little boats were obviously for inshore fishing, but l suspect they go further offshore on nice days. Little villages dotted the coastal road and people went about their business carrying bundles of grass for farm animals on their heads. It was a typical rural scene with potholed roads and very few places to pull in along the way. Places of historic interest were everywhere and gun emplacements looked out over the water with old cannon, no doubt used in their day. British, French and Portuguese all had a hand in shaping this island. Indentured labour mainly from India was used to establish sugar cane plantations. Those sagar cane plantations are still there today as well as Pineapple. Potholed roads along the coast gave way to better wider roads as we closed in on Port Louise the capital. We even ended up on the islands one motorway into the capital. Port louise is a bustling little city with high rise and new shopping malls. The waterfront is very modern. Large plush hotels and eateries lined the Corniche. A stark contrast to the little villages we had just come from. Mercedes, BMW and Porsche drove around, a sure sign this was a much wealthier place. Our main reason for being in the capital was to find Vandana, Ibrahim's widow. Ibrahim was my old boss at the Corniche hospital in Abu Dhabi and he had come back to his homeland to set up a medical lab here. Unfortunately he died recently. It was a reasonable bet if we found a medical lab we would find out where his lab was. So Dr google diagnosed the lab site and we were right. The person there knew of Ibrahim and gave us directions to his lab. It was in the Chisty Shiffa clinic. Right lab wrong location, Vandana was at the main lab about a kilometre away. Ten minutes later we were greeting each other. It was lovely to meet her for the first time. We talked and later that night went out for a seafood feast and a lot of conversations. Later we drove home in the rain on the motorway.

[jeramymobley]

Meet AVA, the AI Brainchild of Autodesk, IBM and Oscar Winners

In a world where AI assistants are becoming de rigeur, Autodesk is rolling out AI-powered virtual assistant. The California-based B2B software giant is now introducing AVA, short for Autodesk Virtual Assistant, across its website ahead of integrating into its software platform later this year.

While the media has been focused on consumer-facing AI and chatbots, the B2B business case is just as strong. For more than 34 years, Autodesk sold its popular 3D design, engineering and entertainment software under perpetual desktop licensing agreements. However, the way customers want to buy and access products is changing—from working with desktop applications to subscription-based models using software hosted on cloud and mobile platforms (much as Adobe has done, for instance).

Recognizing that shifting to a subscription business model might create an avalanche of inquiries requiring real-time customer service and support so clients’ businesses wouldn’t be disrupted, Autodesk decided to use cognitive technology to enhance its customer experience.

While Autodesk maintains a staff of about 350 internal and external customer support agents who handle roughly one million customer and partner contacts per year, half of those pertain to activation code requests, changes of address, contract problems and technical issues—simple requests that a chatbot could easily help resolve.

A conversation with AVA might begin:

My name is AVA and I’m a virtual agent (not a human). I’m continually learning to help you with questions about:

Registration

Activation

Installation

My Account

Licensing

When you’re ready, type your question just as if you were chatting with a human agent and hit enter, and we can work together to find the solution. Sometimes I have trouble understanding lots of input at once, so the more concise you are, the better I am able to help you.

If I can’t find the answer you need, I’ll get you to a human agent.

Let’s get started: how can I help you?

“We needed a very different way to service our customers than we had in the past,” stated Gregg Spratto, VP of Operations for Autodesk Inc. The solution was developed in partnership with IBM, using the Watson conversation API. Now out of beta, the lifelike virtual agent returns answers to customer questions quickly by applying natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning techniques to recognize and extract the intent, context and meaning behind inquiries.

In one example, British 3D artist Will Dudley needed to download software and was swiftly helped in an interaction he shared below:

AVA is the best thing Autodesk makes. pic.twitter.com/RdjX08xITL

— Will Dudley (@willjdudley) May 23, 2018

The system’s capabilities, at present: supporting 100,000 conversations a month, easing the burden on call center staff; recognizing 60 distinct use cases to quickly resolve simple requests so that human customer service agents can assist customers with more complex issues; and cutting customer inquiry resolution time dramatically, from 1.5 days to an average of 5.4 minutes for most inquiries.

“The solution’s capability of recognizing the context of the question has resulted in Autodesk being able to resolve customer inquiries up to 99% faster,” Spratto noted.

Our very own AVA is featured in @WSJ, how the future of chatbots – both shortcomings and advantages, will make the customer experience more satisfying https://t.co/U0IVzdrA6U pic.twitter.com/ol8Vj4ff2w

— Autodesk (@autodesk) May 9, 2018

The visual representation of AVA, a multi-ethnic woman who resembles Meghan Markle, the newly-minted Duchess of Sussex, was designed by New Zealand’s Soul Machines, which believes in making digital people and raising them like a child. Soul Machines CEO Mark Sagar has twice won an Academy Award and animated characters for movies like Avatar, King Kong, and Spider-Man 2. (AVA is based on bi-racial New Zealand actress Shushila Takao, as Fast Company notes.)

Soul Machines previously created Sophie, a virtual assistant for Air New Zealand customers:

AVA will continue to evolve, as Autodesk director of machine assistance Rachael Rekart told VentureBeat, which added, “In the coming weeks, the assistant will even be able to analyze facial expressions and analyze voices to detect emotions like joy, sadness, and frustration. Real-time knowledge of a person’s emotional state will allow AVA to share an emotional reaction on her face in return.”

Find out more in Rekart’s Bloomberg TV interview:

The post Meet AVA, the AI Brainchild of Autodesk, IBM and Oscar Winners appeared first on brandchannel:.

[odiamoviesngs]

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Musician keyboardist Liam Howlett reminds us how basic a beat is, even in nowadays of pale 'emotional' music, in Fight Fire with Fire. As no-nonsense hiphop couple Ho99o9 (I was informed that is articulated 'Loathsomeness') belts out, "The puppy is yapping distraught, has run and flee with no rope/The warmth is coming/Stop running, leave your blood in the city/We stick together, stormy climate/We don't fuck with police," we are into equal parts Marilyn Manson region and half-Banksy ward – that is, before the road craftsman turned into a Sotheby's performing one.

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[thebourisbox]

Mark Sagar: how humans will interact with machines in ten years

See on Scoop.it - Design, Comm, Sci and Tech

In ten years artificially intelligent robots will be living and working with us, according to Dr. Mark Sagar, CEO of Soul Machines, an Auckland, New Zealand-based company that develops intelligent, emotionally responsive avatars.

  Sagar, an AI engineer, is the inventor of a virtual nervous system that powers autonomous animated avatars like Baby X — a virtual infant that learns through experience and can “feel” emotions.

  “We are creating realistic adult avatars serving as virtual assistants. You can use them to plug into existing systems like IBM Watson or Cortana — putting a face on a chatbot,” said Sagar.

Within a decade humans will be interacting with lifelike emotionally-responsive AI robots, very similar to the premise of the the HBO hit series Westworld, said Sagar.

  But before that scenario becomes a reality robotics will have to catch up to AI technology. “Robotics technology is not really at the level of control that’s required,” he said.

[ladystylestores]

Amazon eyes Zoox, Aurora goes back to school and Cabana hits the road – TechCrunch

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every Saturday in your inbox.

Hi and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B. I’m your host Kirsten Korosec, senior transportation reporter at TechCrunch.

The mobility world got busy this week. Really. busy. This is gonna be a long one, buckle up.

