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Monthly Archives: April 2015

  • 19

HK-based Indian yoga teacher sets world record

Hong Kong-based Indian yoga teacher Yogaraj C.P. has set a new Guinness World Record by performing more than 1600 asanas for 40 hours and 15 minutes – without a break. He began the Maha Yoga Sadhana on February 13 and performed yoga on successive nights of February 13 and 14 before achieving the incredible feat on February 15. Yogaraja, who has been teaching yoga over the past 20 years and took a proactive role in popularizing yoga in Hong Kong, decided to create a new world record after the India-led resolution for declaring 21June as the International Yoga Day was passed at the UN last year.

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  • 18

Legal hurdles remain for Obamacare

President Barack Obama’s signature legislative initiative– Affordable Care Act—completed five years of its meaningful existence. The President signed the epoch-making law on March 23, 2010 which has transformed the lives of more than 16 million Americans.
Prior to Obamacare, the U.S. was one of the only developed nations that didn’t have a national health program.

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  • 17

How we can put Indian Railways back on track

Every Indian, I’m sure, has an incredible romantic railway memory. Remember the scene in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955), the breathtaking milestone of world cinema, where we see the boundless joy on the faces of Apu and Durga when they are sprinting through kash fields to see the oncoming train? The sight of the train filled the brother-sister duo with utter delight. The portrayal of the kids’ wonderment has been Ray’s master stroke and a cinematic tour de force.
Well, the memories of happy journey have faded into oblivion after successive central leaderships have jerry-rigged things resulting in a massive mess for the ‘nation’s lifeline’.

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  • 24

Satya Dash: Odisha’s Green Crusader

With the sun disappearing stealthily on the horizon and shadows lengthening on the platform, Howrah-Puri Shatabdi screeched to a halt at Balasore. My host Dr Rabinarayan Dash spotted me among the crowd and rushed to greet me.
“Hey, you’re finally at Balasore,” said Dr Rabi, a renowned rheumatologist based in Lund, Sweden. I was supposed to visit his native village, Badasindhiya, 10km from downtown Balasore.

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  • 25

Education in Bengal: A teacher’s trauma

Destination: Kalitala High School, Hingalganj block, on the India-Bangladesh border, 120 km from Kolkata
Protagonist: A young teacher
This is the story of a teacher, of her intense passion for teaching, of her undying spirit and above all her daily struggle for survival. She’s been taking the long and arduous journey from Dum Dum to a remote hamlet called Kalitala in Hingalganj in north 24 Parganas on the India-Bangladesh border over the past five years.

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  • 23

Kabir: When will Ananda Publishers correct this goof-up?

In the book Kabir by Kshtimohon Sen, on the blurb (at the back), it is written: “In 1808, Prof Sen joined Bisva-Bharati ….” This is a gross factual mistake…
How is it possible? Rabindranath Tagore was born in 1861 and Prof Sen was born in 1880.
In the column Boikolom, the Ananda Publishers used to ridicule little magazines with religious regularity, and try tenaciously to find out little flaws as if they are the final word on Bengali language and literature. The Boikolom used to make snarky comments about these little magazines and many of these magazines folded up later.

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