A constable Amir Hussain was killed in a brief encounter between police and militants in the Soura area of Srinagar on Tuesday, informed Vijay Kumar, Jammu and Kashmir IGP.
During the shootout, one militant who belonged to the LeT group was also injured. “In a brief encounter one militant and one jawan were injured. The jawan succumbed to injuries and attained martyrdom.
Soon we will neutralize all three militants , they belong to the LeT group,” Jammu and Kashmir IGP told media persons here.
A wreath-laying ceremony of SgCT Amir Hussain was also held by the police personnel today. (ANI)
source: http://www.risingkashmir.com / Rising Kashmir / Home / by ANI / March 22nd, 2022
Powerlifting champion Sk. Sadia Almas presenting a bouquet to Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy at Tadepalli on Tuesday.
Proposal for setting up a powerlifting academy at Mangalagiri approved
Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has announced a final assistance of ₹5 lakh on behalf of the Andhra Pradesh government for international powerlifting champion Shaik Sadia Almas.
Ms. Sadia, along with her father Samdhani, met Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy at his chamber in the Assembly . She won three gold medals and a bronze medal at the Asian Powerlifting Championships held at Istanbul in Turkey in December 2021.
Mr. Jagan Mohan Reddy appreciated Ms. Sadia and approved the proposal of establishing a powerlifting academy in her hometown of Mangalagiri. He said that the government would make all efforts to encourage athletes in the State.
Sports Minister M. Srinivasa Rao, Mangalagiri MLA Alla Ramakrishna Reddy, Special Chief Secretary Rajat Bhargava and others were present on the occasion.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> National> Andhra Pradesh / by Tharun Boda / Vijayawada – March 22nd, 2022
Sarfaraz Khan has rained runs in the domestic circuit. | Photo Credit: VIVEK BENDRE
Living father Naushad’s dream, hitting 400 balls every day, driving across north India to find a game or practice session during the lockdown, never settling for just a hundred — the prodigious Mumbai run-scorer offers an insight into his life and methods
You may have come across the 3 Ps and 3 Ds in self-help books. Sarfaraz Khan, the record-breaking Mumbai run machine, has been performing such exceptional feats that he deserves new terminology devised especially for him.
A kid from the by-lanes of Kurla, a central Mumbai suburb, Sarfaraz isn’t one for corporate jargon; he prefers ‘Bambaiya’ lingo. But having tracked his cricketing sojourn for over a decade, one can sum him up in the 4 Os: Obsession, Outstanding, Occupation and Opportunity. Let’s look at each of these facets.
Obsession
Hours after being adjudged the Player of the Match in Mumbai’s final Ranji Trophy league game in Ahmedabad, Sarfaraz reaches his home in Taximen’s Colony in Kurla at around 10 p.m. The first thing he asks his father Naushad is whether the ‘nets’ are booked for the morning.
At 7 a.m. the next day, Sarfaraz is padded up at the Karnatak Sporting Association at Azad Maidan, ready for the daily drill of facing at least 200 balls in the session (he will repeat this dose on a makeshift turf pitch outside his house in the afternoon).
This is the routine Sarfaraz has followed ever since he was hailed as a ‘boy wonder’ in Mumbai’s school cricket circles a decade ago. The 24-year-old has had a topsy-turvy ride though. He has enjoyed the high of playing two Under-19 World Cups and being retained by an IPL franchise ahead of an overhaul. Then came a challenging phase when he left Mumbai for Uttar Pradesh before returning to the domestic powerhouse and establishing himself as a vital cog.
Sarfaraz’s stupendous success — he averages a staggering 77.74 in First Class cricket — has been driven by his determination and maturity at the crease. But the stocky batter says the runs are also a consequence of trying to repay his father’s faith and hard work. In many ways, he has been living his father’s dream.
Sarfaraz Khan at Cross maidan. | Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI
“I have struggled quite a lot. Especially with Abbu. Even after playing two World Cups, the IPL, to be lined up alongside 400-odd cricketers for selection trials (in Uttar Pradesh in 2016-17) and wear the badge of player No. 315, it was quite weird. I used to feel bad for Abbu. We used to stay in a hotel and Abbu would have sleepless nights,” says Sarfaraz, having taken a break from his morning drill and made way for Naushad, who has padded up to ensure the “net bowlers don’t feel like wasting their time”.
