HERITAGE BYTES: Dilli and the Tale of the Two Pillars



Iron Pillar and Qutb Minar

Though the Iron Pillar and Qutub Minar are located around 15-20 meters apart, in terms of history, they cover a time of around 900 years. Between them, and the site they cover, they narrate the tale of transition from Rajput kingdoms to the Delhi Sultanate and also emergence of Delhi as a capital city.

 

The inscription on the Iron Pillar (belonging to 4th century CE) valorizes the achievements of Chandra II identified as Chandragupta II of the Gupta dynasty. This rust-free metallurgical marvel is also associated with the tale of Dilli. According to a popular legend, one Brahman told the Tomar king Ananagapala that the Pillar rested on serpent king Vasuki’s hood and was immoveable. Further, his rule would last as long as the Pillar stood firm. Out of curiosity, the king got the Pillar dug out only to find the base smeared with Vasuki’s blood. He tried hard to fix the Pillar.

However, even after several attempts, the Pillar remained loose (Dhili, in Hindi). The name of the capital ‘Delhi’ is often traced to this lore about the ‘dhili’ pillar. The Tomars soon lost the kingdom to the Chauhans who in turn lost it to the Turks. Qutubuddin Aibek, the slave general of victorious Muhammad Ghori built the capital city of Delhi in the heart of the former Rajput stronghold called the Lal Kot and Rai Pithora. The temple complex gave way to the ‘Quwwat-al Islam’ Mosque and a part of the Minar. The sky-scape of North India also changed with domes, minars, and arches replacing the flat-roofed or pyramid-shaped tops of the building structures. 

Known as ‘Qutb Saab ki Lath’ (the staff of Bakhtiyar Kaki, the Sufi saint respected hugely by Sultan Iltutmish who built the subsequent storeys), the Minar was popularly believed to connect the earth to the heaven. More importantly, it served as an imposing visual reminder to the advent of the new Sultanate and Islamic supremacy. 

Delhi never looked back after this and though the seats of power kept on changing within the city, it continued to remain the capital city. 

The two Pillars still stand tall talking to each other and to the visitors about the glorious and not-so-glorious times they have seen.

Written by Dr. Shashank Sekhar Sinha

Delectable Tales

Basa Fish with Zucchini and Broccoli

By Sajleen Bedi

I made this dish, for the first time, last night for dinner and it turned out really well. It is extremely simple and hassle free.

 The ingredients you’ll need to make this particular dish are:

• 500 gms basa fish (I ordered from Nature’s Basket, it’s by Cambay Tiger)
• 1 Zucchini
• 1 small broccoli head
• Seasonings

To marinate the fish, you need some seasonings. I love pepper and basil, so I added a pinch of both and some salt. You can also add thyme, rosemary (basically whichever flavor you like) and squeeze a bit of lemon juice in the end. Keep this marinated fish in the fridge for 15-20 minutes.

In the meanwhile, cut the vegetables. Take a nonstick pan and add a little bit of olive oil. Now add the vegetables. You can also add sweet corn if you like. Saute the vegetables for 2-3 minutes on medium flame until they are crunchy but cooked.

Take another pan and put some olive oil in it and then start cooking the fish. Add some salt and pepper according to taste. Cook the fish for 8-10 minutes. Basa takes very little time to become tender, so make sure not to overcook the fish. Now add the veggies and cook for another 5-10 minutes and cover it with a lid. In the end, squeeze some more lemon juice before serving the dish.

Cooking for me is all about experimenting. One can take a rough idea from a recipe, but one must give it a personal touch too. So add the seasonings and the vegetables you like. It is easy and doesn’t take much time to cook, and therefore is perfect for me.

So you think you can manel?

Manspreading: When a man sits with his legs wide apart,
invading the space of the occupant next to him.

All-male panels may soon be a thing of the past. Now, feminists are calling out organisers who turn the dais into a manference.

