YouTube – Kanimozhi – NDTV Interview
30 Saturday Apr 2011
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innews.outlookindia.com | Non-Implementation of Quota Agitates Dalits: NCSC.
“It is a fact that dalits in government jobs and elsewhere have not been given reservation in promotion despite having adequate provision,” NCSC chairman P L Punia said here.
Punia told this at a gathering of dalits who in large number turned up at his meeting. Many of them submitted memoranda with the commission and demanded immediate steps to redress their grievances.
Most of the allegations were non-implementation of reservation on promotion, atrocities on dalits, compensation for rape victims and for the families of the persons killed in caste conflicts.
Stating that the commission had set up at least 16 committees to address problems of dalits, Punia said that he was in constant touch with authorities on different issues.
Punia also expressed concern over negligible conviction rate of atrocities cases in the state.
As many as 11,000 atrocities cases were pending till 2011 in the state, while 6,000 waited disposal in courts. The police was yet to take up investigation in other 5,000 cases, one of the memorandum submitted by a dalit organisation claimed.
The community also alleged that they were deprived up of getting reservation facilities in technical educations and private institutions.
Punia assured the dalit representatives that the commission had recommended opening of eight new full-fledged office, one including in the state.
Filed On: Apr 29, 2011 21:16 IST
29 Friday Apr 2011
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innews.outlookindia.com | Security Removal Act of Intimidation: IPS Sanjeev Bhatt.
However, state DGP Chitranjan Singh’s office said there was no security threat to Bhatt, but following his demand with the SIT for security, an armed constable will remain with him round the clock.
The DGP office here had yesterday issued orders to all the five security men and a driver deployed with Bhatt to report to their headquarters in Junagadh immediately or else their stay outside the headquarters would be termed illegal.
Bhatt claimed that this was the second such order asking for withdrawal of security for him and his family despite him being recommended Y-category security by the State Intelligence Bureau (SIB).
Earlier this month, ADGP (training) had ordered that the five men and vehicle deployed with Bhatt be sent back to Junagadh. Bhatt is at present on leave.
“These are intimidatory tactics that would undermine and jeopardise my safety and security of my family,” Bhatt told mediapersons today.
“Someone (in the government) is afraid of the truth (about 2002 riots) coming out. This (withdrawal of security) was a desperate measure by desperate men,” he said.
Bhatt, in his affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, had alleged that Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi instructed officers during a late night meeting held on February 27, 2002, to allow Hindus “to vent out their anger” during the clashes as he wanted Muslims to be “taught a lesson”.
Bhatt, who is posted as principal, State Reserve Police Training Center (SRPTC), Junagadh, said government had earlier asked him to relieve the men deployed with him.
“Since I resisted their orders and requested for security for me and my family, they have now issued orders directly to the constables to report to their headquarter or else action could be taken against them,” he said, adding the five armed constables and a driver, along with the official vehicle, would be sent back to Junagadh today itself.
Bhatt, in a strongly worded letter to DGP today, said, “despite repeated written requests for providing adequate and fool-proof security to me and my family, you have continued to take proactive steps to jeopardise my security and safety of my family by repeatedly ordering withdrawal of security.”
Meanwhile, the DGP office issued an official statement on why security was not required for Bhatt.
“On assessing the threat to Bhatt it was found that he did not receive any threat call or intimidation from anybody. Therefore, there was no recommendation of security cover for him,” the statement said.
It further clarified, that security to a police officer at his residence is provided only at the place of his posting.
“But, Bhatt, without permission of his superior officer, had taken the police security officials to his Ahmedabad residence,” the statement said.
However, based on Bhatt’s letter to the Special Investigation Team (SIT), probing some riot cases, demanding security, the home department has issued orders to deploy an armed constable with Bhatt round the clock, it added.
The statement by DGP office further said that Bhatt was asked not to go on leave while his application for half-pay leave for 54 days was under consideration.
“But Bhatt, disregarding the orders went on sick leave,” the statement said.
In his affidavit filed on April 14 in the Apex Court, Bhatt also accused the Supreme Court appointed SIT of coercing witnesses, hostility, cover-up of probe, and showing reluctance in recording important information with regard to the post-Godhra riots.
Bhatt, who was questioned by SIT on March 21, 22, 23, said after facing ‘unconcealed hostility’ by SIT members he was under apprehension that the agency was part of the cover-up operation with regard to the probe in riot cases.
