My Science School

Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi Nehru; 19 November 1917 – 31 October 1984) was an Indian politician and a central figure of the Indian National Congress. She was the first and, to date, only female Prime Minister of India. Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. She served as prime minister from January 1966 to March 1977 and again from January 1980 until her assassination in October 1984, making her the second longest-serving Indian prime minister after her father.

Indira Gandhi was born Indira Nehru into a Kashmiri Pandit family on 19 November 1917 in Allahabad. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a leading figure in India's political struggle for independence from British rule, and became the first Prime Minister of the Dominion (and later Republic) of India. She was the only child (a younger brother died young), and grew up with her mother, Kamala Nehru, at the Anand Bhavan, a large family estate in Allahabad. She had a lonely and unhappy childhood. Her father was often away, directing political activities or incarcerated, while her mother was frequently bedridden with illness, and later suffered an early death from tuberculosis. She had limited contact with her father, mostly through letters.

She had been Minister for Information and Broadcasting (1964- 1966). Then she held the highest office as the Prime Minister of India from January 1966 to March 1977. Concurrently, she was the Minister for Atomic Energy from September 1967 to March 1977. She also held the additional charge of the Ministry of External Affairs from September 5, 1967 to February 14, 1969. Smt. Gandhi headed the Ministry of Home Affairs from June 1970 to November 1973 and Minister for Space from June 1972 to March 1977. From January 1980 she was Chairperson, Planning Commission. She again chaired the prime Minister’s Office from January 14, 1980.

 

Picture Credit : Google

When Dan Brown was growing up, his parents decided not to keep a television in the house. So he spent his childhood playing the piano, reading and solving puzzles. He started writing piano pieces when he was five, and aspired to become a musician before turning to writing. Brown's first children's book "Wild Symphony", which released in September, is a combination of his love for music and his passion for storytelling and mysteries.

What's the book about?

"Wild Symphony" is about a musical conductor-it’s a mouse named Maestro. At the beginning of the book, you learn that Maestro mouse is preparing to put on a musical concert with a motley team of wild animals from blue whales and kangaroos to ostriches and cheetahs. Each animal has a special secret, and readers have to guess what it is by decoding the jumbled letters hidden throughout the stunning illustrations in the book.

Accompanied by music

Scanning the QR code given in the book will lead you to a free, augmented reality app. You can listen to music by pointing your phone camera towards each page. The music has been composed by Brown himself. Each animal is accompanied by a musical score, which reflects its special personality - whether it is upbeat and fun like bouncing kangaroos or quirky like the buzzing bees. All the 21 musical pieces are performed by the Zagreb Festival Orchestra, Croatia.

Life lessons

In addition to playing a musical instrument, the animals offer a valuable life lesson to the readers don't be afraid to be yourself and failure is a stepping stone towards success. This interactive musical picture book is a delight for the eyes and ears!

Did you know?

Like Brown, many famous authors have dabbled in children's books. Here are some examples:

• Salman Rushdie - "Haroun and The Sea of Other Stories


• Ernest Hemingway-"The Faithful Bull"


• Gertrude Stein - "The World Is Round"


• Margaret Atwood - "Up In The Tree


• James Joyce - "The Cat And The Devil"

 

Picture Credit : Google

Alfred Nobel was born in Sweden on October 21, 1833. He was interested in literature, but his family steered him towards chemical engineering, to follow his father’s example. Nobel’s father Immanuel was an engineer who experimented with different explosives.

An explosive discovery

Once while mixing different additives to nitroglycerine, Nobel discovered that adding fine sand – silica – turns the liquid into paste, which made it safer and easier to handle. He moulded the paste into rods, which could be inserted into holes for controlled explosions. Nobel patented his discovery as dynamite. Always eager to experiment and innovate, he acquired as many as 355 patents during his lifetime; most of them dealt with manufacturing arms and helped him earn a fortune.

A change of heart

An unusual incident that took place in 1888 forced Nobel to re-evaluate his life. A French newspaper mistakenly published an obituary on him (instead of his brother Ludvig who had died due to a heart attack.) Titled "The Merchant of Death," it criticised Nobel for the sale of arms. The error was later corrected, but it continued to prick his conscience. On November 27, 1895, Nobel signed his last will and testament, stipulating that 94% of his assets should be used to establish a series of five awards to felicitate excellence in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Physiology, Literature and Peace. Nobel died in 1896 and the Nobel Prizes were handed out for the very first time in 1901.

ON THE 2020 HONOUR ROLL

• Chemistry: Jointly awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna "for the development of a method for genome editing."


• Physics: One half to Roger Penrose for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity" and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."


• Physiology and Medicine: Shared between Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus."


• Literature: U.S. poet Louise Glück for "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."


• Peace: The UN World Food Programme (WFP).

DID YOU KNOW?

