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Under the grace of Shri Ramana Maharishi, RAMANA STUDY-POINT is a small effort for providing study material for those who are preparing for the Indian Civil Services. (IAS, IPS, IFS, IRS, etc)
Wednesday 14 September 2011
Vitamins
PERIODIC TABLE FOR VITAMINS
Vitamin Deficiency Symptoms ChartVitamin B appears to help relieve stress. There are probably enough B group vitamins in most of the food that we eat, but if you want to look into natural alternatives for better health then consult your doctor or natro-path for advice on taking this vitamin. B vitamins are important to emotional and neurological health. If you take supplemental B complex with your regular multi-vitamin/mineral, you should take a combination with extra C; this helps your body to metabolize the B vitamins better. Please see the following vitamins chart for your reference:
Vitamins and depression What is the relationship between the Vitamins and Depression? There are a variety of vitamin deficiencies that can lead to depression symptoms. Correcting deficiencies, when present, often relieves depression. B-Vitamin Problems May Cause Depression in Some. The first clinical effects of insufficient vitamin B complex are mood changes, insomnia, changes in appetite, sugar carving and impaired drug metabolism. As a group, the B vitamins plays an important role both in alleviating depression and in relieving the anxiety and restlessness which often accompanies it. |
Vitamin B - B2 and its deficiency leading Depression Although this vitamin itself has not generally associate with emotional states, researchers find that diets restricted only in riboflavin produce adverse personality changes, including aggressive personality alterations. Vitamin B3 Vitamin B deficiency has been associated with depression ans anxiety. It helps in irritability and other mental disturbances. Vitamin B - B5 Vitamin B5 is active in the formation of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which can be involved in some depression. A deficiency can caues depression, fatigue and allergies. Vitamin B6 Vitamin B6 has a major importance in regulating your mood disorders and is the most implicated of all the vitamins in the cause and treatment od depression. Vitamin B12 and its deficiency leading depression The mental changes caused by deficiency of Vitamin B12 can raise from difficulty in concentrating or remembering, mental fatigue and low moods, to a severe depression, intense agitation etc. |
Friday 9 September 2011
ECONOMIC SURVEY OF INDIA 2010-2011
ECONOMIC SURVEY 2010-2011
- The Economic Survey to review the economic performance in the current financial year and forecast the economy prospects for the coming year.
- Indian economy to grow by 9 per cent in next fiscal year.
- Gross fiscal deficit decreases to 4.8% of GDP.
- Inflation estimated to be higher by 1.5%.
- India on way to become fastest growing economy in the world.
- Calls for new 'Green Revolution' for agricultural sector with higher investment and introduction of latest technologies.
- Government working on regulations to emphasize on capital market.
- Increase influx of foreign capital by building close association with G-20 countries.
- National Forest Land Bank to improvise the infrastructure projects.
- Estimated economic growth at 8.75-9.25 per cent for fiscal year 2012.
- Estimated agriculture sector growth at 5.4 per cent during this fiscal year.
- Growth of Industrial output by 8.6% where, manufacturing sector registers 9.1%.
- The export stats; 29.5% in 2010 April-December and Import; 19%.
- Trade gap minimizes to $82.01 billion.
- Raised both saving and investment rate to 33.7% & 36.5% of GDP.
- Estimated food grains production at 232.10 million tonnes.
- Fores reserves to reach $297.30 billion.
- Importance given to telecommunication sector.
- Policies supporting accounting, legal, tourism, education, financial and other services.
- Taxation of goods and services to be revised.
- Introduction of Financial Schemes to monitor unemployment.
- Reformation necessary in the current education system by inviting more private participation.
Sunday 4 September 2011
A HANGING (DEATH PENALTY) by GEORGE ORWELL
The barbarity and “unspeakable wrongness” of capital punishment — of “cutting a life short when it is in full tide” — has rarely been brought out as powerfully and as movingly as in George Orwell's 2000-word essay, “A Hanging.” Published in 1931 in The Adelphi, a British literary magazine, this journalistic gem describes the execution of a criminal in Burma — where Eric Arthur Blair, which was Orwell's real name, served in the British Imperial Police between 1922 and 1927. The clinical tone of the narration of the forced march to the gallows serves as a perfect foil to the moral revulsion and horror that Orwell wanted his readers to experience. The Hindu publishes, with permission from the copyright holder, “A Hanging” as part of its editorial campaign for the abolition of capital punishment in India. This is in the context of the scheduled execution, now stayed, of three convicts in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case and the impending execution of other convicts on death row — Editor-in-Chief.