Over a year ago David Hasselhoff, the alpha male once-lifeguard from Baywatch, found himself a new (uninvited) career as the mascot of the 'manel' - the all-male panel. He appeared on a Tumblr called All Male Panels, started in Feb last year by Finnish feminist researcher Dr Saara Sarma. The Tumblr wanted to highlight the gender lopsidedness of discussion panels and other high altars of expertise and experience, like say, state cabinets and boardrooms. Sarma invited people to send in flyers or pictures of all-male events and seminars, which received Hasselhoff's virile stamp of approval: 'Congrats, you have an all male panel!.

The manel is being named and shamed worldwide, with memes, online petitions, boycotts and even spoken word poetry slamming it. 'Group thinking turns into brain shrinking; humans seeking meaning and development, male-only panels are such an embarrassment' raps Sofie Sandell, professional speaker and digital leader on YouTube. In India too, the stew's beginning to simmer.

Last year, Sairee Chahal, founder of Sheroes and Fleximoms — career communities for women — was invited to a top tech conference in Bangalore. "It has typically been a bro affair, but the organisers wanted to do an all-women panel for the first time, alongside their regular all-male sessions, Chahal recalls, "They had no context for the panel - the organisers asked me to identify women panelists and a suitable subject. We didn't do it eventually because the four other women I'd approached from tech felt there was no purpose to the panel."

Companies and conference organisers who are inviting a lone woman to a male-heavy dais simply to avoid the label of sexism are now being called out. Ashwini Asokan, co-founder and CEO of the Artificial Intelligence company, Mad Street Den, has been challenging sexism in the tech industry and got trolled for it. In fact, sexist putdowns are often what hold women back from taking the stage. "Several women started conversations on Twitter saying they lacked the confidence because of bullies and trolls," says Asokan.

She points out that India has more female engineering and computer science graduates than most countries (30- 40% of college seats), giving the lie to the specious claim that suitable women experts simply cannot be found. "It's why I pick up the phone, find them and push them to these panels," Asokan says.

To counter the old boys clubs that conferences and seminars have become, Asokan suggests that women create their own networks. "I was one of the biggest promoters of the Grace Hopper (Celebration of Women in Computing) conferences," she says, "I believe women-only events are a great training field; if you're shy to get up on a mixed gender panel and get bullied, here's where you start. Hopefully, in a few years we won't need women-only conferences at all."

Several women's organisations globally are building databases of women leaders and experts (a woman can nominate herself). Some like the UK-based Her Say and The Women's Room are also shoring up female experts across disciplines who can comment in the media (only 24% of women are heard, seen or read about in traditional media globally, revealed the Global Media Monitoring Project 2015).

ElsaMarie D'Silva, MD and co-founder of Red Dot Foundation, and her colleague, the Kenya-born Esther Ngumbi are assembling a crowd-sourced directory of women experts from around the world; they've got 500 profiles from 45 countries so far. "Filling panel spots with known names (often men) is easy. How can one discuss a topic of any importance without considering the views of 50% of the population?" says D'Silva, a resident of Mumbai. So far two international organisers in Australia and Shanghai have already reached out to them. Phase two will put those profiles on a map with the public listings.

D'Silva and Ngumbi recently wrote a blog post on GoodMenProject.com, appealing to men to also weigh in on the debate. In January, in a domino effect, three leading comics artists withdrew from the lifetime achievement award shortlist of a major comic-books festival in France because it was all-male, prompting several others to bow out as well in protest. In Australia earlier this month five male 'star' speakers pledged to boycott panels that weren't gender-diverse. Quartz also featured Sree Sreenivasan, the chief digital officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as one of those pledging to give all-male panels a miss.

But a panel is only one Tetris block; it needs to fit in with others to move the bar. An organization that doesn't channel more women into leadership roles would have accomplished nothing more than window dressing by asking a woman to a panel.

"Women don't crave patriarchal pats on the back; they deserve equal participation in public life. Their voices need to be respected and actioned. Women who speak up in public fora are called 'aggressive', 'militant', 'trouble-makers' and worse," says columnist Shobhaa De, who for years has occupied a place at the conference table. "I make sure I am heard loudly and clearly when I sign up for these panels. I turn the 'feeble' questions around when required. If it's an important enough panel discussion, I don't care if I am there as a 'token woman' — I make sure I have my say regardless."