Post his affidavit in the Apex Court, Bhatt has been summoned by the Nanavati Commission, probing the 2002 riot cases, on May 16.
29 Friday Apr 2011
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in24 Sunday Apr 2011
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inLanguages Grew From a Seed in Africa, a Study Says – NYTimes.com.
A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.
The finding fits well with the evidence from fossil skulls and DNA that modern humans originated in Africa. It also implies, though does not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of considerable controversy among linguists.
The detection of such an ancient signal in language is surprising. Because words change so rapidly, many linguists think that languages cannot be traced very far back in time. The oldest language tree so far reconstructed, that of the Indo-European family, which includes English, goes back 9,000 years at most.
Quentin D. Atkinson, a biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has shattered this time barrier, if his claim is correct, by looking not at words but at phonemes — the consonants, vowels and tones that are the simplest elements of language. Dr. Atkinson, an expert at applying mathematical methods to linguistics, has found a simple but striking pattern in some 500 languages spoken throughout the world: A language area uses fewer phonemes the farther that early humans had to travel from Africa to reach it.
Some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13. English has about 45 phonemes.
This pattern of decreasing diversity with distance, similar to the well-established decrease in genetic diversity with distance from Africa, implies that the origin of modern human language is in the region of southwestern Africa, Dr. Atkinson says in an article published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Language is at least 50,000 years old, the date that modern humans dispersed from Africa, and some experts say it is at least 100,000 years old. Dr. Atkinson, if his work is correct, is picking up a distant echo from this far back in time.
Linguists tend to dismiss any claims to have found traces of language older than 10,000 years, “but this paper comes closest to convincing me that this type of research is possible,” said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Dr. Atkinson is one of several biologists who have started applying to historical linguistics the sophisticated statistical methods developed for constructing genetic trees based on DNA sequences. These efforts have been regarded with suspicion by some linguists.
In 2003 Dr. Atkinson and Russell Gray, another biologist at the University of Auckland, reconstructed the tree of Indo-European languages with a DNA tree-drawing method called Bayesian phylogeny. The tree indicated that Indo-European was much older than historical linguists had estimated and hence favored the theory that the language family had diversified with the spread of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, not with a military invasion by steppe people some 6,000 years ago, the idea favored by most historical linguists.
“We’re uneasy about mathematical modeling that we don’t understand juxtaposed to philological modeling that we do understand,” Brian D. Joseph, a linguist at Ohio State University, said about the Indo-European tree. But he thinks that linguists may be more willing to accept Dr. Atkinson’s new article because it does not conflict with any established area of linguistic scholarship.
“I think we ought to take this seriously, although there are some who will dismiss it out of hand,” Dr. Joseph said.
Another linguist, Donald A. Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “It’s too early to tell if Atkinson’s idea is correct, but if so, it’s one of the most interesting articles in historical linguistics that I’ve seen in a decade.”
Dr. Atkinson’s finding fits with other evidence about the origins of language. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert belong to one of the earliest branches of the genetic tree based on human mitochondrial DNA. Their languages belong to a family known as Khoisan and include many click sounds, which seem to be a very ancient feature of language. And they live in southern Africa, which Dr. Atkinson’s calculations point to as the origin of language. But whether Khoisan is closest to some ancestral form of language “is not something my method can speak to,” Dr. Atkinson said.
His study was prompted by a recent finding that the number of phonemes in a language increases with the number of people who speak it. This gave him the idea that phoneme diversity would increase as a population grew, but would fall again when a small group split off and migrated away from the parent group.
Such a continual budding process, which is the way the first modern humans expanded around the world, is known to produce what biologists call a serial founder effect. Each time a smaller group moves away, there is a reduction in its genetic diversity. The reduction in phonemic diversity over increasing distances from Africa, as seen by Dr. Atkinson, parallels the reduction in genetic diversity already recorded by biologists.
For either kind of reduction in diversity to occur, the population budding process must be rapid, or diversity will build up again. This implies that the human expansion out of Africa was very rapid at each stage. The acquisition of modern language, or the technology it made possible, may have prompted the expansion, Dr. Atkinson said.
“What’s so remarkable about this work is that it shows language doesn’t change all that fast — it retains a signal of its ancestry over tens of thousands of years,” said Mark Pagel, a biologist at the University of Reading in England who advised Dr. Atkinson.