Take a look at the most recent survey we conducted with a bunch of venture capitalists about mobility and what areas interest them most. We talked to Ernestine Fu with Alsop Louie Partners, Stonly Baptiste and Shaun Abrahamson with Urban Us, Shahin Farshchi with Lux Capital, Kate Schox with Trucks VC and Jeff Peters of Autotech Ventures.

Reach out and email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Alright, time to dig in. Vamos.

Micromobbin’

Uber tossed more than 20,000 JUMP bikes into a recycling yard following its deal to offload the JUMP brand to Lime. A photo below, courtesy of Cris Moffitt, shows a sliver of the thousands of bikes at the yard in North Carolina.

“The extent of waste is unfathomable,” the Bike Share Museum said in a tweet.

Since then, Tier Mobility CEO and co-founder Lawrence Leuschner said he wants to take some of those bikes, “repair them, and give them a second life – as we do for all of our vehicles,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Image Credits: Cris Moffitt

Keaks (Kirsten Korosec) has been working on a big(ish) story about JUMP for the last week. Stay tuned and/or holler at her if you have any tips.

Meanwhile, we noticed Superpedestrian, the startup that makes self-diagnosing electric scooters, has teamed up with Zagster. Superpedestrian quietly launched LINK, its shared electric scooter service in partnership with Zagster in Fort Pierce, Florida in late December.

As of at least February 2020, Zagster had an agreement with Superpedestrian’s LINK to manage the fleet of shared scooters in Kansas, according to city commission documents. In March, the city council in Manhattan, Kansas authorized the city to negotiate a permitting contract with Zagster to run a six-month electric scooter pilot in partnership with Superpedestrian’s LINK.

Over in Europe, long-distance ridesharing startup BlaBlaCar said it’s expanding to scooter sharing. The company doesn’t plan to operate its own fleet of scooters. Instead, BlaBlaCar is partnering with Voi, a European e-scooter service that has raised $136 million over multiple rounds. Voi scooters will feature three different brands — Voi, BlaBlaCar and BlaBla Ride.

— Megan Rose Dickey

Deal of the week

It’s not a deal yet — well, as far as we know, but I’d be remiss not to highlight it here. I’m talking, of course, about the WSJ report that Amazon is in advanced talks to acquire self-driving vehicle startup Zoox.

Zoox is unlike any other autonomous vehicle startup I’ve encountered in the past five or so years. The company has taken on several capitally intensive and ambitious roles — electric vehicle designer and manufacturer, full stack autonomous vehicle developer and robotaxi operator. Zoox co-founder Jesse Levinson will disagree with me here — we’ve had this discussion before — but the company is essentially doing this alone. Yes, it has relationships and support from suppliers; it has investors. But it doesn’t have a meaningful OEM partner and backer like its competitors Argo AI and Cruise . And it has no where near the piggy bank that Waymo holds.

It’s a bold and risky strategy. It’s also expensive.

It’s a poorly kept secret that Zoox has had to do some belt tightening over the past 12 months. The company cut costs last year and tried to renegotiate some supplier contracts, sources told me at the time. In October, it raised $200 million in new convertible note funding, which was supposed to be folded into a Series C round and close by the end of 2019 or early 2020. As far as we know, that never happened. Sources have told me Zoox was in talks with OEMs about sealing a deal with a manufacturing partner that might also include financial backing. Daimler and FCA were name dropped in different conversations at the time, but I was never able to verify that the deals were close.

Then COVID-19 hit. Zoox tightened its belt further and cut nearly all of its contract drivers.

There’s no doubt that Zoox needs money to survive. But an Amazon-Zoox deal, if it happens, is bittersweet.

Zoox is the plucky startup — the stand-at-the-cliff’s edge pioneer that you want to succeed. Going it alone carries existential risk, but it has also given it the freedom to stick to its vision.

If acquired, Zoox will get sucked up into the Amazon ether and one wonders what it will become.

Other deals that got our attention:

Bolt, the Estonia-based company that provides on-demand ridesharing, scooters and other transportation services across some 150 cities in Europe and Africa, raised €100 million ($109 million) in a convertible note. Bolt also confirmed that is now valued at €1.7 billion (or nearly $1.9 billion at today’s rates). The money is coming from a single investor, Naya Capital Management, which was also a major backer of the company in its last round, a $67 million Series C announced in July 2019.

Ola Electric, the EV business that spun out of the ride-hailing giant Ola in 2019, acquired  electric scooter startup Etergo. The Dutch startup built a scooter that uses a swappable, high energy battery that delivers a range of up to 240 km (149 miles). Ola Electric is aiming to produce and launch its own line of two wheelers as soon as this year.

Tesla’s board certified a financial milestone that unlocks the first tranche — worth more than $700 million — of an unprecedented multi-billion-dollar pay package for CEO Elon Musk, according a document filed Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The milestone allows Musk to purchase the first grouping or tranche of nearly 1.69 million shares at a steep discount. As far as we know (based on SEC filings) Musk has not exercised those options yet.

AV spotlight: Aurora

If you haven’t heard, there’s a battle over talent in the autonomous vehicle industry. One AV founder once described it to me as a “knife fight.”

It’s not just about hiring talent though. It’s about building the right culture to get the job done. In this case, it’s the not-so-small goal to develop and deploy autonomous vehicle technology at commercial scale.

Self-driving vehicle startup Aurora recently hit the 500-employee mark, an internal milestone capped by several new key hires, including Sagar Behere, as director of systems and safety engineering and Tara Green, who is leading human resources, recruiting and IT.

It wasn’t the 500-employee figure that I found interesting. It’s a new in-house program the company is calling Aurora Academy and Raul Rojas, a former professor of computer science and mathematics at the Free University of Berlin who was hired to lead it. The idea is to create a program where employees can build specific technical skills in the self-driving technology domain using its own experts. Rojas comes with deep background in robotics and autonomous vehicle technology. He met two of Aurora’s co-founders Chris Urmson and Drew Bagnell while participating in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. Rojas also co-founded in 2011 Autonomous GmbH, an autonomy startup acquired by TomTom in 2017.

Aurora has hired computer scientists, engineers, physicists, and mathematicians to help in the complex task of integrating different hardware and software modules into an AV system. And yet, Rojas noted there is still a need “to build bridges across the various disciplines so that we can propagate expertise across all levels of the company.” He said that’s where Aurora Academy comes in.

The program kicked off in mid-March with a six-week course entitled “Essential Skills for Poses, Transformations and Lie Groups.” (Light stuff, right?) These are the mathematical tools that give roboticists a uniform and powerful framework for localization and motion planning.

Other classes will cover software engineering, sensor development, mathematical foundations, visualization, planning, control and machine learning. The academy will also be open to non-technical employees who want to learn more diverse skills, including how to program in Python.

“The self-driving world is still a small community, so there’s a limited pool of candidates to begin with, and not many universities offer specialized programs on autonomous driving, so it’s unlikely you will find someone right out of school with all the skills needed,” Rojas said.

For instance, Aurora acquired last year Blackmore, one of the few companies developing Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) lidar, which emits a low-power and continuous wave.

“It’s unlikely someone could have studied it in school, so in June we’re starting a course to teach the physics of Doppler lidar, how to process the data at the fastest possible rate, and how to profit from the measurements in perception tasks,” Rojas noted.

Is your AV company doing something interesting — you know, beyond bringing autonomous vehicles into the mainstream? Hit me up and tell me about it.