It was in Burma, a sodden morning of the rains. A sickly light, like yellow tinfoil, was slanting over the high walls into the jail yard. We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages. Each cell measured about ten feet by ten and was quite bare within except for a plank bed and a pot of drinking water. In some of them brown silent men were squatting at the inner bars, with their blankets draped round them. These were the condemned men, due to be hanged within the next week or two.
One prisoner had been brought out of his cell. He was a Hindu, a puny wisp of a man, with a shaven head and vague liquid eyes. He had a thick, sprouting moustache, absurdly too big for his body, rather like the moustache of a comic man on the films. Six tall Indian warders were guarding him and getting him ready for the gallows. Two of them stood by with rifles and fixed bayonets, while the others handcuffed him, passed a chain through his handcuffs and fixed it to their belts, and lashed his arms tight to his sides. They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water. But he stood quite unresisting, yielding his arms limply to the ropes, as though he hardly noticed what was happening.
Eight o'clock struck and a bugle call, desolately thin in the wet air, floated from the distant barracks. The superintendent of the jail, who was standing apart from the rest of us, moodily prodding the gravel with his stick, raised his head at the sound. He was an army doctor, with a grey toothbrush moustache and a gruff voice. ‘For God's sake hurry up, Francis,' he said irritably. ‘ The man ought to have been dead by this time. Aren't you ready yet?'
Francis, the head jailer, a fat Dravidian in a white drill suit and gold spectacles, waved his black hand. ‘Yes sir, yes sir,' he bubbled. ‘All iss satisfactorily prepared. The hangman iss waiting. We shall proceed.'
‘Well, quick march, then. The prisoners can't get their breakfast till this job's over.'
We set out for the gallows. Two warders marched on either side of the prisoner, with their rifles at the slope; two others marched close against him, gripping him by arm and shoulder, as though at once pushing and supporting him. The rest of us, magistrates and the like, followed behind. Suddenly, when we had gone ten yards, the procession stopped short without any order or warning. A dreadful thing had happened — a dog, come goodness knows whence, had appeared in the yard. It came bounding among us with a loud volley of barks, and leapt round us wagging its whole body, wild with glee at finding so many human beings together. It was a large woolly dog, half Airedale … For a moment it pranced round us, and then, before anyone could stop it, it had made a dash for the prisoner, and jumping up tried to lick his face. Everyone stood aghast, too taken aback even to grab at the dog.
‘Who let that bloody brute in here?' said the superintendent angrily. ‘Catch it, someone!'
A warder, detached from the escort, charged clumsily after the dog, but it danced and gambolled just out of his reach, taking everything as part of the game. A young Eurasian jailer picked up a handful of gravel and tried to stone the dog away, but it dodged the stones and came after us again. Its yaps echoed from the jail wails. The prisoner, in the grasp of the two warders, looked on incuriously, as though this was another formality of the hanging. It was several minutes before someone managed to catch the dog. Then we put my handkerchief through its collar and moved off once more, with the dog still straining and whimpering.
It was about forty yards to the gallows. I watched the bare brown back of the prisoner marching in front of me. He walked clumsily with his bound arms, but quite steadily, with that bobbing gait of the Indian who never straightens his knees. At each step his muscles slid neatly into place, the lock of hair on his scalp danced up and down, his feet printed themselves on the wet gravel. And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
The gallows stood in a small yard, separate from the main grounds of the prison, and overgrown with tall prickly weeds. It was a brick erection like three sides of a shed, with planking on top, and above that two beams and a crossbar with the rope dangling. The hangman, a grey-haired convict in the white uniform of the prison, was waiting beside his machine. He greeted us with a servile crouch as we entered. At a word from Francis the two warders, gripping the prisoner more closely than ever, half led, half pushed him to the gallows and helped him clumsily up the ladder. Then the hangman climbed up and fixed the rope round the prisoner's neck.
We stood waiting, five yards away. The warders had formed in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner began crying out on his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!', not urgent and fearful like a prayer or a cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost like the tolling of a bell. The dog answered the sound with a whine. The hangman, still standing on the gallows, produced a small cotton bag like a flour bag and drew it down over the prisoner's face. But the sound, muffled by the cloth, still persisted, over and over again: ‘Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram! Ram!'
The hangman climbed down and stood ready, holding the lever. Minutes seemed to pass. The steady, muffled crying from the prisoner went on and on, ‘Ram! Ram! Ram!' never faltering for an instant. The superintendent, his head on his chest, was slowly poking the ground with his stick; perhaps he was counting the cries, allowing the prisoner a fixed number — fifty, perhaps, or a hundred. Everyone had changed colour. The Indians had gone grey like bad coffee, and one or two of the bayonets were wavering. We looked at the lashed, hooded man on the drop, and listened to his cries — each cry another second of life; the same thought was in all our minds: oh, kill him quickly, get it over, stop that abominable noise!