• Have you ever wondered why the Nobel Prize winners are called laureates? The word Laureate' refers to the laurel wreath' which is a symbol of victory and honour in Greek mythology.


• Marie Curie is the only person who was awarded the Nobel in two different scientific categories - Physics and Chemistry.


• Malala Yousafzai is the youngest to win the Nobel. She was only 17 when she won the Nobel Peace Prize.


• John B. Goodenough is the oldest person to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He won in 2019 at the age of 97.


•  

Picture Credit : Google

Multiple words, extraordinary creatures, cracking adventures, and quantum physics – welcome to Philip Pullman’s universe. It’s a world you may be familiar with world you like reading fantasy novels. Now, a previously unseen “His Dark Material” story written by Pullman over a decade ago, which he never intended to publish, will be released this month. Are you ready to dive into Pullman’s universe?

Early life

In 1956, Pullman, along with his stepfather, visited the area affected by the River Murray floods in Australia. The swelling floodwaters had devastated entire towns in three States, leaving an immense grey mass as far as the eye could see. Everything was submerged under water. It inspired him to pick up the pen. These memories helped him write “His Dark Materials” – trilogy and “La Belle Sauvage: The Book of Dust.”

What’s the new book about?

The new book called “Serpentine”, is a novella set after the end of the trilogy “His Dark Materials”, but before the start of Pullman’s recent book, “The Secret Commonwealth.” The story sees Lyra and her daemon Pantalaimon return to Trollesund, the remote town where she first met the armoured bear lorek Byrnison and aeronaut Lee Scoresby in “Northern Lights”

Pullman wrote the story for a charity auction in 2004, at the request of Nicholas Hytner, then director at the National Theatre, during the company’s production of “His Dark Materials.”

Who is Lyra?

Lyra is the main character in Philip’s trilogy of books called “His Dark Materials.”

First released in 1995, the books have now sold more than 17 million copies around the world, and been turned into a film and TV series.

He also wrote a follow-up series called the “Book of Dust”, which tells the story of Lyra as a baby, and as an adult.

Pullman is currently writing the final book in the “Book of Dust” trilogy which will perhaps be the last on Lyra’s story.

Oh Really?

• On September 1, 2020, he ignited a debate on Twitter on punctuation, saying: “apparently young people feel that full stops are threatening or angry and messages are friendlier without them bunch of wimps”.


• Popular singer Ed Sheeran is a fan of Pullman. Sheeran has named his newborn daughter Lyra, after the heroine of his favourite “His Dark Materials” series.


• While writing “La Belle Sauvage”, Pullman had vowed not to cut his hair until it was finished. Judith, his wife of 47 years, finally chopped off his ponytail after he completed the book.


• Pullman writes only three pages a day. The rituals sacred and he has been following it since he started writing.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Narayan won numerous awards during the course of his literary career. His first major award was in 1958, the Sahitya Akademi Award for The Guide. When the book was made into a film, he received the Filmfare Award for the best story. In 1964, he received the Padma Bhushan during the Republic Day honours. In 1980, he was awarded the AC Benson Medal by the (British) Royal Society of Literature, of which he was an honorary member. In 1982 he was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, but never won the honour.

Born to a schoolteacher father, he took the name R. K. Narayan at the suggestion of his close friend and another great author, Graham Greene. He learnt Tamil and English in school. He did his initial studies at the residence of his grandmother and eventually moved to Mysore with his parents, when his father got appointed as headmaster of the Maharaja’s High School in Mysore.

R. K. Narayan earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mysore and went to the United States in 1956 at the invitation of the Rockefeller Foundation. His literary career began with his short stories, which appeared in ‘The Hindu’ newspaper. He began to work as the Mysore correspondent of ‘Justice’, a Madras-based newspaper. When he could not get his first novel ‘Swami and Friends’ published, a mutual friend showed the draft to Graham Greene who agreed to arrange for its publication.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Neena Bhandari Sydney, May 29 (PTI) Prominent novelist and human rights activist Arundhati Roy has been awarded the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize for her work in social campaigns and advocacy of non-violence.

"Arundhati Roy is a distinguished world citizen. She is an outstanding communicator who writes with great clarity and grace. At a time of terrible disregard for human life, we need to hear from citizens like Arundhati Roy", Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, Professor Stuart Rees said.

The prize, the only international peace prize awarded in Australia, was announced by the Foundation's Chairman Alan Cameron last night.

Each year the prize is awarded to an organisation or individual who has made significant contributions to global peace, including improvements in personal security and steps towards eradicating poverty and other forms of structural violence.

Roy, author of the 1997 Booker Prize winning `The God of Small Things', will deliver the City of Sydney Peace Prize Lecture in Sydney on November 3.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Born in 1952 in Calcutta, India, Vikram Seth was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Stanford University and Nanjing University.