Dispatches from Africa

On demand mobility powered by electric and solar is coming to Africa.

Vaya Africa, a ride-hail mobility venture founded by Zimbabwean mogul Strive Masiyiwa, launched an electric taxi service and charging network in Zimbabwe this week with plans to expand across the continent.

The South Africa-headquartered company is using Nissan Leaf EVs and has developed its own solar-powered charging stations. Vaya is finalizing partnerships to take its electric taxi services on the road to countries that could include Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia, Vaya Mobility CEO Dorothy Zimuto told TechCrunch.

The initiative comes as Africa’s on-demand mobility market has been in full swing for several years, with startups, investors and the larger ride-hail players aiming to bring movement of people and goods to digital platforms.

Uber and Bolt have been operating in Africa’s major economies since 2015, where there are also a number of local app-based taxi startups. Over the last year, there’s been some movement on the continent toward developing EVs for ride-hail and delivery use, primarily around motorcycles.

Beyond environmental benefits, Vaya highlights economic gains for passengers and drivers of shifting to electric in Africa’s taxi markets, where fuel costs compared to personal income is generally high for drivers.

Using solar panels to power the charging station network also helps Vaya’s new EV program overcome some of challenges in Africa’s electricity grid.

Vaya is exploring EV options for other on-demand transit applications — from min-buses to Tuk Tuk taxis.

— Jake Bright

Layoffs, business disruptions and people

Let’s kick this section off this week by highlighting a new company hoping to disrupt van life.

Cabana is a new startup launched by a former Lime executive that’s bringing tricked-out vans with all the amenities of a Holiday Inn hotel room to cities on the West Coast, starting in Seattle. As TechCrunch reporter Jonathan Shieber noted, companies like Tentrr,  HipCamp and even Airbnb have gotten in on the vanlife movement, and Cabana’s founder definitely thinks he can ride the wave.

Cabana has already raised $3.5 million from investors, led by Craft Ventures — the investment firm founded by David Sacks. Other investors include Goldcrest Capital, Travis VanderZanden (the chief executive and founder of Bird), and Sunny Madra, vice president of Ford X at Ford Motor Company.

Hiring news

Rivian appears to be planning to offer its own insurance to customers based on a new job posting for an insurance agency data manager first spotted by RivianForums, which passed along the tip.

The job is to lead Rivian’s property and casualty (P&C) insurance agency, a position that entails recruiting, training, coaching and managing employed licensed sales agents and an insurance customer care team, according to the posting on Rivian’s website. The employee will also sell insurance products and provide feedback to partners on opportunities, the posting said. It’s an unusual move, but not unprecedented. Last August, Tesla launched an insurance product.

Cruise has a new board member who comes with deep experience in tech and hardware. Regina Dugan has a lengthy resume that includes former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the current CEO of Wellcome Leap, a non-profit founded by Wellcome Trust to accelerate innovations that benefit global health. In between DARPA and Wellcome Leap, Dugan was head of Google’s Advanced Technology And Products (ATAP) Group and led Building 8, Facebook’s hardware skunkworks.

“In health care and in transportation, I believe in the power of science and technology to change our world. With this power comes the responsibility to deliver life-saving advances at scale — Cruise has the tech, the team, and the tenacity to get it done. I’m stoked to join,” Dugan said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Sweden-headquartered Voi Technology recruited Richard Corbett to head up its U.K., Ireland and Benelux operations. Corbett joins from rival Bird, where he spent two years as the U.S. company’s U.K. and Ireland chief, as well as helping to launch e-scooter rentals in Netherlands.

Layoffs and other departures

AirMap, an airspace services platform for unmanned aircraft, cut its staff. Layoffs.fyi reported that around 30% of the team was let go.

Aston Martin announced  CEO Andy Palmer was leaving his post. His replacement is Tobias Moers, the current head of Mercedes-Benz’s AMG division, Car and Driver reported.

Welp … Audi fired Daniel Abt from its Formula E racing team after learning he had a professional sim driver race for him during a virtual competition called the “Race at Home Challenge” held last weekend. It appeared Abt was going to merely be suspended. Abt said in a video message published Tuesday on YouTube that Audi had dropped him from the team.

German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen plans to cut up to 15,000 jobs, or around 10% of its work force, by 2025 as a result of a slump in demand, according to a company memo that Automotive News reported. ZF said in an email to employees that half of the 12,000-15,000 job cuts would be in Germany.

Uber is cutting 600 jobs in India, or 25% of its workforce in the country. The job cuts, which affect teams across customer and driver support, business development, legal, policy, marketing, and finance, are part of the company’s global restructuring that eliminated 6,700 jobs this month.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Here are a few other items that caught my eye …

Deloitte Insights tackled a topic that many of us might be mulling as well. They looked at what mobility might look like after COVID-19. The report specifically explores four possible futures over the next three to five years. You can check out the full report here, which provides a high-level description of society, economy and geopolitics and then narrows in on transportation.

In one rosier scenario, dubbed “a passing storm,” the COVID-19 pandemic shakes society but, after a slow start, is met with an increasingly effective health system and political response, according to Deloitte. The pandemic causes long-term economic impact: e-commerce and last-mile delivery networks proliferate and are increasingly supported by autonomous vehicles and digitization of the logistics value chain. Vehicle sanitation becomes a priority, which leads to new self-cleaning materials, certification programs and form factors such as passenger partitions. The in-transit experience benefits from advances in digital entertainment and productivity prompted by the pandemic, including, potentially, AR and VR applications.

AV stuff …

I recommend reserving an hour or two to play around with this Global Autonomous Vehicles Index created by the autonomous vehicles group at law firm Dentons. It’s free and lets users compare the nuances of AV testing and deployment regulations across 18 countries and all 50 U.S. states. For instance, regulations in Canada don’t require a human driver in a vehicle when testing AVs. In China, rules require each organization to buy the compulsory liability insurance for traffic accidents for each vehicle. Yet in Germany, there are no special requirements for AVs which go beyond the motor vehicle liability insurance.

Baidu completed Apollo Park, an autonomous driving and vehicle-infrastructure testing base that houses more than 200 autonomous vehicles and is located in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area. The facility is used for vehicle storage, cloud control on remotely sensed big data, operational command, maintenance and calibration, as well as research and development.

Baidu has completed Apollo Park, an autonomous vehicle testing and development center. Photo: Baidu

Waymo will bring its autonomous vehicles back to public roads in the Bay Area starting June 8, The Verge reported. The plan, according to an email viewed by The Verge, is to use the self-driving vehicles to deliver packages for two Bay Area non-profits: illustrator Wendy McNaughton’s #DrawTogether, which provides art kits to Bay Area kids; and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Autonomous robotics startup Nuro will test prescription delivery in Houston through a partnership with CVS Pharmacy. The pilot, which will use a fleet of the startup’s autonomous Toyota Prius vehicles and transition to using its custom-built R2 delivery bots, is slated to begin in June.

It’s electric …

Mercedes-Benz is now selling its EQV 300 all-electric premium van in Europe, the second EV to come out of the automaker’s initiative to produce a line of battery-powered models under its new EQ brand.

Rivian has resumed work at its factory in Normal, Ill. following a temporary shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Investor and customer Amazon provided an update this week stating that Rivian is still on track to supply it with electric delivery vans. Vans will begin delivering to customers in 2021, as previously planned. About 10,000 electric vehicles will be on the road as early as 2022 and all 100,000 vehicles will be on the road by 2030.