“He has worked so hard on me that I feel I have to do it for Abbu. I don’t know whether I will eventually end up playing for India but I want all his hard work to pay off. That’s what I am striving for. He has left everything for our cricket, so I am glad that he has that [chance] to see his son scoring so heavily in Ranji Trophy, that too for a team like Mumbai. To play for Mumbai in itself is a big deal. And to be able to play again means a lot.”
For a sense of the family’s obsession with cricket, sample this: during the pandemic-enforced lockdown, Naushad drove his sons and a couple of local net bowlers in an SUV all the way to Azamgarh, his ancestral town in Uttar Pradesh, to ensure they stayed playing cricket. For the next year or so, the Khans would drive to every town and city across north India that offered the opportunity to play a practice game or have an outdoor net session.
“Be it Meerut, Mathura, Ghaziabad, Azamgarh…. he would drive us all over north India. In Mumbai, people couldn’t drive down for two hours and here we were, travelling all over India in our car to play cricket,” Sarfaraz says.
“Abbu would drive us all over so that our cricket didn’t stop. Sometimes when I travel to other places in the north — be it Delhi or Jaipur or Mohali — I feel as if it’s a home game and not away. I am so used to playing in those conditions that acclimatisation is never an issue.”
Outstanding
You cannot separate Naushad — a former Western Railway cricketer who has devoted his life to moulding Sarfaraz and his younger brother Musheer, an all-rounder, into classy cricketers — from Sarfaraz’s cricketing journey. But this day is about Sarfaraz. And Naushad realises it and doesn’t intervene even once when Sarfaraz is chatting with The Hindu.
Sarfaraz Khan at Cross maidan. | Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI
Ask the plain-speaking Sarfaraz how well he remembers his First Class hundreds and pat comes the reply: “Six centuries… ek (one) triple, three doubles because a triple is also counted as a double. And every century is 150-plus, the one I scored for UP was 150 (155), it is the lowest.”
He says it as a matter of fact. But his returns since returning to Mumbai in January 2020 after a three-year hiatus are gargantuan: 1,564 runs in 15 innings at 142.18! And he isn’t a wee bit surprised by his phenomenal consistency, be it for Mumbai or for India-A against an all-international bowling attack in South Africa.
“I used to score heavily in school cricket, so it feels the same. I have done the same all my life, be it at Azad Maidan or a club ground or at a big stadium, I just am used to going through the motions and scoring runs,” he says.
“Every day brings a new challenge, a new ball, a new set of bowlers and it just doesn’t feel like I scored a hundred yesterday. It just feels like I have to work all over again and go through the routine and the process all over again and score runs. That’s what I have done since school cricket and since I started training with Abbu.”
And what’s the secret behind his daddy hundreds? The response offers a peek into his mindset.
“A lot of players tend to play a rash stroke after getting to the hundred. Once I celebrate the hundred, I keep telling myself — obviously every batter wants to score a hundred — ‘your aim is achieved, now do it for the team by converting it into a big one’.
“Also, there are so many quality players who score hundreds,” he says. “If you want to stand out, you have to score big hundreds, so I wait for four-five balls after the hundred and then start playing freely. Till the 100, I tend to plan in 10s, once I cross the 100, I start looking at it in 20s or 30s because every 20-30 runs that I add, not only will I get to another milestone but I will be taking the team to safety.”
Occupation
In addition to being obsessed with making it big as a cricketer and living his father’s dream, a changed batting outlook has also helped Sarfaraz. He has begun treating the match as his “office” and batting as his “job”. He refers to a dialogue from M.S. Dhoni’s biographical feature film: “Duty ke baad bhi practice (Your practice continues even after office hours)”.
“For me, it’s duty ke pehle and office ke baad bhi practice (it’s practice both before and after office),” he says. “I don’t have an off day. If I am not playing a match, I face at least 400 balls a day once Daddy wakes me up at 5 a.m.”
So how does he put his astounding form into perspective? “I have always been grounded, whether I score or not. I know that you enjoy when you perform well but there are always more sad days in life. That’s why we don’t tend to get excited. Even when I score, I don’t throw parties, nor do I attend anyone else’s. I don’t celebrate my birthday, nor do I attend someone else’s birthday party,” Sarfaraz says.
“My Daddy says, ‘You have so many followers and fans, so if you end up being friends with everyone, someone will have his or her birthday. So if you attend a birthday party every day, when will you play cricket?’ So I don’t go out much nor does our household get over-excited with any achievement. For us, doing well is like our daily job. And I’ve been learning something every day. But I keep telling myself two things: not to repeat the same mistake and follow whatever Daddy says.”