He has travelled widely and lived in Britain, California, India and China. His first novel, The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986), describes the experiences of a group of friends living in California. His acclaimed epic of Indian life, A Suitable Boy (1993), won the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Overall Winner, Best Book). 

Vikram Seth is an Indian poet, novelist, travel writer, librettist, children's writer, biographer and memoirist.



During the course of his doctorate studies at Stanford, he did his field work in China and translated Hindi and Chinese poetry into English. He returned to Delhi via Xinjiang and Tibet which led to a travel narrative From Heaven Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.

The Golden Gate: A Novel in Verse (1986) was his first novel describing the experiences of a group of friends who live in California. A Suitable Boy (1993), an epic of Indian life set in the 1950s, got him the WH Smith Literary Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

 

Picture Credit : Google

For the second time, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie has been judged the best ever winner of the Booker prize. The Best of Booker award, which has been announced at the London literature festival this afternoon, marks the prize's 40th anniversary. A similar contest - the Booker of Bookers - was held in 1993 to coincide with its 25th birthday, and came to the same conclusion.

Midnight's Children is a teeming fable of postcolonial India, told in magical-realist fashion by a telepathic hero born at the stroke of midnight on the day the country became independent. First published in 1981, it was met with little immediate excitement. It was an unexpected winner, but went on to garner critical and popular acclaim around the world. The novel's popularity, very unusually for a literary award, is what has secured the prize, having been picked from the shortlist by an online public vote that drew just over 7,800 votes. The shortlist itself was selected by a panel of judges - the biographer, novelist and critic Victoria Glendinning; writer and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup, and John Mullan, professor of English at University College London.

 

Picture Credit : Google

In a first, recognition for an English writer, Amitav Ghosh has been announced as 2018's Jnanpith Award winner for "outstanding contribution towards literature".

Ghosh's work, though fiction, finds an interconnection between the historical disturbances and the human distress spread across cultures and races. His academic background as a historian and a social anthropologist enable him to go to depths, not everyone can go.

Amitav Ghosh has explored Indian protagonists ranging across a wide international field, including Bangladesh, England, Egypt and Myanmar in both his fictional and discursive writings.

Born in Kolkata in 1956 to a Bengali Hindu family, the 62-year-old author currently lives in New York with his wife Deborah Baker.

Amitav Ghosh, who spent his formative years in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria. Ghosh is also recipient of the Padma Shri and Sahitya Akademi Award.

The Jnanpith Award is an Indian literary award for individual contributions to literature. It was instituted in 1961 by the cultural organization Bharatiya Jnanpith to honour the best creative literary writing in any of the 22 "scheduled languages'.

The winner gets a cash prize along with a citation and a bronze replica of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Anushka Ravishankar is an award-winning author of children's books, and co-founder of Duckbill Books, a publishing house. Ravishankar sent her first few stories to Tinkle, a comic book published by Amar Chitra Katha. When two of these stories won a contest organised by the magazine, the publisher of Tinkle offered her a job, but Ravishankar could only freelance for Tinkle as she was staying home to care for her young daughter. When her family moved to Chennai in 1996, she was hired to be an editor at Tara Books, a children's publishing house in the city. There she authored Tiger on a Tree, a book of nonsense verse that was translated to Japanese, Korean and French. While the book only sold about 2500 copies in India, it sold over 10000 copies in the United States and over 7000 copies in France. She also worked as Publishing Director at Scholastic India.

She founded the Duckbill Publishing House in 2012 with Sayoni Basu.

She is sometimes called the Indian Dr. Seuss.

Ravishankar was born in Nashik, and graduated in mathematics from Fergusson College, Pune in 1981. While at college, she was influenced by the works of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Edward Gorey. After completing her post-graduation in operations research, Ravishankar worked with an IT firm in Nashik for a while. She became a full-time writer after the birth of her daughter.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Indian playwright and journalist Annie Zaidi was announced the winner of the 2019 Nine Dots Prize for her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus.

The Nine Dots Prize is a book prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues. Entrants for the prize are asked to respond to a question in 3,000 words and the winner receives $1,00,000 to write a short book expanding on the essay’s idea. The question this year was “Is there still no place like home?”

Zaidi said she had been working towards a similarly themed project for a while, but she did not “have the financial, or even mental, bandwidth to do it justice”. “The Prize will allow me to dedicate time to the examination of this question, which is of critical importance in the modern world – and it will help fund the necessary research trips, which, as a freelancer, is something I appreciate hugely.”

Zaidi’s book based on her Nine Dots Prize-winning essay will be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2020.

The entries for the prize were judged anonymously by 11 members of the Nine Dots Prize Board which comprises academics, journalists and thinkers. The board is chaired by Professor Simon Goldhill, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. “In Annie Zaidi we have found a powerful and compelling voice with a unique insight into what home means for citizens of the world today,” said Goldhill. “We are very excited to see how Annie’s work will develop over the coming year and hope that it will help further current conversations around the concept of belonging worldwide.