Audi created a new business unit called Artemis to bring electric vehicles equipped with highly automated driving systems and other tech to market faster.

Tesla slashed prices across its electric vehicle portfolio as the automaker aims to boost sales in an economy beaten down by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Model S and Model X saw base prices cut by $5,000, while the Model 3 standard range plus saw a $2,000 drop.

Ride-hailing and miscellaneous bits …

Uber is launching a book-by-the-hour feature in the U.S., starting Monday. The feature lets users book rides for $50 an hour and make multiple stops. The hourly booking feature, which is already available in a handful of international cities in Australia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East, will initially launch in a dozen U.S. cities.

Core Investments, a Boston-based real estate development company,  has proposed a last-mile delivery station for Amazon, Boston Business Journal reported.

Review: Lotus Evora GT

I delayed my first road trippin’ review to make room for Matt Burns’ take on his recent weekend with the $100,000 2020 Lotus Evora GT.

As Burns’ explains:

The Lotus Evora GT is supersized go-kart with nary an advanced technical feature. And I love it. While most cars are coming equipped with supercomputers, the lack of technical wizardry makes the 2020 Evora GT interesting, and that’s why it’s on TechCrunch.

Join Burns on his ride.

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[gethealthy18-blog]

Gunjan Saxena – The Untold Story Of The First Ever Indian Woman To Fly Into A Combat Zone

New Post has been published on http://healingawerness.com/getting-healthy/getting-healthy-women/gunjan-saxena-the-untold-story-of-the-first-ever-indian-woman-to-fly-into-a-combat-zone/

Gunjan Saxena – The Untold Story Of The First Ever Indian Woman To Fly Into A Combat Zone

Gunjan Saxena – The Untold Story Of The First Ever Indian Woman To Fly Into A Combat Zone Surya Sathya Narayanan Hyderabd040-395603080 October 15, 2019

The big war of India — the Kargil. The victory in it showed the world that India cannot be messed with. As we eliminated infiltration from Pakistan, we realized the power and valor of our defence wing. 1999 seems so long back, yet like it was just yesterday.

Of all the operations that we went with, Operations Vijay and Safed Sagar were among those that contributed to the success of the conflict in entirety. In these conflicts, the IAF played a critical role in giving India a strategic advantage. In the process, IAF increased its employee count and got a crash course for pilots and engineers to spot the enemies and eliminate them.

Around this time Gunjan Saxena, who was pursuing her graduation came across the opportunity to be part of the first batch of women pilots in the IAF. Coming from a family that had a history in the defence, Gunjan was not unfamiliar with the challenges of being in a defence wing. So, it made her more excited than anything else. There was only one small catch in the whole thing. That was the time when the defence forces were filled to the brim with male officers and women were not allowed to fly as yet. This would mean that the expectation on her as the first batch was a lot higher.

The challenge strengthened Gunjan’s resolve to grab the opportunity. Although not allowed to fly jets, being the first batch of lady pilots was a massive mark in Indian history. Beyond anything, there was a lot of skepticism about how women would cope with the increasing stress involved in combat and flying. Around when the young women were awaiting a chance to show the world their worth, the Kargil War was in progress.

Indiatimes

Owing to the massive scale of the war, IAF resources had taken a massive hit and every pilot available had to be put on the force to keep up with the combat and flying requirements. Taking all the men into combat flying, women took to the cockpit for duties such as dropping supplies, medical attention and evacuation, and reconnaissance. By now, Gunjan could barely contain her excitement and waited to be called into duty.

When the time came, she joined hands with another courageous pilot, and together these both were asked to handle duties in combat zones. Over the course of her tenure, Gunjan flew her chopper to drop supplies to the Indian troops, and also pick up wounded soldiers and dead bodies from treacherous terrains. Not only did she perform her duty to the best of her abilities, but she also provided her seniors with the position of the enemies. This helped better the war strategies that would later prove instrumental in a magnanimous victory for India.

Besides having to fly in hostile conditions, Gunjan had to stay mentally and physically prepared for any other possible forms of attack. In addition, she constantly carries a fully loaded assault rifle and a revolver in case she would need to fight her way out after a crash landing. In her Cheetah helicopter, she took on some of the most unpredictable territories. In one such situation, a rocket was fired at her helicopter when she was preparing to take off from the Kargil airstrip. While the rocket missed the Cheetah, it crashed into a hill in a massive explosion. Despite this, Gunjan continued to operate her chopper to the best of her abilities. With her life on danger round the clock, Gunjan refused to back down.

Indiatimes

As a helicopter pilot, Gunjan believes that the most satisfying feeling is that of casualty evacuation since there is a life you save. Despite the amount of efforts she put in, her career at the IAF ended soon after the Kargil war. This was predominantly because of the lack of permanent commissioning back then.

In the midst of all the massive Kargil war, the IAF managed to create history. The legacy is called Gunjan Saxena. Being the first-ever woman to fly into a combat zone, she was awarded Shaurya Chakra — defence gallantry for acts of courage and valor while not engaging in direct combat.

While Gunjan may not have had the chance to fly jet aircraft, she set the benchmark a little higher for women who aspired to get into the defence. Going against the odds and looking death in eye every day is not something we could do every day. But, Gunjan did. And she set the example for several other women.

In a world that is dominated by men and pseudo-feminists, Gunjan is the living testament to gender equality. She took it upon herself to give the best to her country, countrymen, commanders, and compatriots. And, that is the true meaning of a human and a warrior.

So, what is your excuse for not fulfilling your ambition and aspiration? Gender? Well, think again. The benchmark was set 20 years ago. The benchmark is called Gunjan Saxena.

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[bharatiyamedia-blog]

Narendra Modi in Maldives: PM slams Pakistan throughout tackle to parliament, says 'some nonetheless consider in good terrorists, dangerous terrorists'