Opportunity
As someone who adapts to red-ball and white-ball formats as seamlessly as he switches between “Abbu” and “Daddy” when he refers to Naushad, Sarfaraz is making a strong case for an India call-up. One can sense that he desperately desires that India cap, especially with the sensational form he has been in, but he spells his position out calmly.
“There would be at least 500 cricketers toiling around us here at the maidan right now. And each one of us aspires to play for India. Whenever the chance comes, I have to be ready for it. That’s all that I am prepping for. If I can do it, I know I shall make my Daddy happy. And that’s what matters the most,” Sarfaraz says, before padding up again and replacing Naushad in the nets.
While Sarfaraz’s range-hitting keeps fielders and bystanders on their toes, Naushad expresses the hope that Sarfaraz gets a chance at the earliest in his new IPL franchise, the Delhi Capitals.
Had the Ranji Trophy not been postponed due to the Omicron variant, Sarfaraz could well have triggered a bidding war instead of being bought at base price in the accelerated auction. But as he starts walking towards his father’s SUV — the same one that had turned into his virtual home-cum-cricket room during the lockdown — Sarfaraz has a parting shot.
“It’s not about the money. It’s about the opportunity.”
With the dazzling form and frame of mind he is in, don’t be surprised if Sarfaraz adds ‘Optimisation’ to his 4 Os the moment he gets an opportunity in the IPL.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Sport> Cricket / by Amol Karhadkar / March 19th, 2022
Amin Jaffer in his library dining room, standing in front of Yuntao Zhang’s painting of Cellini’s Medusa | Photo Credit: Architectural Digest / Antonio Martinelli
The Rwanda-born Indian curator, who has made the French capital his home, on the Al Thani collection’s first museum, his new book, and the importance of private collections
Writer, curator, collaborator, colonial furniture specialist: Amin Jaffer wears his titles effortlessly. And in the last couple of years, he’s added another one — that of Paris denizen — after he uprooted his English life of 25 years to move into a hôtel particulier (a grand townhouse) on Quai Voltaire along the Seine.
The move made sense. An “éminence grise of the international art world”, as an Architectural Digest article calls him (Jaffer is on the cover of the magazine’s 10th anniversary issue this month), he was “spending a lot of time in Venice, and the commute to London was becoming taxing”. But more importantly, his newest project, a private museum for the Al Thani Collection, is in the city, at Place de la Concorde’s Hôtel de la Marine.
“Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani was looking for a more permanent place to house the treasures of his collection,” says Jaffer, recalling how at the time, the French government body Centre des Monuments Nationaux was thinking of converting the former storage space for royal tapestries at the Hôtel — a four-year, €132 million restoration project. “They proposed that the Al Thani Collection could exhibit its masterpieces there.” With a 20-year agreement in place, acquiring a Parisian pin code thus gave him a twofold advantage, both with work and keeping up his continental way of life. (The last few weeks alone have seen Jaffer travel to Seville and Carmona in Spain and Parma and Venice in Italy.)
The Al Thani Collection at Hôtel de la Marine | Photo Credit: Marc Domage
Polaroid and a passion for art
The view of the Louvre from his third floor flat definitely tipped the scales in its favour. (The photos he shares on his Instagram, @aminjaffer_curator, are proof enough.) And the fact that Vivant Denon, the first director of the museum, had once been a resident in the 17th century building. Moreover, as he explains in an email that he squeezes in between flights, he’s always had a special connection with the Louvre. As a six-year-old, he had visited the museum with his mum, spending an entire day exploring its rooms, a Polaroid camera clutched tightly in his hands. He still has the photographs. “The adrenalin rush of seeing a great work of art inspired me then — as it does now,” he says, adding how by the time he turned 10 he had visited most of the major museums in Europe. “Other seminal moments include an early visit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and a trip to Rome to see the Vatican collections.”
The courtyard at L’Hôtel de Beuvron with its Rococo fountain | Photo Credit: @aminjaffer_curato
But he nearly missed his calling. Born into an Indian business family in Kigali, Rwanda, a career in art wasn’t an option growing up. His subjects in university were economics and commerce! That is, until he chose the history of French opera and French Renaissance châteaux as his first year electives and reignited his love affair with the arts.
Today, Jaffer, who is in his early 50s, is not only the chief curator of the Al Thani Collection, but also works with leading museums around the world in a “curatorial role, focussed on public projects, exhibition programming and producing catalogues”. His resume includes long stints at the V&A Museum in London as curator and as the International Director of Asian Art at Christie’s.