 

Picture Credit : Google

In 2015, Nayantara Sahgal returned the Sahitya Akademi Award she received in 1986 for her novel ‘Rich Like Us’.

Nayantara Sahgal is an Indian writer in English. Her fiction deals with India's elite responding to the crises engendered by political change. She was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru family (not the Nehru-Gandhi family as she so often points out), the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.

Sahgal's father Ranjit Sitaram Pandit was a barrister from Kathiawad. Pandit was also a classical scholar who had translated Kalhana's epic history Rajatarangini into English from Sanskrit.[citation needed] He was arrested for his support of Indian independence and died in Lucknow prison jail in 1944, leaving behind his wife (Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit) and their three daughters Chandralekha Mehta, Nayantara Sehgal and Rita Dar.[citation needed]

Sahgal's mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was the daughter of Motilal Nehru and sister of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Vijayalakshmi had been active in the Indian freedom struggle, had been to jail for this cause and in 1946, was part of the first team representing newly formed India that went to the then newly formed United Nations, along with M.C.Chagla. After India achieved independence, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit served as a member of India's Constituent Assembly, the governor of several Indian states, and as India's ambassador to the Soviet Union, the United States, Mexico, the Court of St. James, Ireland, and the United nations.

Sahgal attended a number of schools as a girl, given the turmoil in the Nehru family during the last years (1935–47) of the Indian freedom struggle. Ultimately, she graduated from Woodstock School in the Himalayan hill station of Landour in 1943 and later in the United States from Wellesley College (BA, 1947), which she attended along with her sister Chandralekha, who graduated 2 years earlier in 1945. She has made her home for decades in Dehradun, a town close to Landour where she had attended boarding school (at Woodstock).

 

Picture Credit : Google

The novelist Kiran Desai won the Man Booker Prize for "The Inheritance of Loss," a novel that examines identity, displacement and the indissoluble bonds of family.

Desai spent seven years writing the novel. The loss in her title is chiefly the loss of faith in India felt among the legions that overstay tourist visas and become illegal immigrants in the US. Her story counterpoints the lives of an embittered old judge, a survivor of British colonial rule, with those of his loyal cook and the cook's son, one of the immigrants who scrabble for subsistence on developing world pay in New York.

Desai has said in interviews that her title "speaks of little failures, passed down from generation to generation.

Announcing the long list of 19 books on August 14, Prof Lee said: "It's a list in which famous established novelists rub shoulders with little known newcomers."

On September 14, when the shortlist of six titles was published, it became evident that she and her fellow-judges had done something rare in the 38-year annals of Booker: they had dumped the famous writers and picked mainly little-known newcomers.

 

Picture Credit : Google

Mahasweta Devi (14 January 1926 – 28 July 2016) was an Indian fiction writer in Bengali and a socio-political activist. Her notable literary works include Hajar Churashir Maa, Rudali, and Aranyer Adhikar. She was a self-recognised communist and worked for the rights and empowerment of the tribal people (Lodha and Shabar) of West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh states of India. She was honoured with various literary awards such as the Sahitya Akademi Award (in Bengali), Jnanpith Award and Ramon Magsaysay Award along with India's civilian awards Padma Shri and Padma Vibhushan.

Devi wrote over 100 novels and over 20 collections of short stories primarily written in Bengali but often translated to other languages. Her first novel, titled Jhansir Rani, based on a biography of the Rani of Jhansi was published in 1956. She had toured the Jhansi region to record information and folk songs from the local people for the novel.

Mahasweta Devi's specialisation lied in the studies of Adivasi, Dalit and Marginalized citizens with a focus on their women. They were associated as protestor in the face of the oppressive British rule, the Mahajanas and upper class corruption and injustice. She lived in the Adivasi villages in West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh years afer years, befriending them and learning from them. She has embodied their struggles and sacrifices in her words and characters. She had claimed that her stories aren't her creation, they are the stories of the people of her country. Such an example is her work " Chotti Mundi Ebong Tar Tir"

In 1964, she began teaching at Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College (an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta system). In those days Vijaygarh Jyotish Ray College was an institution for working-class women students. During that period she also worked—as a journalist and as a creative writer. She studied the Lodhas and Shabars, the tribal communities of West Bengal, women and dalits. In her elaborate Bengali fiction, she often depicted the brutal oppression on the tribal people and untouchables by the powerful authoritarian upper-caste landlords, money-lenders, and venal government officials. She wrote of the source of her inspiration:Postcolonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has translated Devi's short stories into English and published three books Imaginary Maps (1995, Routledge), Old Woman (1997, Seagull), The Breast Stories (1997, Seagull).

 

Picture Credit : Google