Suddenly the superintendent made up his mind. Throwing up his head he made a swift motion with his stick. ‘Chalo!' he shouted almost fiercely.
There was a clanking noise, and then dead silence. The prisoner had vanished, and the rope was twisting on itself. I let go of the dog, and it galloped immediately to the back of the gallows; but when it got there it stopped short, barked, and then retreated into a corner of the yard, where it stood among the weeds, looking timorously out at us. We went round the gallows to inspect the prisoner's body. He was dangling with his toes pointed straight downwards, very slowly revolving, as dead as a stone.
The superintendent reached out with his stick and poked the bare body; it oscillated, slightly. ‘He's all right,' said the superintendent. He backed out from under the gallows, and blew out a deep breath. The moody look had gone out of his face quite suddenly. He glanced at his wrist-watch. ‘Eight minutes past eight. Well, that's all for this morning, thank God.'
The warders unfixed bayonets and marched away. The dog, sobered and conscious of having misbehaved itself, slipped after them. We walked out of the gallows yard, past the condemned cells with their waiting prisoners, into the big central yard of the prison. The convicts, under the command of warders armed with lathis, were already receiving their breakfast. They squatted in long rows, each man holding a tin pannikin, while two warders with buckets marched round ladling out rice; it seemed quite a homely, jolly scene, after the hanging. An enormous relief had come upon us now that the job was done. One felt an impulse to sing, to break into a run, to snigger. All at once everyone began chattering gaily.
The Eurasian boy walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man), when he heard his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright. — Kindly take one of my cigarettes, sir. Do you not admire my new silver case, sir? From the boxwallah, two rupees eight annas. Classy European style.'
Several people laughed — at what, nobody seemed certain.
Francis was walking by the superintendent, talking garrulously. ‘Well, sir, all hass passed off with the utmost satisfactoriness. It wass all finished — flick! like that. It iss not always so — oah, no! I have known cases where the doctor wass obliged to go beneath the gallows and pull the prisoner's legs to ensure decease. Most disagreeable!'
‘Wriggling about, eh? That's bad,' said the superintendent.
‘Ach, sir, it iss worse when they become refractory! One man, I recall, clung to the bars of hiss cage when we went to take him out. You will scarcely credit, sir, that it took six warders to dislodge him, three pulling at each leg. We reasoned with him. “My dear fellow,” we said, “think of all the pain and trouble you are causing to us!” But no, he would not listen! Ach, he wass very troublesome!'
I found that I was laughing quite loudly. Everyone was laughing. Even the superintendent grinned in a tolerant way. ‘You'd better all come out and have a drink,' he said quite genially. ‘I've got a bottle of whisky in the car. We could do with it.'
We went through the big double gates of the prison, into the road. ‘ Pulling at his legs!' exclaimed a Burmese magistrate suddenly, and burst into a loud chuckling. We all began laughing again. At that moment Francis's anecdote seemed extraordinarily funny. We all had a drink together, native and European alike, quite amicably. The dead man was a hundred yards away.
Sunday 28 August 2011
Harun Rashid Khan - Deputy governor of RBI
Harun Rashid Khan is new deputy governor of RBI
Harun Rashid Khan on Monday assumed charge as Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India for a period of three years.
Mr. Khan replaces Shyamala Gopinath who retired last month, RBI said in a statement.
As one of the deputy governors of the apex bank, Mr. Khan will look after the Central Security Cell, Department of External Investments and Operations, Department of Government and Bank Accounts, Department of Payment and Settlement Systems, Foreign Exchange Department, Internal Debt Management Department and Inspection Department.
Prior to this appointment, Mr. Khan was Executive Director of RBI.
He had served in that position since October 2007 and looked after the Department of External Investments and Operations, Foreign Exchange Department, Internal Debt Management Department and Department of Government and Bank Accounts.
He was earlier Regional Director of RBI’s New Delhi Office and and had also served as Principal of the College of Agricultural Banking in Pune.
With a career spanning over 32 years, Mr. Khan had worked in diverse fields of specialisation like rural credit, currency management, banking supervision and regulation, debt management, reserve management, exchange control, personnel administration and internal accounts.
Mr. Khan has also been associated with number of committees both within and outside the RBI, including Committee on Technology Exports, Committee on Ways and Means Advances to the State Governments, Working Group on Instruments of Sterilisation and International Task Force on Central Counter-parties.
He also chaired the internal group of RBI on Rural Credit and Microfinance.
Based on the recommendations of that committee, known as the Khan Committee, the RBI had issued guidelines to expand the banking outreach through business facilitators and business correspondents with information and communication technology support for spearheading financial inclusion in the country.