Amin Jaffer in his home office, sitting in front of a triptych by Reza Aramesh | Photo Credit: Architectural Digest / Antonio Martinelli
The perks of a private collection
“Born in central Africa, educated in Europe and America, I do feel something of a hybrid and I am drawn by works of art that are born from the encounter of two — or more — civilisations,” says Jaffer, who has recently “been fascinated by the fusion of Spanish and Amerindian culture, particularly in the domain of painting”. This ties in beautifully with the Al Thani Collection and its catalogue of more than 5,000 works of art drawn from across world civilisations.
It makes us wonder, how important are such private collections in the art world? “Pioneer collectors have vision and resources that compliment the public art offering,” he says, explaining how such collections play a significant role in the programming of national institutions. “Recent examples in Paris [besides the Al Thani Collection] includes the Bourse de Commerce and the Fondation Louis Vuitton. In India, Kiran Nadar has developed a programme of exhibitions around her collection that makes an essential contribution to the art scene,” adds the Indian art expert who played a key part in launching Christie’s first auction in Mumbai in 2013.
At Hôtel de la Marine | Photo Credit: Marc Domage
On board with digital
Jaffer’s personal collection is equally varied. A triptych by Iranian photographer Raza Aramesh, of Afghan refugees sitting in the Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, takes pride of place in his home office, while a painting of Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini’s Medusa by Chinese contemporary artist Yuntao Zhang hangs in the library dining room. Elsewhere, Qing period armchairs, Louis XVI commodes, and Bouke De Vries’ Memory Jars are tucked into corners and under tables. “My most recent passions are French 18th century silver and hardstones from late Antiquity, especially objects in porphyry. I am learning more about Symbolist painting, too,” he says.
His days of confinement (as the French called the lockdown) helped broaden his base. When not watching life on the river, he was visiting digital museums and “researching parallel institutions” around the world. “What’s certain,” he says, “is that technology will play a greater role in the way we enjoy works of art — whether through the presence of more immersive, digitally-led exhibitions [such as the RMN Grand Palais’ immersive Venice show opening in autumn] or the sharing of information about works of art through digital platforms [like the one for the Palazzo Pilotta collection in Parma, which he experienced last weekend].” Does this mean he’s also on board with NFTs? “Of course, the phenomenon interests me,” he says, “but I do not yet have sufficient expertise to comment on anything in this new domain.”
The Al Thani Collection | Photo Credit: Marc Domage
Left Bank to the Concorde
For now, he’s back at his home at L’Hôtel de Beuvron, listening to Wagner and Mahler, and updating his Instagram. V&A’s new exhibition, Fashioning masculinities — on the male dress and its influences — has caught his eye, though he admits his personal wardrobe is rather formulaic. Tailored clothes in a limited palette of colours is the ‘uniform’, accented by pocket squares and ties that reflect the season or his mood. “Cufflinks are a weakness,” he shares, “and the best ones are by [Indian jeweller] Viren Bhagat, without doubt.”
Even as Jaffer immerses himself in life on the Left Bank, work at the museum is keeping up its momentum. “Some substantial pieces have been added to the collection in the past two years, which reflect the diversity of interests [of Sheikh Al Thani]. These will be shared with the public through displays at the Hôtel de la Marine,” he concludes.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Entertainment> Art / by Surya Praphulla Kumar / March 19th, 2022
At Falak in Bengaluru, a custodian of the old Urdu-speaking culture and culinary traditions brings storytelling to the table
While the lights of Dubai-esque skyscrapers speak of a new Bangalore and its ambition, the salubrious weather on the terrace is a testament to an old city — pleasant and genteel, never mind traffic, chaos or climate change!
This convergence of the old and the new is a theme, as I sit down to a meal at Falak, the new restaurant at Leela Bhartiya City. The meal is to flow like a quintessential 19th century Lucknowi dastaan (story), hyperbolic and stylised, to mimic the oral storytelling tradition, dastaan-e-goi.
In my bookcase, I have a copy of Tilism-i-Hoshruba, the truly first Indo-Islamic romance epic, an extension of the dastans of Amir Hamza, of the Persian tradition, albeit in translation. When it was first published, in a serialised form, between 1881-93, by the iconic Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow, it marked an important moment for the Urdu-speaking-and listening audience of northern India, long familiar with the Persian romance tradition — with fantasy, adventure and the implausible built in. But I turn to Hamza, to also dive into the inherent syncreticism on the pages, as the mores of a Persian world collide and merge with those of local Braj Bhasha-speaking cultures of the Indo-Gangetic plain.