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/deep-focus/So-you-think-you-can-manel/articleshow/52379744.cms

Walk the World Champions

Walk the World Champions who made this event a great success!

Ashish Purwar | Neeti Verma | Puja Kumari | Nitesh Singh | 

Gurkiran Kaur Shahi | Swati Chopra | Surabhi Srivastava | 

Deepak Chhabra | Shafina Segon | Sonali Bhardwaj

Recreation Club Elections 2016 results

And, we have the winners now!!

So, we had two days of campaigning, canvassing and loads of emails, artworks and enthusiasm!! It’s great to know that we have such creative minds amongst us.

 

For the first time in the history of T&F India, we had the ballot voting under which all employees cast their votes physically. Murugesh ji was very kind to take the ballot box and the voting slip to each employee at the YMCA office and collect the votes. 

Our outstation colleagues were also a part of this voting and voted electronically using the survey:

And we have the office bearers now!!

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL THE WINNERS:

President: RITESH BHUTANI

Secretary: MEER MEHTAAB HUSSAIN

Treasurer: ANKIT GUPTA

Ritesh, Meer, Ankit and Nominated Member Rajni Dhingra will form the Core Club Committee, and will lead the club and all its activities over the next year. 

Congratulations to all of them; we’re sure that they will make the T&F India Club a continued success story!

A special mention to all candidates who contested the elections. They fought it out in the right spirit, and it was great to see their ideas, enthusiasm, and innovative campaigns. The voting results indicate that it was a closely contested elections.

Finally, many thanks to all T&Fers for their tremendous interest and enthusiasm in the event. There was near 100 per cent polling with participation from outstation as well as in-office colleagues, with many people going out of their way to cast their votes. 

Ritesh, Meer, Ankit and Rajni, over to you to take our Club forward!

Walk the World, 18 April 2016

Informa Walk the World - 18^th April 2016; also the World Heritage and Monuments Day
Total funds collected: INR 31,200

Highlights of the day:

• 63 people from T&F India contributed 264 kilometers to the Walk the World challenge;
• Inclusive of the 1.5 Kms walk inside the Humayun’s tomb in one hour and 15 minutes!
• 50 colleagues from office - 26 male colleagues, 24 female colleagues
• 13 colleagues from outstation – all walked as promised. A big round of applause
• Walk scheduled on one of the most picturesque routes in Delhi (thanks to ma’am)
• The 3 km walk took a total of 25 minutes and 16 seconds
• We celebrated the World Heritage & Monuments Day appropriately at the Humayun’s Tomb
• Dr Shashank Sinha – our star curator, undoubtedly did a fantastic job! Thank you Shashank. You made this walk more worthwhile.  
• Healthy breakfast to end the day!

Walk the World Report by Sonali Bhardwaj (official reporter), pictures by Pooja Saxena (official photographer) attached.

A few thank you’ s are in order:

• Nitesh & Deepak for running around getting us police permissions to do the walk with Ashish Purwar. It was quite challenging. Thank you so much
• Swati Chopra & Neeti Verma ensuring that we end the walk with a healthy breakfast from choosing vendors and food tasting to finalizing menus. Thank you both.
• Surabhi and Gurkiran for creating those beautiful placards with Deepak, which added so much more value to the walk

And, to Sonali & Deepak for getting us those wonderful T-shirts and bands in a super timeframe of one week

The Day:

We all were very excited in the morning for the iconic charity walk. The reason behind the excitement was of course the walk, but also that this not just the walk but a heritage walk, with picturesque route. In the cool breeze of Delhi, we started our 3km walk at 7.30 am from Lodhi Gardens to Humayun’s tomb.

Ready for walk

Colleagues holding the posters about Delhi during the walk

One more added advantage was that today was the World Heritage Day so there were no entry fee to the Humayun’s tomb. Yayyy!!

At the entrance of Humayun Tomb

Dr Sinha described every detail about the tomb very minutely which attracted a lot of spectators. Even some outsiders joined us! We distributed reading material curated by our walk champions Surabhi and Gurkiran in consultation with Nitasha ma’am, who shared with us some lovely reading material on Delhi.