http://tinyurl.com/yxj4tgt8 Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on his first overseas go to after reelection as prime minister, slammed Pakistan whereas addressing the Maldivian Parliament. Modi, talking on the Individuals’s Majlis, stated, “Terrorism is without doubt one of the greatest threats going through the world at present. This hazard just isn’t towards one nation or area, however towards humanity itself. Not a day passes when terrorism doesn’t take the lifetime of an harmless. Terrorists haven’t got banks and weapons factories of their very own. Regardless of that, they have no lack of cash or weapons. The place do the terrorists get these weapons? State-sponsored terrorism is the explanation behind this,” he stated. “Individuals nonetheless attempt to create notions of ‘good terrorist, dangerous terrorist’,” he added. “The water goes above the pinnacle now.” “The world united to behave towards local weather change. Why cannot we take the same choice towards terrorism?” he stated. “I attraction to all nations to organise a world convention towards terrorism in order that we will determine a approach to put an finish to the means obtainable to terrorists. If we do not act now, the generations to return will not forgive us,” he added. Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the Maldivian Parliament. ANI Stressing on the ties between India and Maldives, Modi additional stated, “Maldives is a gem in not solely the Indian Ocean, but additionally on this planet. This lovely place has attracted individuals via the ages.” “This Majlis is not only a constructing fabricated from stones and cement. This can be a platform the place the hopes and aspirations of the individuals echo. Maldives has proven that the citizen is at all times the winner in a democracy.” “Not too long ago, India additionally completed the world’s greatest democratic train,” he stated. “For 130 crore Indians, this was a mega-festival of democracy. ‘Sabka saath, sabka vikas aur sabka vishwas’ is the premise for not solely our authorities’s inner but additionally exterior insurance policies. Neighbourhood first is a prime precedence for our authorities,” he added. “India and Madlives’ hyperlinks are older than historical past itself. The waves between India and Maldives inform a narrative of the friendship between our individuals. India’s efforts have at all times been to assist Maldives in occasions of want. India is happy with Maldives’ development,” stated the prime minister. “India and Maldives signed a $1.four billion commerce deal when (Maldives) President Solih got here to India. Dozens of social affect tasks began by India have affected the lives of a number of individuals in Maldives,” Modi stated. The prime minister additionally stated that inequality as a result of know-how and local weather change have been different challenges going through the world at present. “We want to pay attention to the challenges of the world at present. Variations between individuals due to know-how are a few of the issues going through the world at present. We live the fact of local weather change each day. Our farmers are getting affected due to drying rivers,” he stated. “I had earlier outlined the SAGAR imaginative and prescient for the Indo-Pacific area. Safety And Progress for All within the Area is the blueprint for improvement on this area,” he added. Modi and Maldivian president Ibrahim Mohamed Solih held wide-ranging talks on Saturday as the 2 nations signed six agreements to strengthen bilateral cooperation in key areas like defence and maritime safety. Modi arrived within the Indian Ocean archipelago on Saturday on his first overseas go to after reelection as prime minister to strengthen the bilateral ties, reflecting the significance India attaches to its ‘Neighbourhood First’ coverage. The primary Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was for cooperation within the fields of hydrography. One other was on well being. The opposite agreements have been on the institution of passenger and cargo providers by sea, cooperation in customs capability constructing between the Central Board of Oblique Taxes and Customs of India and the Maldives Customs Service. An MoU was additionally signed between the Nationwide Centre for Good Governance, Division of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances and Maldives Civil Service Fee on Coaching and Capability Constructing Programme for Maldivian civil servants. A technical settlement on sharing white delivery data between the Indian Navy and the Maldives Nationwide Defence Power was additionally signed. With inputs from PTI Your information to the most recent cricket World Cup tales, evaluation, stories, opinions, stay updates and scores on https://www.firstpost.com/firstcricket/series/icc-cricket-world-cup-2019.html. Comply with us on Twitter and Instagram or like our Facebook web page for updates all through the continued occasion in England and Wales. !function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s) {if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function() {n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)} ; if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version='2.0'; n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0; t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,'script', 'https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js'); fbq('init', '259288058299626'); fbq('track', 'PageView'); (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_GB/all.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.9&appId=1117108234997285"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); window.fbAsyncInit = function () { FB.init({appId: '1117108234997285', version: 2.4, xfbml: true}); // *** here is my code *** if (typeof facebookInit == 'function') { facebookInit(); } }; (function () { var e = document.createElement('script'); e.src = document.location.protocol + '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js'; e.async = true; document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e); }()); function facebookInit() { console.log('Found FB: Loading comments.'); FB.XFBML.parse(); } Source link

[shankarjaikishanfansassnintl]

Raj Kapoor’s ‘ Barsaat’ remains a watershed movie in the Hindi cinema.

The title literally means ‘rain’ but Raj Kapoor’s interpretation was different. The film’s theme was the flow of human desire that resembled the constant fall of rain, drenching the earth that symbolized the man and woman. Raj played the Pran, who loves Reshma (Nargis), and his love is reciprocated. Reshma, a poor girl, defiles her father who opposes their romance. On the way to meet her lover, she drowns on the way-or so it is thought. Pran’s friend Gopal (Premnath) has a more casual approach to love and he jilts the village girl Neela (Nimmi) who kills herself. Gopal is repentant. A short while later, Pran and Gopal are driving through the countryside when they stumble upon Reshma, who is married off to a fisherman (K N Singh). Pran deliberately crashes his car, and love triumphs at the eleventh hour. The thundering success of this love story put the R K Films on the road to glory as Bollywood’s premium production company of all time. After the lukewarm reception to the maiden venture ‘ Aag’, Raj Kapoor became a commercial-cum-artistic force to reckon with as a filmmaker with this film. his leitmotif- the depiction of love as mere passion with just the right mix of physicality and the sublime spirituality – was first seen in this film, to evolve as the stamp of a titanic film maker all the way to his 1985 swan song, ‘ Ram Teri Ganga Maili.’ Barsaat signaled the coming together of the greatest team ever in Hindi films- Raj Kapoor, Mukesh, Shanker, Jaikishen, Hashrat Jaipuri and Shailendra. After ‘ Aag’, Raj Kapoor had already signed music director Ram Ganguly again but due to some problems with Kapoor, Ganguly’s two assistants, with whom he had already formed a distinct tuning, the tabla player Shanker and harmonium man Jaikishen were signed as composers. Raj’s father Prithviraj Kapoor had introduced him to a bus conductor whose simple shaayari at a mushaira had impressed him- Hasrat Jaipuri. A little later, an Indian Railway employee who wrote poetry and needed the money- Shailendra –came in. The result was some of the most fantastic music that Hindi film sangeet buff have ever heard-including nuggets like Lata’s ‘ jiya beqaraar his’, ‘ Hawa mein udtaa jaye’, ‘ O mujhe kisse pyar ho gaya’, ‘ Ab mera kaun sahara’, ‘ Barsaat mein humse milen tum sajan’, ‘ and the Lata- Mukesh duet, ‘ Chhod gaye balam’ and ‘ Tirchi nazar hai’, besides the plaintive Rafi gem ‘ Main zindagi mein hardam rota hi raha hoon.’ 1949 was the breakthrough year for Lata Mangeshkar and ‘ Barsaat’ led her parade of hits that year to make her emerge forever as Hindi cinema’s supreme female singer. Above all, with ‘ Barsaat’, debutantes Shanker Jaikishen ushered in a revolution in film music. The fresh, vibrant score was devoid of those monotonous thekas and droning cadences that characterized Hindi film music till then. It heralded the onslaught of cerebral orchestration or arrangements, as they are known today in Hindi film music. As a debut score, it was also compositionally fabulous- and the records sold phenomenally. It was this music that opened up a new avenue of commerce for Hindi cinema- of a musical score that made big money independently of the film. Though ‘ Barsaat’ the film, was a rage on its own, its music got it both the initial value and its repeat audience. Legend has it that when Naushad was fishing for compliments from his producer- the late Mehboob Khan- for the success of songs of their collaboration ‘Andaaz’ (released in the same year), Khan looked at the rain outside and quipped, ‘ Lekin aapke gaano ko to ‘Barsaat’ ne dho dala’! (Your songs have been washed away by ‘Barsaat!’) With ‘ Aag’ and ‘ Andaaz’ as predecessors, Raj and Nargis had already established an on-screen chemistry that made the distributors ecstatic. But ‘ Barsaat’ clinched the team that was to do 15 more films and emerge as the icons of screen romance in Hindi cinema. The film also marked the debut of cinematographer Jal Mistry and the entry of actress Nimmi and writer Ramanand Sagar into the R K fold. The film has one more significance for R K Films- the famous RK emblem of a man holding a woman by her waist in a near ballet pose was derived from a still of Raj and Nargis from this film. Launched on the day of Dassera in 1948 within weeks of release of ‘ Aag’, ‘ Barsaat’ was completed in nine months-with shoots in places like Kashmir and Mahabaleshwar-and premiered on 30th September 1949. (Courtesy: Stardust Classics) https://shanker-jaikishen.blogspot.com/2008/10/raj-kapoors-barsaat-remains-watershed.html -- k k raiat October 17, 2008 Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

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Top 7 Underwater Sites That Have Surprisingly Re-Emerged

Nature works in mysterious ways, most of which even transcend human comprehension. It wipes away and builds again. It drowns and resurrects. There is an order in its chaos and a chaos in its order which simply astounds adventure enthusiasts like myself.