Finding nuanced Avadhi in Bengaluru
It’s a surprise to find a restaurant referencing this art form, to present Lucknowi (as also other Mughalai) dishes. Used to so much pastiche when it comes to Avadhi, the detailing in the menu is also unexpected. The food that arrives confirms that this perhaps is one of the most nuanced Avadhi/Mughalai restaurant opening in recent times — here in Bengaluru, rather implausibly, rather than Delhi, Mumbai or even London! Everything falls into place, however, when Farman Ali, all of 70, a chef who cooks behind the fiery range and sigri himself, and presides over the kitchens of Falak, makes his appearance.
When he hears about of my own Lucknowi antecedents, Ali abandons the idea of narrating food lore. With an extreme politeness that marks old Nawabi etiquette, he asks me, “ Ab aap ko kya dastan sunaye? [what possible tales can I tell you?].” And bursts into poetry, instead!
The rest of the evening goes by with the chef dropping verses from Daag or Ghalib or the other few who made 19th century Delhi one of the most literary cities in the world, even if we have forgotten that genre of poetry of lament created almost exactly at the time as Shelley, Wordsworth and the Romantics.
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Parts of an ancient story
For Ali, I realise, this is not performance — though it is quite in sync with modern chefs expected to be performative as they spend time building brands ‘front of the house’. Instead, this is a way of life, a culture that has all but completely faded. As the meal progresses — the nihari (pepper-laced stew of old Delhi’s spice market, concocted, according to lore, to ward off cold and flu thought to emanate from the Yamuna canal in Chandni Chowk) being replaced by the qorma ( nihari evolved into the subtle Avadhi qorma, catering to aristocrats who thought it ill-mannered to be smelling of spices after a meal) being replaced by the ‘ balai’ka tukda for dessert (not dubbed ‘ shahi’ royal bread pudding here; balai being the correct term for clotted cream) — we talk not food but art.
One of the dishes served at Falak | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
“After 1857, so many artisans and poets fled Delhi for the Deccan,” says Ali. “Culture spreads like this.” He is right, of course. But the ghazal or qasidas aside, it’s also the biryani that has diffused. Farman Ali’s is the old Delhi/Lucknowi style (he grew up in old Delhi and still has a house there) where rice is cooked in stock, and the ‘ pulao’ is not the layered and overtly spiced dish that its Hyderabadi cousin is. Old ‘Nakhlauwallas’ — such as yours truly — contend there was no Avadhi biryani at all, before the restaurants took over, just many fanciful and well-documented pulaos such as the ‘ moti’ (pearls) or the ‘cuckoo’, served with fried onions and thin yoghurt, no chutney or gravy.
The man behind Jamavar
Ali worked in restaurants in Delhi and Dubai before being handpicked by The Leela’s Capt CP Krishnan Nair to create the food of Jamavar nationally, to cook and serve pan-Indian food. Based in Bengaluru, he curiously escaped much national attention, retiring just before the pandemic, but was called back by the owners of Bhartiya City, foodies themselves, to cook food closer to his roots.
If cuisine is an expression of a culture, at a particular point in history, its custodians and storytellers are as important as the taste of dishes.
In India, at this moment in time, it is perhaps important to look back on the custodians of the old Urdu-speaking cultures and their culinary expressions. What kind of a society produced these stylised dishes? Farman Ali, in many ways, is the last of the great chefs, many of whom were feted much more and earlier in their careers than him — such as Imtiaz Qureshi of ITC Hotels (and his family, such as son-in-law Ghulam Qureshi of Dumpukht), and chef Ghulam Rasool of Taj Hotels.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Life & Style> Food / by Anoothi Vishal / March 19th, 2022
Nazreen C J, who is hearing impaired, marvels art connoisseurs by transforming unheard tunes into elegant moves, reports Anuja Susan Varghese.
Nazreen is also interested in painting and photography | A Sanesh
Ernakulam :
The differently-abled are often blessed with myriad capabilities. Heightened sensory powers and special skills, developed by some individuals over several years overcoming challenges, at times leave audiences spellbound.
Such is the tale of Nazreen CJ, hearing impaired from birth. The limitations, however, did not stop the Kochi resident — called Kukku fondly — from exploring art and travel, and from honing her many talents. An expert bharatanatyam dancer, her performance, syncing steps by sensing vibrations of the beat on the floor, is an amazing sight.
From Class V, Nazreen has practised dance to the rhythm of classical music, mastering not just bharatanatyam, but kathak and mohiniyattom as well.
