DEVADASI SYSTEM

A devadasi is a female artist who is dedicated to worship and serve a deity or a temple for the rest of her life. This dedication took place in a Pottukattu ceremony that was similar to marriage ceremony. These women also learned and practiced classical Indian artistic traditions such as Bharatanatyam, Mohiniyattam, Kuchipudi and Odissi. Their social status was high as dance and music were an essential part of temple worship.

The devadasi is a Sanskrit term which means servant of deva [GOD] or devi [GODDESS]. This is a kind of religious practice carried on basically in the southern part of India. Devadasis were respected member of the society and it was believed that they were eternally married ‘suhagan’ who is never widowed. And their presence in a marriage ceremony for the purpose of making mangalsutra was compulsory .It was believed that the bride who wears that Mangalsutra will die a ‘suhagan’.

The devadasi system, though, is still in existence in rudimentary form but with the activism of Dalit activists, state governments of different states at different times outlawed this ritual such as Andhra Pradesh Devdasi [Prohibition of dedication] act 1988 or the Madras Devadasi act 1947.

During the period of British rule in the Indian subcontinent, kings who were the patrons of temples lost their power, thus the temple artist communities also lost their significance. As a result, Devadasis were left without their traditional means of support and patronage and were now commonly associated with temple prostitution. The practice of Devadasi was banned during British rule, starting with the Bombay Devadasi Protection Act in 1934. The colonial view of devadasi practices remains debated as the British colonial government from non- religious street dancers.

LET'S FORGET THE PAST

Let's forget the stale past

For it is filled with the cobwebs

Of disturbing confusion and bickering misunderstandings

Let's start afresh a new life

When there is an after -life

After the stillness of cold death

Why not then welcome a new life

After the exist of the dead past!

Of what use is our non- living past

And still live in it?

It is useless regretting over

What has gone sour and rancid

Let's burn down to ashes

What's not to our liking

Let's pound to disintegration

What has gone wrong between us

Let's change the direction

Of our life's route

Let's pursue that path

Where there is no discord

But only filled with fragrant roses

Let's weld and we'd together in boundless unity

To the source of happiness and harmony

Where our lives spent in eternity

Would have no ending at all!

Roll No: 63

2020-22

The improvement of science and technology has made our lives comfortable and easy thus we became an independent individual who hardly borders about out next door. Life as such is challenging and the humans have made it more complicated because life has fallen into the class and categories where the rich are getting richer and the poor are dying for food. We live in a world where millions of people go hungry every day on the other hand we see people who enjoy surplus of wealth. Such disparities are created due to the selfishness and greed of humanity. Every time we pass by the roadside we come across many destitute and poor who spend sleepless nights by the roadside. People pass by without taking any notice of them as they are so used to. On one such occasion there was an incident where a women pass by the roadside distributing food for the poor on the street, she came across a man lying down on the footpath motionless she came closer to have better study of the condition of the man then she noticed that there was no more life in him. Soon she called up to the police and informed about the incident. In no time police arrived and investigated the matter and took off the body. The lady’s courage and concern for the needy was admirable. Do we have a similar attitude towards our needy brethren while we come across such incident? Do we care to look around what is happening to our next door and lend a helping hand?

Likewise we come across very few people who selflessly render service to the needy brethren in our society where virtue of love, service and kindness is almost forgotten. In the past few years we have been experiencing a very difficult time due the outbreak of pandemic covid 19 where many people lost their lives whereas many others have left homeless and poor. Many of us too got the disease yet we were able to get through the trial situation and come out of it. Thanks to Almighty God who took care of us, preserved our lives and enabled us to see this beautiful world again. The Institute of St. Ann’s college of education provides ample opportunities for the students to groom and grow in knowledge and virtue of helping and caring for one another by conducting various outreach programs. The Institute has reached out to many poor with their charitable works; I am so blessed to be part of it. We should never be tired of doing good to the others, every helping hand can help the poor because caring for the poor and needy people and helping them is a noble endeavour. The more we give to the poor and needy people, the more we strengthen their dependency. If we give them the chance or opportunity, we will see an effective and long-lasting improvement in their lives.

These are the women scientists that blazed new trails in their field of Science by shattering glass ceilings in their era.

From being the first woman to hold a teaching position in a university to the first to earn a doctorate, these women have broken stereotypes to walk among men so that others may run today.

Dr. Kamal Ranadive was an unsung scientist who made science accessible to all.

Born on 8 November 1917, in Pune to Dinkar and Shantabai, Kamal Samarth was a genius to reckon with from early childhood. Dinkar, an erstwhile Biology professor at Fergusson College in Pune has become an inspiration by leading herself into a bright career. She was not one to give in to irrational societal norms but ensured all her children received the best education.