Dr. Pagel sees language as central to human expansion across the globe.
“Language was our secret weapon, and as soon we got language we became a really dangerous species,” he said.
In the wake of modern human expansion, archaic human species like the Neanderthals were wiped out and large species of game, fossil evidence shows, fell into extinction on every continent shortly after the arrival of modern humans.
14 Thursday Apr 2011
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in09 Saturday Apr 2011
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inThe Hindu : Arts / History & Culture : A slice of history.
Two temples, Sivayoginathar and Karkadeswarar, near Kumbakonam, are believed to be storehouses of information.
As if refurbishing the spiritual trail blazed by Sridhara Venkatesa Ayyaval, Sadasiva Brahmendra and Sadguruswamy, who spread the bhakti cult of Nama Siddhanta and bhajana paddathi throughout the Thanjavur delta during the rule of Sahaji II (1684-1712 A.D) and his successors, are the shrines of Sivayoginathar and Karkadeswarar, which bear the legacy of having been sung by Thirugnanasambandar alone. Both these temples are a must to visit especially when one takes part in the annual Ayyaval utsavam in the Tamil month of Karthigai or at any time of the year.
Thiruvisanullur, now part of Thiruvidaimarudur block, lies at a distance of eight kilometers to the east of Kumbakonam on the northern side of the River Cauvery. It went by the name of Sahajirajapuram after Sahaji II who donated it to 45 pandits.
The author had seen the sign board carrying the name, Sahajirajapuram at the entrance to the village from Kumbakonam-Thirumangalakudi road till 1950. It was also an Inam village till 1952. However, in ancient times it was referred to as Vembarrur and Thiruviyalur.
Massive enclosure
As one traverses from Kumbakonam, the first cut to the left after sighting Thiruvisanullur name board proceeds to Sivayoginathar temple at a distance of less than a kilometer. The temple with its massive enclosure and a five-tier rajagopuram stuns the visitor. Such a massive rajagopuram and the minor shrines inside it were indeed built by Rajendra Chola (1012-1044 A.D.)
When we stepped into this shrine on March 6 this year college students were engaged in sprucing up the sides of the enclosure infested with weeds and grass. When we tarried for a while, a few of them pointed out the sun dial embedded on the parapet of the southern wall of the enclosure and opposite to the Goddess sannidhi. It was hemi-spherical and denoted the time from sun rise to sunset. It was indeed amazing that the Cholas had not only marveled in temple architecture but also in science of reckoning time!
The presiding deity is a fine piece of lingam, and faces east. He is called Sivayoginathar because sage Siva yogi after intense tapas (penance) mingled with the eternal effulgence. He is also known as Puranadeeswarar as the shrine is said to have originated prior to all other shrines. Around the garbagraha there is an enclosure for circumambulation, and a sikara over this is attributed to Vikrama Chola (1118-35).
Chatur Kala Bhairavas
The uniqueness of the temple lies in the fact that there are chatur Kala bhairavas, instead of one, in the first enclosure, facing west. To their left side are Siva linga and Saneeswara idol accentuating the different stages in a man’s life, namely, brahmacharya, grahastasrama, vanaprasta and sanyasa. The Bhairavas’ delineating the four kalapramanas are Gnana Bhairava, Swarna akarshna Bhairava, Unmatha Bhairava and yoga Bhairava respectively.
The worship of Gnana Bhairava confers sound education and good employment. The second one blesses devotees with excellent growth in their career and enables acquisition of material gains. The third one promotes good health, financial stability and good luck. The fourth one focuses a devotee’s attention to attain moksha. It is claimed that lighting of lamps with black pepper on eight consecutive Sundays during “raghu kalam’ to chatur bhairavas would restore one’s lost property and wealth. Further, worship of chatur bhairavas on the eighth day of ‘Suklapaksham’ promotes advancement in business, and prosperity while in ‘Krishnapaksham’ protects the worshipper from evil spirit and envy besides, curing one’s diseases.