“She was a bright child from the very beginning,” says Nazreen’s mother, Noorjahan Jani. “We realised she could not hear or speak only after she was two, and by then it was too late.”
One huge positive for Nazreen, now 22, was that she studied in a regular school, enabling her to understand conversations by lip-reading.
“She learned to accept she was different from other children. Being part of the Kochi Kalabhavan, she received opportunities to perform in cultural events on various stages and also in television programmes,” Noorjahan points out. Family support is a pillar of strength for Nazreen, with her mother accompanying her to cultural events and competitions.
“During her schooldays, we travelled to Mumbai, Chennai and Ranchi. Though she is very confident now about managing on her own, we are still reluctant to let her travel alone,” says Noorjahan. Realising her mother was talking about her adventurous dreams, Nazreen gestures to say that they worry needlessly.
Her sister, Jasmine Anseer, says Nazreen did not have any special training method or additional assistance while learning classical dance. “She would pick up the steps and the rhythm as shown by her dance teacher. She continues with the steps till the dance sequence ends.” Her mother also recalls bitter experiences, when Nazreen was denied opportunities due to her condition. “Some organisers fear she would make mistakes on stage. Such experiences hurt her the most, yet she didn’t back down. Whenever she received opportunities, she has made sure that she puts up excellent performances,” Noorjahan says.
The walls of their home are stacked with prizes, with Nazreen having excelled in other fields too, like drawing, painting and photography. She used to play badminton as well. Recently, she modelled for Seematti, one of Kerala’s leading textile brands.
“She is a very different person when on stage. It won’t be apparent to anyone she can’t hear the music. Be it ramp walk or western dance, she nails them with elan. During solo performances, we just have to ensure one of us is there off-stage to alert her when the song starts and is about to end,” says Jasmine.
When asked about her ambition, Nazreen joyously nods and gestures she wants to become a wildlife photographer. Nazreen did her BSc in maths at the St Teresa’s College, and is now busy with programmes and photography sessions.
“Due to Covid, things were dull for a while. But life is now back on track,” says Jani C S, Nazreen’s father, beaming with pride. And Nazreen gestures, looking forward to the shows lined up.
source: http://www.newindianexpress.com / The New Indian Express / Home> Good News / by Anuja Susan Varghese / Express News Service / March 20th, 2022
SM Jaffar was one of India’s finest hockey players in an era when the country reached near invincibility in the sport.
In the warm southern California summer of 1932, a group of young and colourfully-dressed athletes caught the attention of the residents of the Olympic host city. Angeleños, as the residents of Los Angeles were called at that time, had been expecting to see exotic looking foreigners, but even so, it would have been hard for many of them to not take a second look at turbaned Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus from faraway India.
Accounts from diaries from the 1930s suggest that one 20-year-old with his trademark moustache and turban caught the attention of both athletes and fans. This hockey player from Shergarh, in what was then the Montgomery district of western Punjab, was one of the rising stars of the Indian hockey team: Sayed Mohammed Jaffar Shah (SM Jaffar), who played the left-out (forward) position.
Like his teammates, who undertook the 42-day journey by ship from Colombo to California, SM Jaffar could have easily been distracted by the attractions that Hollywood offered, but his focus on the hockey was unwavering. “This charming athlete from India, this sheikh from the deserts of Montgomery, this man who carried with him something of an atmosphere of vast extensive plains and cornfields and open air wherever he went, attracted many admirers,” writer Syed Ahmed Shah, better known as Patras Bokhari, wrote in an essay in the 1930s. “But this stranger with a manly moustache had the modesty of a village virgin that was both fascinating and forbidding.” SM Jaffar was Bokhari’s student at the Government College in Lahore.
Jaffar had a reputation of being a disciplinarian to the core. He even eschewed coffee, as his only attempt at drinking the beverage resulted in the loss of an entire night of sleep. “Myriads were the temptations in the way of a young man so far away from his mother and his father and his friends and dear ones at home,” Jaffar was quoted as saying by Bokhari.
The hockey player, who was a hawking and hunting enthusiast and a regular patron of Amritsar’s hawk sellers, chose to spend his free time in Los Angeles visiting the zoo and the city’s lion farm.