Frankly speaking, I travel all over the world on a regular basis but still, I haven’t been able to cover some of the most unique historical sites.

Do you know why? Because they’ve been swallowed up by nature itself.

Fortunately, a few of these archaeological wonders are resurfacing. This gives an opportunity to the wanderers to come and explore them.

So, if you’re anything like me, you’d be applying for a vacation at your workplace, packing your bags, booking your flights, and making your way to see the destinations below:

Pueblo de Potosi

Via noticiaaldia.com

The resurfacing of this archaeological site gives us an important lesson — nature always has her way, regardless of what a man plans. When the Venezuelan government purposely drowned the local town of Potosi in 1985, they’d expected it to stay underwater so their hydroelectric dam plan could be safely executed. That worked for thirty years.

However, the El Nino phenomenon happened. It warmed the surface of the water, initiated a drought, and caused the entire city to re-emerge. Most famous is the town’s church ruins which are incredibly gothic to look at.

Turtle Island

Via dailymail.co.uk

Chinese believe that turtles signify longevity. That’s why thousands of these tourists, in addition to the locals, rush over to the Georges Reservoir on Muodaoxi River to see the sacred island in action.

What happens is that every spring, the reservoir supplies the water to the surrounding area. That causes the water level to drop to about 168 meters. As the water recedes, a beautiful island emerges from the center of the river and interestingly, it’s in the shape of a turtle! Can you believe that?

Grüner See

Via orangesmile.com

Imagine a crystal clear lake which turns into a green meadow at the end of every year. Sounds like the best of both worlds, right?

This is the phenomenon which unfolds at the Grüner See, Styria. Each spring, the mountains surrounding the lake shed their snowy caps. The glacier water trickles down and falls into the lake, increasing its depth to around forty feet.

This happens from mid-May to June. After this, however, the water level starts receding as the winter approaches, revealing a breathtaking natural park below the lake. You can have the time of your life at this underwater paradise. Trust me on that.

Villa Epecuen

Via theatlantic.com

Notoriously named ‘Argentina’s ghost town’, this tourist village was constructed on the shoreline of a famous salt lake, a few miles southwest from the city of Buenos Aires.

Populated by five thousand people back then, the village started experiencing a whimsical weather, signified by over-raining. This resulted in the flooding of the lake, which broke the dam and swept away the entire Villa Epecuen.

It’s been submerged since 1993, but only lately has the hyper-localized weather settled enough for the village to emerge. Do visit the haunting site and let me know what you find.

Jal Mahal

Built almost 300 years ago in the heart of the Man Sagar Lake, Jaipur city, India, this ‘water palace’ has a remarkable beauty of its own. The architecture of the Mahal is Rajput-themed, the medium is set in red sandstone, and the stories are a total of five in number, out of which, four are submerged in the lake water.

Only recently has the government of Rajasthan initiated a reconstructive project on the palace, aiming to return it to its former glory. But as of now, it is opened for tourists to explore via boating. Do get a chance to explore this one.

Xuanping Village

Via dailymail.co.uk

Quick question: What’s one of the worst natural disasters?

An earthquake. Yes.

This calamity, caused by the shifting tectonic plates beneath the Earth’s surface, is known to cause a widespread upheaval. Sometimes, it even triggers another disaster. This is precisely what happened in the village of Xuanping, China.

Back in 2008, an 8.0 magnitude earthquake hit the province, causing the barrier lake beside the area to burst open. This resulted in an instant flooding. However, with a miraculous drop in the water level years later, the village has recently started reappearing. By the looks of it, is a total ghost town with a half-submerged primary school and office buildings. Definitely deserving an aerial view.

Temple of Santiago

Via darkroom.baltimoresun.com

Historically speaking, the monks and friars of the colonial times built this Mexican monastery back in the sixteenth century. It stood its ground until 1966 when the Nezahualcoyotl Reservoir was built, submerging the temple completely in water. Only lately has this site started re-emerging due to the droughts, which occurred in Mexico in the last ten years. Eerie, yes?

Thus, nature never fails to surprise us.

We should be quick to take advantage of its wonders whenever it decides to unveil them. In the same way, these resurfacing sites do warrant a visit. Don’t you think so?

The post Top 7 Underwater Sites That Have Surprisingly Re-Emerged appeared first on Dumb Little Man.

from Dumb Little Man https://www.dumblittleman.com/archaeological-wonders/

[101percentindia]

Girl Trafficking In Hindi Cinema

My first brush with the law.

As a freelance journalist, my first and last brush with the law happened around an online article on trafficking. I had written about a wonderful documentary on women. One of the persons mentioned in the film and in my review, filed a defamation charge against the director of the film, the editors of the online magazine and against me for writing. The said person is shown approaching a police station, pretending to be a lawyer, to purportedly ‘rescue’ small girls and give them back to their ‘mothers.’ I later learnt that part of his earnings came from filiing false suits against any Tom, Dick and Harry he felt had defamed him in some way. Instead of putting me off, this incident challenged me to probe deeper into this thriving trade in human trafficking and also to find out how Hindi cinema has dealt with this serious issue.

I went deep into the economics and sociology of trafficking and the details were mind-boggling. Newspapers and magazines are rife with factual stories and case histories of real-life incidents. The human trafficking industry has a reported annual income of $8 billion, and the UN estimates that it may employ as many as 40 million women. Although human trafficking is illegal in almost every country, thousands of girls each year become sex slaves. Even when rescued by social workers, voluntary agencies and sometimes the local police, many of them go back to where they came from, mostly prostitution.

My experience of having watched umpteen films on trafficking, specifically four recent ones, shows that Indian filmmakers’ insight on the subject has evolved over the years. They have moved away from Gulzar’s Mausam, through Sagar Sarhadi’s Bazaar and T.S. Ranga Rao’s hard-hitting Giddh. They are bolder, forthright and not really bothered about what the CBFC has to say.

Related: Busting Child Prostitution In Varanasi | 101 Underground

The ugly world of bride trafficking. Image source: hindustantimes.com

Paro (2017) This short but poignant film draws attention to the illegal business of bride trafficking which goes on unabated, as there are no complaints or if there are, the police look the other way. Vijay Kumar, says he made the film based on a real-life experience, “No one calls the bride by her name because she leads an anonymous life within the family, tending to her bed-ridden husband who is unhappy about the entire situation, but helpless as his mother holds family decisions in her control. The custom of selling the girl as a bride is called Paro Pratha. What shocks is the fact that she accepts her life as a predestined reality and does not know that another kind of life exists beyond this market. She is just a commodity to be bought and sold again and again. All of them have the same name, Paro.” The film is made in Haryanvi because the story, based on true events, happens in a village near Rohtak where Vijay Kumar grew up. If a man buys a paro for Rs.50,000, he will sooner or later, try and sell her off for Rs.60,000, which brings human beings down to the economic laws of supply and demand.