Khan was also earlier the nominee director of RBI on the boards of Dena Bank, Bank of Maharashtra, Punjab and Sind Bank, Bank of Rajasthan and the Orissa State Finance Corporation.
The RBI has four deputy governors looking after various departments.
In his latest position, Mr. Khan joins Subir Gokarn, K.C. Chakrabarty and Anand Sinha who also serve as deputy governors of the central bank.
Rohinton Nariman - Solicitor General of India
Senior lawyer Rohinton Nariman was on Wednesday appointed the Solicitor General of India after the Appointments Committee of Cabinet approved his name, sources in the Law Ministry said.Nariman, 54, son of eminent jurist Fali S Nariman, replaces Gopal Subramanium who resigned to protest Nariman’s appointment, without his knowledge, as special government counsel in a 2G spectrum allocation scam case.
Nariman has argued a number of constitutional and corporate cases in the Supreme Court and high courts. He, with senior advocate Harish Salve, argued for Mukesh Ambani’s RIL in the dispute over the supply and pricing of gas from KG basin between the Ambani brothers.
Nariman was designated a senior advocate at age 37 in 1993 when the then CJI M N Venkatachaliah amended the rules to reduce the limit of the minimum age of 45 years for designating a lawyer as a senior advocate.
Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowships 2011
Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowships 2011
1. Girija Devi ( Classical singer,Padma Bhushan, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award 1977)
2. N. Ramakrishna
3. R.F. Dagar
4. T.K. Murthy (born 13 August 1924 is an Indian mridangam player.)
1. Girija Devi ( Classical singer,Padma Bhushan, Sangeet Natak Akademi Award 1977)
2. N. Ramakrishna
3. R.F. Dagar
4. T.K. Murthy (born 13 August 1924 is an Indian mridangam player.)
Thursday 25 August 2011
Role of Media in a Democracy
Introduction
Democracy means "A system of government in which all the people of a country can vote to elect their representatives". Media came into existence in 1780 with the introduction of a newspaper namely "The Bengal Gazette" and since then it has matured leaps and bounds. It has been playing a very important role in shaping human minds.
Role of media
Media plays a crucial role in shaping a healthy democracy. It is the backbone of a democracy. Media makes us aware of various social, political and economical activities happening around the world. It is like a mirror, which shows us or strives to show us the bare truth and harsh realities of life.
The media has undoubtedly evolved and become more active over the years. It is the media only who reminds politicians about their unfulfilled promises at the time of elections. T.V news channels excessive coverage during elections helps people, especially illiterates, in electing the right person to the power. This reminder compels politicians to be upto their promises in order to remain in power.
Television and radio have made a significant achievement in educating rural illiterate masses in making them aware of all the events in their language. Coverage of exploitative malpractices of village heads and moneylenders has helped in taking stringent actions against them by attracting government's attention.
The media also exposes loopholes in the democratic system, which ultimately helps government in filling the vacuums of loopholes and making a system more accountable, responsive and citizen-friendly. A democracy without media is like a vehicle without wheels.
In the age of information technology we are bombarded with information. We get the pulse of the world events with just a click of a mouse. The flow of information has increased manifolds. The perfect blend of technology and human resources (journalist) has not left a single stone unturned in unearthing rampant corruption in politics and society. We all are well aware of what tehelka did. Thanks to technology that has brought a kind of revolution in journalism.
Impact of media
The impact of media is really noteworthy. Excessive coverage or hype of sensitive news has led to communal riots at times. The illiterates are more prone to provocations than the literates. Constant repetition of the news, especially sensational news, breeds apathy and insensitivity. For instance, In Dhananjoy Chatterjee case, the overloaded hype led to death of quite a few children who imitated the hanging procedure which was repeatedly shown in most of the T.V. news channels. There is a plethora of such negative impacts. Media should take utmost care in airing or publishing such sensational news.
Commercialization has created a stiff competition in media. In order to outdo each other print media has often gone one step further in publishing articles, cover stories, etc. on sex.
Media experts say this is one of the means of attracting readers who are glued to T.V. news channels, which have cropped up swiftly in a recent past and they believe this is a cheap form of journalism.
Conclusion
No one is perfect in this world and so is the media. Here I am not degrading the media, rather I would say there is still a lot of scope for improvement by which media can raise upto the aspirations of the people for which it is meant. I cannot think of a democracy without active and neutral media. Media is like a watchdog in a democracy that keeps government active. From being just an informer it has become an integral part of our daily lives. With the passage of time it has become a more matured and a more responsible entity. The present media revolution has helped people in making an informed decisions and this has led to beginning of a new era in a democracy.
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