Royal donors
The goddess is Soundaranayaki, also known as Saanthanayaki. Her sannadhi is in the first ‘prakara’, and faces south. About hundred inscriptions were copied from this temple in the year 1907. It is seen from the inscription that the queen of Gandaraditya and mother of Uttama chola, Sembian Madeviar, had gifted gold ornaments and vessels to the temple. Rajaraja I and his queen performed ‘thulabara’ with gold at this temple. Among the royal donors were a Pandyan queen who gifted gold ornaments to it, and Krishnadevaraya who remitted certain taxes to it. It was renovated in 1909 and 1933 by the chettiars of Devakottai, and kumbabishekam performed. And now efforts are on to renovate it is evident from the scaffolding on the rajagopuram. The sacred tree is pipal and the theertham is Jatayu.
Just like how there are temples ear-marked for the nine planets in Thanjavur district (undivided), Sivayoginathar shrine has been singled out for those born in the rishabha rasi to visit as often as they could to overcome the malefic effects in their horoscope.
A reference about Nandhi is also available. Its head is slightly tilted to the right as if in a listening posture! It is said that in the very distant past, a man who led a dissipated life was nearing his end, and seized by the fear of Lord Yama came rushing to this temple calling forth the Lord’s names loudly. This stirred up the Nandhi to turn its head in the direction of the voice, and the deity, addressed by the Nandhi about his plight, granted him relief.
On coming out of Sivayoginathar shrine, we immediately drove to Karkadeswarar temple about half a kilometer on the same road. Originally, it was said to have been built with brick and mortar, and later on replaced with stones. There is no rajagopuram but a huge moat on the northern side called ‘Thirumaruvum Poikai’ which is said to harbour navabhashana wells with curative properties. The place where the temple is located, is called Thirundevankudi, which is but the corruption of “thiru nandu kudi’. This, and the Sanskrit name of the Lord connote that a crab must have worshipped Siva and attained salvation.
Legend has it that a yaksha who mimicked the gait of Sage Durvasa, noted for his irascibility, was cursed to be born as a crab in the above ‘theertham’ and worship Siva with lotus flower for the curse to be lifted. At the same time, Indra was said to be offering ‘puja’ daily to the Lord with 108 lotus flowers plucked and supplied by Varuna. As days wore out, Indra noticed one flower missing in his count and thereupon he traced the missing flower to the claws of a golden crab. Instead of killing it, he traced its path which led to the lingam. Before Indra caught it, it made a hole into the lingam and vanished. It is averred that after performing special ablution to the Siva lingam, the golden crab could be seen. However in the sanctum sanctorum, just above the lingam and to its side the configuration of the crab and its pathway are well etched on stone. The story of Durvasa is engraved on one of the pillars in the anterior hall.
Karkadeswaram or Thirundevankudi was once Aushadavanam and as such the Lord was known as Aushadavaneswarar. A Chola king who was afflicted with paralysis is said to have been cured of it by the God and Goddess who donned the roles of physician and nurse. In return, he started renovating the temple, and to his surprise, the idol of Goddess went missing and he commissioned the artisan to make one. This idol was christened Arumarundunayaki. After this, the original idol was traced out, and this was named Aboorvanayaki. The Goddesses are side by side near the bali peetam and face south.
Separate niches
On entering the temple one meets with a large stone pillared hall at a lower level, and from the door step one can sight a small tower over the garbhagriha. In the enclosure around it are found sannadhis for deities such as Ganapathy, Muruga, Gajalakshmi, Durga and Chandi. While Dakshinamurthy is on the southern side of smaller enclosure, the idols of the Saivaite quartet are on the left side of the entrance in a larger enclosure.
Sri Ramalinga Swamigal (Vallalar) of Vadalur has also sung in praise of this temple. The fact that Gnanasambandar had visited it ascribes its existence to the seventh century. It is ranked 42 among the 63 shrines lying north of the River Cauvery. It falls under the jurisdiction of the Executive officer of Koranattu Karuppur Sundareswarar temple.
Besides conferring relief from bodily ailments, worship of Karkadeswarar is to be earnestly sought for by those born in Kadaka rasi with ruling stars Punarpoosam, Poosam and Ayilyam.
Highlights
The temple with its massive enclosure and a five-tier rajagopuram stuns the visitor.
The rajagopuram and the minor shrines inside it were indeed built by Rajendra Chola (1012-1044 A.D.)
Sivayoginathar shrine has been singled out for those born in the Rishaba rasi.
Sri Ramalinga Swamigal (Vallalar) of Vadalur has sung in praise of Karkadeswarar temple.
Karkadeswarar temple is to be sought for by those born in Kadaka rasi with ruling stars Punarpoosam, Poosam and Ayilyam.