Bollywood and its use of social causes. Image source: hindinews18.com

Mardaani (2014) I went with a friend to watch Mardaani not knowing what it was about but because I am a fan of Rani Mukherjee. Though the movie turned out to be a very unexpected experience. Rani as Shivani is a committed officer of the police force with a supportive husband who backs her despite odds. It’s the story of a powerful ego struggle between the police officer and the kingpin of the trafficking trade. Shivani is taken off the case but she continues to pursue it with the help of a couple of juniors.

I personally had a problem with the title of the film - Mardaani. It’s a well-known acronym for Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi and was bestowed on her because of her manly qualities. But why must a police officer be termed “mardaani”? Is she not equally trained in taking on offenders as much as her male colleagues?

Another issue for me was the climax which shows Shivani pushing the girls to punish the young ring-leader by bashing him up so badly that he lands in a wheelchair. Can, and should, a high-ranking responsible police officer allow the victims to take the law in their own hands?

I felt the director was taking his audience on a jolly ride into girl-trafficking though the motives were distanced from this social issue. They were focussed on showcasing the versatility of Rani Mukherjee as a protagonist who can carry a film without the support of a hero, pure commerce to rake in the money and enlisting itself at film festivals through the subject of trafficking.

Related: The Madam Of A Brothel Told Me, “All That Matters In Life Is Big Boobs And Long Hair.”

13-year olds forced into prostitution. Image source: thecommunityjournal.com

Lakshmi (2014) I had similar problems with the title of this film. It’s ironical because in every second Indian middle-class home, the girl is named Lakshmi, perhaps in the hope that she will augur good fortune for the family. The film is hard-hitting but after a point, it becomes too in-your-face. The process of initiating the 13-year-old girl into prostitution is graphically detailed. The brothel madam teaches her to apply some ointment before servicing her clients to ease the pain. Lakshmi is also given hormone injections to flesh out her body before time, and is repeatedly raped by the pimp Chinna (Kukunoor) because she tries to escape. I personally found the repeated violence on Lakshmi and the other girls visually repulsive and voyeuristic and felt they could have been avoided. Add to this the terribly melodramatic climax that takes away the soul of the film.

At a special screening of Lakshmi for sex workers in a red-light area in Mumbai, Kukunoor was accosted by a group of extremely overwrought sex workers who wanted to know who played the nasty pimp in the film. “Agar woh mil jaye to hum ussey aisa sabak sikhaayenge ki naani yaad aa jayegi” (If we find him, we will teach him a lesson he’ll remember). When they learned that the director himself had played the pimp, the women attacked him till he had to be whisked away. He may have begun with the right intention but did not quite expect this negative reaction.

Love Sonia - a breath of fresh air. Image source: indiawest.com

Love Sonia (2018) The latest in this line is Love Sonia, directed by US based Tabrez Noorani. It’s about a 17-year-old village girl Sonia, who is very closely bonded to her younger sister Preeti. Their world is shaken when Preeti goes missing, actually having been sold by her poverty-stricken father to flesh traders. Sonia goes looking for her and lands up in the same situation. This journey exposes the violent underpinnings of trafficking in human flesh, mainly of very young girls. It travels through the international den of trafficking and sex trade to Hong Kong and Los Angeles.

My personal grouse is with different aspects of the film - the camera focussing on the pained face of the sad father (Adil Hussain) because I feel it rings false. No father can be forgiven for selling his daughter. Scenes are very graphic and violent and many among the audience may not be able to take it. The good thing about the film is the lack of stars, except Richa Chada and Frieda Pinto (if we can call them stars). It is mainly a female dominated film with a peppering of Manoj Bajpayee who does a menacing act well.

Related: A Brothel That Is James Bond’s Namesake, A Bomb Site And Some Dance-Bar Hopping

The question is – are such films genuine attempts to draw attention to trafficking? Or are they trying to piggyback on trafficking to gain easy access to film festivals and awards? The subject lends itself to the voyeuristic instincts of a sex-hungry audience and this can function as a temptation for a new, or a struggling filmmaker to shift focus from social responsibility to titillation and sensation, which will make a producer happy. These films offer scope for a lot of skin show, vulgar dialogues, sensual body language and doses of sex and violence. They are full Bollywood masala - vulnerable girls, shady agents, sex workers, brothel madam, pimp, muscle man, NGO worker and last but not the least, the client.

In the final analysis I feel, though we have moved away from the likes of Mausam and Bazaar, we still have a long way to go. But these recent films prove that cinema is not only for entertainment but also for information, awareness and social change.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are independent views solely of the author(s) expressed in their private capacity and do not in any way represent or reflect the views of 101India.com

By Shoma A. Chatterji Cover photo credit: washingtonpost.com

[ezlifeindia-blog]

Your Travel Guidance To Places In India For A Monsoon Vacation

Monsoon is the best season of the year. India is a country that heavily depends on its agriculture for the economy. Monsoons in India are quite long, four months is a long time. The monsoon winds first hit the west coast of the country, usually around 31st May. By the second week of June, the entire western coast is hit by the monsoon. This results in heavy rainfall. In India, seasons do not change gradually, it happens in an instance. So, when the land experiences its first shower, the weather cools down forming a pleasant atmosphere.

Apart from the pleasant atmosphere and relaxing weather, the other reason for vacations during the monsoon is that there are no declared holidays in the month of July. In fact, there is only one holiday in June i.e. Eid al-Fitr, celebrating the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Not necessarily, Eid al-Fitr occurs in June, it depends on the lunar calendar.

In this article we have a short list of places that are apt for monsoon holidays. Some places are fit for a weekend getaway and some need a mini-vacation. None of the places in this list require more than 4 days.

1. Munnar, Kerala

This place is also known as Kashmir of the South. A beautiful hill station in the Western Ghats that has a view which can kill your soul in a look or give you a lifelong thrill. Lush green mountains and gorgeous tea plantations. The altitude of this picturesque destination is 1532 m above the sea level. A destination that gives the tourists a glimpse of the heaven. Cloud covered hills, exotic tea plantations, tea cafes throughout the city and a shopping market i.e. no less than an authentic bazaar.

 ·  How to reach: Being a hill station, so above the sea level, there is no direct connectivity via railways or air.

 By Air: The nearest airport is Kochi. Kochi International Airport is 110 km from Munnar.

 By Rail: The nearest railway stations are located at an equal distance of 140 km from the exotic hill station. The railway stations are Ernakulam & Aluva.

 By Road: A prepaid taxi or taxi on-hire can be used to reach Munnar from the railway station or airport.

 ·  Places to visit: Munnar is known for its extraordinary landscapes and weather. The town is well maintained, neat and clean. There are a few hiccups in the town, which city doesn’t have, but there are many places in the town and nearby locations that can take your breath away. The places to see are:

 o   Tea Plantations: Munnar is famous for its tea plantations and the fresh production of tea. The tea leaves are green coloured with a shining dew on the edge that makes it a scenario hard to forget. This picture doesn’t require a real camera, just the beauty of human eye and the memory are enough to capture it.

 o   The Green Carpet: The green carpet is nothing else but the view of tea plantations from a distance. The hill looks like it is covered with a green carpet. A place of interest for all the tourists, those who visit during the blooming season.

 o   Rose Garden: The Rose Garden in Munnar is an extensive preserved nature that is shaped by man. A dedicated garden for all types and colours of roses. The sweet aroma in the air with some naughty pollens gives a euphoria required on a vacation in the monsoons.

o   Lockhart Tea Plantation & Museum: One of the biggest and most amazing tea plantations in Munnar. Hugh variety of tea is produced every year. Lush green tea gardens that attracts the evil and gives peace. Lockhart Tea Museum is one of the most iconic place to visit in the town. A museum dedicated to all kinds of tea produced by Lockhart Tea Plantations and around the world. Some of the most exotic and enigmatic teas can be found here.

 o   Munnar Tea Museum: Very similar to Lockhart tea museum, but this museum has tea from all over Munnar. Finest collection of rare tea can be found in this museum. The tea museum has a cafeteria serving one of the finest tea in the country. From local tea to international teas, every type of tea can be found here.