These are the two must read books if you liked what you read for your Humayun’s Tomb notes:

• Delhi on Road by Supriya Sahay


• Delhi - its monuments & History by Narayani Gupta Spear Percival, Laura Sykes 

Dr Sinha explaining inside the tomb

 The walk ended with delicious healthy breakfast after the walk which everyone enjoyed J

 Testimonials from the colleagues:

• Very well organized, look forward to attend more walks like this

- Deepak Chhabra, Graphic Designer, Marketing

• The walk, the curator and the breakfast everything was perfect

-          Swati Gambhir, Researcher - Statistics, Europa

• The breakfast was very healthy and tasty

-          Zaki Mehdi, Researcher - Statistics, Editorial

• Very well structured and planned

-          Dimple Francis, Executive Secretary to MD, HR & Administration

Taylor & Francis Journals Editorial Roundtables 2016

The Taylor & Francis Journals Editorial Roundtables 2016 for South Asia were held at Le Méridien in Bengaluru and Vivanta by Taj in Hyderabad on the 8 and the 9 of March respectively. The theme for both Roundtables was ‘Indian Author­­s in the Global Arena.’ Both venues saw several enthusiastic journal authors and editors in attendance. In Bengaluru, there were 137 participants while Hyderabad saw an equally eager participation of about 100 academics.

 

 

 

All the participants received Taylor & Francis Online bags which contained a useful folder and documents on publishing tips for authors, open access, Editors’ Resources newsletters, a South Asia journals catalogue and the Taylor & Francis Peer Review White Paper. The kit also comprised a USB drive that had all the electronic files of the documents and several useful videos such as ‘Article metrics - what do they mean, and why are they important for researchers’, ‘Publish your Open Access article with Taylor & Francis’, ‘What to think about before you start to write a journal article, etc.

Both days started off with a welcome address by Nitasha Devasar, the Managing Director of Taylor & Francis India. She briefly outlined the South Asia Journals Programme of the Taylor & Francis Group, and introduced the esteemed panel seated on the dais, including Dr David Green, Publishing Director – International; Gerald Dorey, Associate Editorial Director; and Dr Colin Bulpitt, Publisher, Physical Sciences. In Hyderabad, our guest speaker was Dr Ajaya Kumar Sahoo, Editor of South Asian Diaspora.

Dr David Green presented on ‘Sharing in Success! Indian Authors in the Global Arena.’ He spoke about the increasingly demanding and complex world of scholarly and academic publishing with people often in multiple roles such as author, researcher, editor, reviewer, collaborator, analyst, fundraiser, etc. and the role of the academic publisher. Dr Green stressed on the importance of quality in journal publishing. He encouraged Indian authors to concentrate on visibility, outreach, impact and public engagement by collaborating on research with the international academic community.

 

The next presentation was by Gerald Dorey on ‘Digital Trends and Developments.’ He charted India’s research output and compared it with data from BRICS, Asia-Pacific and the world. He talked about the research from the top institutions in the areas of STM and SSH in India. The fact that this showed a relatively lower research output from India in SSH stimulated a discussion about the possible reasons amongst the participants. He also spoke at length about the new developments in journal publishing such as open access.

 

The next presentation was ‘Making your research have impact’ by Anindita Pandey. She outlined the various platforms and social media networks that can help authors engage with a larger audience beyond the academic community. She also discussed tools such as Altmetrics that can enable authors to measure the ‘social impact’ of their research and target the right kind of audience for their papers. She also informed the audience about various innovative means of promoting articles, such as the T&F cartoon abstracts, video abstracts, blogging, etc.

 

The final presentation was Dr Colin Bulpitt’s on ‘Publishing Ethics.’ He defined common ethical issues such as plagiarism, self-plagiarism, data fabrication, ‘salami-slicing’, etc. as per current international standards. Following this, he described the processes and procedures that Taylor & Francis follows to keep plagiarism and other academic malpractices in check. He also talked about initiatives such as ‘Think-Check-Submit’ that guides authors to submit papers to genuine journals. He then interacted with the audience by seeking their views on publishing ethics by presenting case studies on issues such as authorship, text recycling and duplicate publication.