She completed her schooling with excellent grades from the prestigious Huzurpaga High School – the oldest girls’ school in the city. She pursued her graduation in Botany and Zoology at Fergusson College and went on to emerge as one of India’s first and leading women scientists. Following her graduation, she obtained her Masters of Science with specialisation in cytogenetics in 1943 from the College of Agriculture, Pune. Kamal’s relocation to Bombay (now Mumbai) post her marriage proved to be immensely conducive for her career, as she now had the chance to work with Dr V R Khanolkar, the founder of Indian Cancer Research Centre (ICRC). Kamal continued her doctoral research under the stalwart’s guidance at the University of Bombay.

Padma Bhushan Kamal Ranadive not just set up India’s first tissue culture lab, she shaped iconic institutions like the Indian Cancer Research Centre (ICRC) and the Indian Women Scientists’ Association (IWSA). She was probably the first in the nation to propose the correlation between breast cancer occurrence and heredity – which was confirmed by later researchers.

Born in a middle-class family in 1917, Asima Chatterjee was encouraged to pursue education in whichever field she liked — a privilege girls rarely received back then.

She is the second woman in the country to gain a doctorate in science. Anima’s study on the Madagascar periwinkle plant contributed to the development of drugs used in chemotherapy to slow the growth of cancer cells. She also discovered that the fruits and bark of the bale tree could treat a variety of gastrointestinal disorders.

She was a chemistry professor at Calcutta University and the first woman scientist to hold a position in any university in the country.

In 1975, she received the Padma Bhushan award and was elected as the General President of the Indian Science Congress Association.

Born in 1913, Bibha was supposedly India’s first woman researcher. One of six siblings from a wellread zamindar family in Hooghly district of an undivided Bengal, Bibha was distantly related to the family of Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose.Yet, neither does the name of this gifted physicist surface in any of the repositories on Indian women in science, nor is she mentioned even once amongst various lists of women pioneers in the history of Indian science. She also did not win any national award or receive a fellowship from a renowned scientific society during her lifetime.

Many of her research works were published by journals such as Nature and Proceedings of the Physical Society of London, while her doctoral research work was going on at the laboratory of Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett, the renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, in the UK.

Known to have lived a relatively quiet life, she was deeply committed to physics and research to the extent that almost all of her time was spent within the confines of her laboratory. Neither Bibha nor any of her siblings ever married.

In 1949, she was selected by none other than Homi J Bhabha to join the newly established Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, as a researcher.

This Brilliant Woman Could Have Won a Physics Nobel for India.

G Nirmala Rani Roll No: 29 2020-22

Be Happy When Everything Goes Wrong

In a very famous study published by researchers at North-western University in 1978 it was discovered that the happiness levels of paraplegics and lottery winners were essentially the same within a year after the event occurred. You read that correctly. One person won a life-changing sum of money and another person lost the use of their limbs and within one year the two people were equally happy. How to Be Happy: Where to Go From Here

There are two primary takeaways from The Impact Bias about how to be happy.

First, we have a tendency to focus on the thing that changes and forget about the things that don’t change. When thinking about winning the lottery, we imagine that event and all of the money that it will bring in. But we forget about the other 99 percent of life and how it will remain more or less the same.

We’ll still feel grumpy if we don’t get enough sleep. We still have to wait in rush hour traffic. We still have to work out if we want to stay in shape. We still have to send in our taxes each year.

It will still hurt when we lose a loved one. It will still feel nice to relax on the porch and watch the sunset. We imagine the change, but we forget the things that stay the same. Second, a challenge is an impediment to a particular thing, not to you as a person. In the words of Greek philosopher Epictetus, “Going lame is an impediment to your leg, but not to your will.” We overestimate how much negative events will harm our lives for precisely the same reason that we overvalue how much positive events will help our lives. We focus on the thing that occurs (like losing a leg), but forget about all of the other experiences of life.

Writing thank you notes to friends, watching football games on the weekend, reading a good book, eating a tasty meal. These are all pieces of the good life you can enjoy with or without a leg. Mobility issues represent but a small fraction of the experiences available to you. Negative events can create taskspecific challenges, but the human experience is broad and varied.

There is plenty of room for happiness in a life that may seem very foreign or undesirable to your current imagination.

For more on how to be happy and the fascinating ways in which our brain creates happiness, read Dan Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness

Everything is temporary, even this.

Happiness is a result of your approach to life, not what happens to you. The things, even those that seem small, that are going right in your life. The people who are in your corner. What you care about most and what you can let go of. You ultimately choose how you react. Your resilience in other tough situations. Bad times don't define you, but your approach does. Worrying, anger, complaining, denial, or any of the infinite other ways we try to circumvent pain when things go wrong won't change the situation.