It was a foregone conclusion that the Indian team, which won the gold medal in the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, would crush the only two opponents – the Unites States and Japan. Like the ongoing Tokyo Olympics, which have lost their sheen because of the global pandemic, the Los Angeles games had reduced participation on account of the Great Depression. Only 37 nations participated in the 1932 Olympics, compared to 46 in Amsterdam four years earlier. The Indian team, divided by groupism between Anglo-Indians and others (the captaincy went to Lal Shah Bokhari), beat the United States 24-1 and Japan 11-1 to win the gold.
“I have had the privilege of seeing many cuttings from American newspapers and I can say without the least fear of contradiction that no other player was more popular, more skilful and more highly praised than Jaffar, with perhaps the solitary exception of Dhyan Chand,” Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah, who was Jaffar’s teacher at Lahore’s Aitchison College, wrote in 1937.
Shah, who would later become the principal of the prestigious Lahore institution, added, “…and what was true at Los Angeles, was equally true at the time of the Olympic Games in Berlin.”
Dhyan Chand runs away with the ball in an Olympic contest. Credit: Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain]
Road To Berlin
After returning to Lahore, Jaffar immersed himself in his studies. He completed his degree and was appointed Extra Assistant Commissioner of Lahore and even took the Indian Police Competitive Examination. His hockey career also continued to flourish. By 1936, he was the captain of the Punjab hockey team at the inter-provincial hockey tournament in Calcutta.
The tournament, won by host Bengal, was used as a selection criterion for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. In a country which had several strong hockey sides such as Bengal, Bombay, Bhopal and Manavdar, just two players from Punjab were selected – Jaffar and Gurcharan Singh. Despite a request from the hockey authorities, the Indian Army initially refused to grant superstar Ali Iqtidar Shah Dara leave to play for the national side.
When it was time to select the captain of the Indian team, there were three candidates: Dhyan Chand, Jaffar and Manavdar’s MN Masood. “The IHF [Indian Hockey Federation] met at Delhi sometime in April to select the captain and officials of the tour,” Dhyan Chand wrote in his 1952 autobiography. “For the office of the captain, three names were put up – Jaffar, MN Masood and myself. Jaffar subsequently withdrew in my favour.”
It is widely accepted that the 1936 Indian team was the greatest to ever take the field in the history of the sport. Two-time defending champions, they were the favourites to win the gold, but the German side was a formidable opponent.
1936 :: Indian Hockey Team That Won Gold Medal In Berlin Olympics .
In Final, India Defeated Germany 8-1
In Tournament India Scored 38 Goals , Dhyan Chand Scored 13 Goals and His Younger Brother Roop Singh Scored 9 Goals
9:49 PM – Aug 1, 2021
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Panic seized the Indian team when they lost a warm-up game to the Germans by a score of 4 to 1. Dhyan Chand and Jaffar requested the army to release Dara for the tournament, and the legend was flown in to Germany a day before the semi-final. Till that point, India had little trouble in the tournament, easily defeating Japan, Hungary and the United States. The champions then crushed France 10-0 in the semis.
The final between India and Germany was witnessed by 40,000 spectators , most of them cheering for the home side.
India had some supporters in the stand too, including members of the Baroda and Bhopal royal families as well as some Indians who lived on the continent. The clinical performance of the Indian team, which won 8-1, threw the theory of Aryan Supremacy to the bottom of the Spree River that runs through the centre of Berlin. In a match where Dhyan Chand scored three goals, Dara added two and Jaffar contributed to the tally with a solitary goal. India could have easily scored more, but Dhyan Chand decided to give the “rough” Germans a “lesson in ball control” and the Indian team toyed with their opponents, moving the ball around endlessly.
“During the tour, he was a very great asset to the team, both on and off the field, and was highly praised by the German press,” Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah wrote about Jaffar. “…He was Dhyan Chand’s right hand man and extremely useful in maintaining the morale of the team.”
The Olympic gold in hockey would stay in the subcontinent until 1972, with India winning gold in 1948, 1952, 1956 and 1964 and Pakistan doing so in 1960 and 1968.
A Tragic End
Unlike Olympic legends, Dhyan Chand and Ali Dara, SM Jaffar, who was at the peak of his athletic abilities in the mid-1930s, would not live to see the departure of the British from the subcontinent.
On the morning of March 21, 1937, Jaffar, an avid hunting enthusiast, went on a duck shoot with his friends on the banks of the Ravi River, near Lahore. The Olympian waded into the river to retrieve a duck that his dog was unable to get. Unknown to the party, the duck fell near a whirlpool in waist-deep water. Jaffar was sucked in, and his boots got caught in the reeds in the water. Despite being a skilled swimmer, he could not set himself free. The two-time Olympic gold medallist drowned in front of his friends in the Ravi. He was 25.