 ·  Things to do: The place is perfect for all the tourists. Couples can find peace and romantic atmosphere around them. Individuals can relax, refresh and rejuvenate in the heart of nature. This place is apt for backpackers, giving them all the necessities like nature, hills, a small town, market place and exquisite local food. Families can enjoy leisure and sight-seeing.

 ·  Best time of the year to visit: June and July are the best months of the year to visit Munnar. It is technically considered as off-season. Due to fewer tourists and chilly yet humid atmosphere makes it the best time to visit.

 ·  Ideal for: Couples, Backpackers and Families.

 2.  Cherrapunjee, Meghalaya: Cherrapunjee is a town in the Indian state of Meghalaya. This town is the wettest place on the planet, experiencing above 150 inches of rainfall every year. Cherrapunjee is a delight for those who love to spend their time in the warm of nature. Continuous rainfall, peaceful environment and no worries of the world. Cherrapunjee is a perfect place for a getaway.

 ·  How to reach: It is difficult for the government to construct transport facilities in the wettest place. So, there is no direct connection form of transportation.

 o  By Air: The nearest airport is Umroi Airport (91 km) which has flights only from Kolkata, making it expensive and the frequency is less. Guwahati airport is 181 km far. Taxi can be hired from the Paltan Bazaar.

 o   By Rail: The nearest railway station is Guwahati – 181 km.

 o   By Road: Bus from Sohra Bus Stand in Bara Bazaar area of Shillong can be boarded.

   Places to visit:

 o   Double Decker Living Root Bridge: The Khasi tribe of Cherrapunjee rainforest have been using the nature’s resources efficiently. They have re-directed the roots of gum trees (found only in the north-east) to build a bridge over rivers. The trees are still living, and the roots continue to grow in horizontal direction. Some trees have double bridges, one above the other. It is a treat to watch, that even in the wild, there is excellent engineering using hand tools and nature.

 o   Mawsmai Cave: This place is what you call a classic tourist attraction, a wide opening mouth of the cave, dim light entering through some ruptured rocks and natural formations of rocks inside the cave that is a result of underground water channel and natural abrasion.  

o   Seven Sisters fall: Seven Sisters Fall is a treat for waterfall viewers. An exquisite site of seven waterfalls simultaneously falling over the hills from a height of 320 m. This is a must visit attraction because the waterfalls are active only during the monsoons.

 o   Arwah Cave: This cave in the Sohra district gives you a treasure thrill. Once entered in this cave, it seems like a location from the Indiana Jones. Unexpected twists and turns, pitch black atmosphere and an aura that creates a mysterious environment. A must-visit for all the adventure seekers.

·  Things to do: Retreat, rejuvenate and relive yourself in the nature because man-made is hard to find in Cherrapunjee.

 ·  Best time of the year: October to May

 ·  deal for: Families and Couples

 · Company or Solitude: Find complete solitude with your companion.

 3.  Udaipur, Rajasthan: A city of palaces. Udaipur is one of the culturally and historically rich cities in India. The legacy of kings and kingdoms has been passed down for centuries. Pleasant weather, iconic palaces and a market that has everything makes monsoon the perfect time to visit Udaipur.

    How to reach:

o By Air: Maharana Pratap Airport is situated 20 km from Udaipur. A domestic airport with flight services to and from Jaipur, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi.

 o By Rail: Udaipur has two railway stations within the city namely Udaipur City Railway Station and Rana Pratap Nagar Railway Station, with train service from all over the country. Commute to Udaipur is much easier.

 o By Road: Udaipur is the intersection point of the East-West Corridor and the Golden Quadrilateral. It is well-connected by national highways and state highways.

 o For local transportation: Cars are available on rent, unmetered taxis, private taxis and radio taxis are available. Auto rickshaw and local bus transport services are also available.

 ·  Places to visit:

 o Lake Palace: Lake Palace is a major tourist attraction. A mainstream sightseeing that is supposed to be seen if you are visiting Udaipur. The palace is located on an island in the centre of the lake and has been house many kings notably Maharana Jagat Sing II. The palace used to be the winter resident of the king. Nowadays, the palace is operated by Taj Group of Hotels as one of their luxury hotels.

 o Monsoon Palace: Monsoon Palace in Udaipur is one of the most breath-taking attraction. Located on the cliff of Aravalli hill, just outside Udaipur. This palace was built just for one purpose, to view the monsoon clouds drifting across the Fateh Sagar Lake.

 o Mansapurna Karni Ropeway: A cable car ride that starts from Deendayal Park and travels to Karni Mata Temple at the Machhala Hill Top. It is one of the popular tourist destination in Udaipur.

o Local Markets aka Bazaars: Artistic handicrafts, rugs and mats are the most popular shopped products in Rajasthan. As the state is cultural capital of the country, there is no denying the fact that it still upholds bazaars and local markets with lots of local shops.

 ·   Things to do: Exploration, sight-seeing, relaxation and shopping.

    Best time of the year: The tourist season from November (Post Diwali) to the start of March (On-set of summer). But, if you want to explore the city for yourself, then the best time to visit Udaipur is in the monsoon i.e. from July to September.

 ·    Ideal for: Couples, Families, Backpackers, Retreaters and Friends.

 ·    It is hard to find the right company, but it is easier to enjoy solitude.

  4.  Valley of Flowers, Uttarakhand:

 ·    How to reach: Being a small tourist spot in the Himalayas, there is no direct transport service.

 o By Air: The nearest airport is Dehradun. From Dehradun Airport, taxi services and bus services are available. It is a 310 km ride.

 o By Rail: The nearest railway station is Haridwar, bus service and taxis are available to reach the start point of this beautiful trek, Govindghat.

 o By Road: Bus services and taxi services from Haridwar to Govindghat are available. The trek starts from Govindghat. The distance is 290 km.

 ·   Places to visit: As such there is no tourist attraction in Valley of Flowers. But, the valley whole is an attraction. Beautiful flowers blooming in the fog and colours spread on the green landscape that gives goosebumps. The insignia of the valley can be experienced at the start of the trek itself. Some of the most exotic and rare flowers bloom in this valley.

 ·  Things to do: Trek through the valley. The trek is 6 km long. The flora and fauna of this place is indigenous. Experience the weather, enrich yourself with the beauty made by God and get lost for few days from the real world to come back with a spirit.

 ·   Best time of the year: July thru September is considered the best time to visit is magnificent beauty. The temperatures are not severe, the weather is pleasant, and it is the blooming season of the flowers. The additional treat to your eyes during this time is the dew on the leaves that shine in the sunlight appearing to be pearls from a distance.

 ·    Ideal for: Adventure seekers, backpackers and friends.

 ·    Enjoy the ever-lasting solitude! Fall in love with yourself and let your thoughts direct you towards eternal glory.

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