 

At the Hyderabad roundtable, Dr Ajaya Kumar Sahoo shared his experience of being an editor of a Taylor & Francis journal. He talked about how the journal has grown and developed over the last 7 years. He illustrated the global nature of the journal by showing the increase in international submissions that the journal has seen recently. He also spoke about the high publishing standards that Taylor & Francis set with regard to peer review, publishing ethics, production and dissemination.

 

 

Besides the presentations, the roundtables also saw the participants releasing copies of a booklet on copyright – What is Copyright? – that was created by T&F in collaboration with other stakeholders in the publishing industry. It was preceded by a fun, although a tad tough, quiz on copyright, with the winners receiving T&F mugs as prizes!

 

Both roundtables received an outstanding reception. There was vigorous interaction among the participants regarding all the discussions and presentations. Several issues were discussed and deliberated upon. The discussions carried on into the tea breaks and the sumptuous lunches. Most participants responded positively to both events in the feedback forms.

 

Taylor & Francis endeavours to continue the conversation and keep the Indian academic community engaged and help them become more visible globally. See you next year!

 

 

The roundtables were also featured in the monthly newspaper Book Link that covers news and events pertaining to publishing. One of the participants spoke to the Book Link correspondent:

‘I would like to thank the Taylor & Francis Group for the opportunity to take part in the roundtable convention held at Bangalore. We found the meeting very fruitful and it gave us many insights into the STM publishing scenario.

- N. Maheshchandra, Deputy Executive Secretary, Indian Academy of Sciences

Book Link, 8(4), New Delhi: April 2014

Another report on the Hyderabad roundtable by Professor Jhilam Chattaraj from RBVRR Women’s College, Hyderabad can be found here on the blog of her college’s literary club: http://thequillsclub.blogspot.in/2016/03/a-tailor-made-event-report-on-taylor.html

 

Pictures of the event can be at:

• Bangalore
• Hyderabad

 

In India, Education and the Government Drive the Publishing Market

An article featuring interview of our Managing Director in Publishing Weekly magazine; a weekly news magazine focusing on the international book publishing business. The interview explores the higher education system in India with special context to academic publishing.

The online version can be read here: http://publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/69232-in-india-education-and-the-government-drive-the-publishing-market.html

A free eBook on Leadership

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Awareness about Copyright

Taylor & Francis Group hosted three events in November – two librarian roadshows and one author event from 19^th till the 23^rd of November that saw participation from over 200 librarians and over 75 academicians, authors, research students and editors.

In each of these events, we kept a special slot on raising awareness about copyright through discussion about the concept by our managing director India, Nitasha Devasar followed by a copyright quiz and subsequent distribution of the copyright booklets. The quiz winners were given prizes for their answers.

Here are some images from the three events that reflect the reach of this endeavour as well as the acknowledgement of its importance.

We are now in the process of sending the soft copies in pdf version of the copyright booklet to all the attendees as well as other contacts through a special copyright campaign to raise awareness about the same. In January 2016, we shall also launch an online copyright awareness quiz with a prize on offer as a part of our awareness campaign. 

Librarians at the Kolkata Roadshow on 19^th November

holding the copyright booklets in their hands

Taylor & Francis staff talking about copyright 

at the Roadshows and author events

                                 

                                Keynote speaker and senior librarians acknowledging 
                                       copyright as an important part of awareness

                                    

                                  Academicians and Librarians at the roadshows and 

                                        author events attempting the copyright quiz

Answering the copyright quiz questions

Winner of the Copyright Quiz at the Roadshow

Librarians' Feedback:

I have been writing and presenting papers on copyright esp. in digital era and widely delivered lectures (as recently as August and October in AP Agriculture Univ and Hyderabad Central University.  You have distributed a small booklet on what is Copyright and told that you will send the digital copy if anyone needs for distribution. I request you to please mail digital copy for distribution to library professionals. Needless to say, I will acknowledge T&F for the booklet. I look forward to receiving the copy.