Month: April 2021

USA

Two British Sikh brothers Bhupinder and and Sunny Gill will make English Football League history this weekend when they become the first pair of British South Asians to officiate in the same match.

Last week, Jaya Asokan, the fair’s former head of exhibitor relations, took over as director of the IAF. Her aim, she has said, is to “drive business and define the purpose of the future editions”. There is to be a new website and new partnerships. And education initiatives, artist commissions and pop-up programmes designed to turn the 13-year-old trade event into a year-round effort to increase audiences for Indian art.

Some of this was already a work in progress. Asokan’s predecessor Jagdip Jagpal played a consolidating role in her three years on the job. Under Jagpal, at least 70% of exhibitor space was reserved for Indian galleries. Art spaces from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka gave it broader sub-continental identity. There was greater focus on performance art and there was an art bookshop.

A herbal medicine formulation named BAU Birsin developed by Kaushal Kumar, Birsa Agriculture University’s scientist of the forestry department, has been granted patent rights by the Indian Patent Office in Calcutta earlier this week.

Scientist behind ‘BAU Birsin’ headed herbal wing of Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali Yogpeeth.

Jharkhand

Veteran actor Satish Kaul, who had 300 Punjabi and Hindi films to his credit and became a household name after playing the role of Lord Indra in the TV show Mahabharat, died of Covid-19 on Saturday in Ludhiana. He was 76.

Krushna Nag has used crop subsidies, farm inputs effectively to grow vegetables, raise good quality poultry and make profit year after year, writes Uma Shankar Kar.

Lac resin is extensively used for preparing a range of products, from cosmetics to ammunition. It is cultivated on a variety of trees, mostly fruit-bearing and shady trees like berry, kusum etc.

For generations, Amrensia Barla in Simdega district of Jharkhand earned from lac cultivation (lac is the resinous secretion of a number of species of lac insects. Cultivation begins when a farmer ties a stick containing eggs ready to hatch to the tree to be infested). 

Inspector Ram Kishore Saklani is a ‘dujey kism ka inspector’ (an inspector of a different kind) among his peers as well as the people in Uttarakhand. His way of policing, motivation and assistance to the youth has earned him so much respect that he was showered with flowers at a ceremony to mark his transfer from the Muni-ki-Reti police station in Rishikesh, where he has set up a transit camp to “train youth for life.”