“It is too painful for me to recall here the incident of his most tragic death, which has deprived us of a brilliant ‘Old Boy’ of whom we were all unreservedly proud; no institution will mourn the death of Jaffar more than Aitchison College, of whose products he was the finest example,” Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah wrote.
SM Jaffar is remembered as an all-time hockey great in Pakistan. As a tribute to his contribution to hockey, Aitchison College constructed a hockey pavilion in 1939. The Ali Institute of Education in Lahore organises an annual hockey tournament in his name. In India, however, his name is known only among the diehard hockey fans of a much older and dying generation. Perhaps a celebration of the legacy of such common heroes of the subcontinent would act as a catalyst for better relations between the South Asian countries?
Ajay Kamalakaran is a writer and independent journalist, based in Mumbai. He is a Kalpalata Fellow for History & Heritage Writings for 2021.
source: http://www.scroll.in / Scroll.in / Home> Remembering History / by Ajay Kamalakaran / August 06th, 2021
Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru | Photo Credit: The Hindu
The lab has been set up to build cutting edge AI products in the healthcare domain, and bridge the gap between clinical medicine and technology by training healthcare professionals in AI
To understand disease patterns and improve treatment outcomes using artificial intelligence (AI) tools, Aster CMI Hospital has joined hands with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) to launch an AI lab.
The lab has been set up to build cutting edge AI products in the healthcare domain, and bridge the gap between clinical medicine and technology by training healthcare professionals in AI.
The lab was launched by Azad Moopen, founder Chairman and Managing Director, Aster DM Healthcare; Lokesh B., Consultant Neurology at the hospital; and Phaneendra K Yalavarthy, Professor of Medical Imaging, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, IISc.
Aster CMI will work with Prof. Phaneendra K Yalavarthy and his team on ‘Development of Deep Learning Methods for Automated Tracking and Segmentation of Nerves in Ultrasound Images’.
Sriram Ganapathy, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, IISc. has been collaborating on ‘Automatic Acute Stroke Symptom Detection Using Mobile Health Technologies’ and also on audio analytics in neurological disorders. Aster CMI believes that these initial projects have a direct impact on the current clinical practice in neurosciences.
At the launch, Dr Moopen said, “With the use of AI, doctors and medical providers will now be able to deliver more accurate diagnosis in the fastest possible time, which can aid the treatment journey. Also, AI would be a big leap towards predictive and proactive data analytics, which will improve preventive care recommendations for patients. We are glad to partner with IISc.”
Prof. Phaneendra K Yalavarthy, who has been instrumental in setting up the lab by providing the computational infrastructure and expertise, said, “AI-powered medical technologies have been rapidly evolving and have become powerful adjunct tools in clinical practice. The broad spectrum of digital medicine, especially to enable the 4P model of medicine (Predictive, Preventive, Personalised, and Participatory) involves natural collaboration between academic institutions and medical institutions.”
He said this artificial intelligence lab is a collaborative effort to develop these AI technologies in the hospital settings such that the translation to clinic will be seamless. “The initial focus of this collaborative lab will be in neurology and will later be expanded to other clinical specialities. We are thankful to Aster CMI for providing space to establish this lab in their hospital to enable co-development of some of these AI technologies for healthcare. This collaborative lab will enable the development of highly impactful research and technologies with a focus on translation to the bedside,” he said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> National> Karnataka / by The Hindu Bureau / Bengaluru – March 19th, 2022
Besides Aleppey Ashraf, eight people from different fields will also be honoured on the occasion
Noted script writer and filmmaker Aleppey Ashraf has been selected for the Prem Nazir Award for the year 2022 instituted by the Prem Nazir Samskarika Vedi on the occasion of the 33rd death anniversary of the actor.
The award will be presented at an event to be held at Kozhikode Town Hall on Tuesday at 5 p.m., which will be inaugurated by noted writer K.P. Ramanunni. Former MLA Purushan Kadalundi will be the guest of honour on the occasion.
Assistant Director R. Thankaraj will deliver the Prem Nazir commemoration lecture.
Besides Mr. Ashraf, eight people from different fields will also be honoured on the occasion.
As part of the event, a karaoke music competition will be held at the venue from 11 a.m. onwards.
Those interested in taking part in the competition may contact 8891922573 or 9778009088 to register.
There will also be a musical programme after the award ceremony, chairman of the Vedi P.T. Azad said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kozhikode / by Staff Reporter / Kozhikode – January 11th, 2022
