The News Caravan

Tag: changed

  • A moment that changed me: I fled Ukraine with my ex’s family as the Russians invaded

    A moment that changed me: I fled Ukraine with my ex’s family as the Russians invaded

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    It was February 2022. Life was going pretty well. I had an apartment with views across Kyiv and I was sketching out a new project as an illustrator. I had finally ended an unhealthy long-term relationship. Yes, I thought. This will change everything!

    My mother and I went on a last-minute holiday to Zanzibar. We left on 15 February, the day the Russians had initially planned to invade. Before we left, there was talk of war, but I didn’t take it seriously. Beautiful Zanzibar made it seem even less likely. We flew back on 23 February. The flight attendant was strict about telling us to wear our face masks. Surely, if everyone was worrying about face masks, then they weren’t thinking about war?

    I went back to my flat with its view of the city. It was a bright and sunny day – but that night, the ravens came. I was woken up by explosions. I went out on to my balcony hoping it was just fireworks. It wasn’t. I shut myself in the bathroom, Googling “war”, but there was nothing in the news.

    What I did next was instinctive: I took my Zanzibar suitcase, added some entirely impractical things such as incense, crystals and three vintage Laura Ashley dresses. Then my ex-boyfriend picked me up in his car. I am still so touched that he did that, considering how we had parted. It seemed right that we should be together.

    Kyiv was the target, and it made sense to get out, but there were traffic jams everywhere and the queues for petrol were ridiculous. We spent the next 24 hours in the car. At Vinnytsia, about 170 miles from Kyiv, we saw bomb sites and destruction. We made it to western Ukraine, where we stayed with my ex-boyfriend’s relatives. It was decided then that all the women, children (and cats) should go abroad. It was forbidden for men to cross the border.

    Imagine the company: my almost-mother-in-law (who was still furious with me), her daughter-in-law and my almost-sister-in-law, who pitied me for putting my efforts into drawing instead of starting a family. In other words, we had little in common.

    Together with two children and a couple of cats, we crossed the Romanian border on 28 February. It was amazing that we reached our destination at all, given how little driving experience we had between us.

    We stayed in a house that had been empty for 20 years. It was extremely cold. We had to heat up an ancient stove with wood that we collected, and the toilet flooded every time it was flushed. I swear the house was haunted.

    We changed places and countries. My almost-sister-in-law showed her gratitude to the people who hosted us by cleaning their houses. I did my best to help her. What else could we do?

    Eventually, we ended up in a little Austrian town called Marchegg. We didn’t know the people, but they opened their arms to us. Later, they even helped me find a place for my mother and sister to stay. Until then, they had camped in a basement. My almost-sister-in-law continued to clean while I got on with my work. I now see that this was her way of dealing with stress. We haven’t become friends, but we’ve become something like good allies.

    My sadness over the breakup dissolved under the weight of war, at least for a couple of months. I was working hard on my new book, trying to embrace the opportunity. Strangely, it helped calm me down. Drawing has always been my therapy.

    After a couple of months, my ex was able to leave Ukraine and come to Austria. While I was happy that he was safe, it meant living together under one roof again. Soon, we were locked in the same impossible relationship. I was making the final changes to the illustrations for the book. I finished the project, then mentally crashed and hit rock bottom.

    Long story short: a psychologist helped me process everything. I feel more stable than ever. My ex is happy with another woman, and I am finally free to see what the future holds. I haven’t suffered as much as millions of other Ukrainians. The war heightened my inner issues, but escaping it helped me heal.

    The Girl of Ink & Stars (illustrated gift edition) by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, illustrated by Olia Muza, is published by Chicken House (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy for £21.75 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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    #moment #changed #fled #Ukraine #exs #family #Russians #invaded
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • JNU’s image as anti-national university has changed in past one year: VC Pandit

    JNU’s image as anti-national university has changed in past one year: VC Pandit

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    New Delhi: JNU’s image as an “anti-national university” has changed in the past one year as the university’s community has shown it is a “nationalistic, creative and inclusive” institution, Vice Chancellor Santishree D Pandit said on Tuesday.

    Over the year, some students have been accused of making anti-India statements and being involved in communal riots, and the university was branded “anti-national”, she said.

    But, now the Jawaharlal Nehru University is back to academic innovation and research excellence, Santishree, who completed one year as JNU VC on Tuesday, said.

    “The varsity’s image as an anti-national institution has changed. This year, the JNU community has shown that it is nationalistic, creative and inclusive. Academic leadership matters for my team and faculty,” she told PTI in an interview.

    Santishree summed up her journey so far as the first female vice-chancellor as “very satisfying”.

    In 2016, three JNU students were arrested on charges of sedition. Later, JNU student Sharjeel Imam and several others, including Umar Khalid, were booked under the anti-terror law Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and provisions of the Indian Penal Code for allegedly being the “masterminds” of the February 2020 riots in the North-East Delhi.

    Listing out her work in the past one year, the vice chancellor said the varsity effected 32 recruitments and 44 overdue promotions.

    The number of women chairpersons and dean has gone up from 19 to 39, she said.

    When asked what are the challenges the JNU is facing at the moment, Sanstishree said the university is struggling to synchronise the academic calendar which was disrupted since early 202 due to Covid; the completion of Ph.D submissions delayed due to the pandemic; and the modernisation of the campus infrastructure.

    “We are also working in the direction of expansion of the implementation of NEP (New Education Policy) 2020 through more MA programmes in different Schools, and increasing the University-Corpus fund from ?50 Crores to ?250 Crores,” she said.

    Born on 15 July 1962 in Leningrad, Russia, Santishree was educated in Chennai at the Presidency College, both B.A. and M.A. Topper and Gold Medallist. She completed her M.Phil and PhD in International Politics from the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New-Delhi; Post-Doctorate in Peace and Conflict Studies from Uppsala University, Sweden.

    She was appointed as the first woman and alumnus Vice Chancellor of India’s top University last year.

    She has published four books and edited two. Her teaching and research career spanning over three-and-a-half decades beginning with a lecturer at Goa University in 1988 and in 1991 joining the University of Pune, now Savitribai Phule Pune University.

    She is also a member of several national academic and research bodies since 2015.

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    #JNUs #image #antinational #university #changed #year #Pandit

    ( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

  • Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World review – Chuck D is a brilliant history teacher

    Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World review – Chuck D is a brilliant history teacher

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    There’s almost no hip-hop in the first episode of BBC Two’s new four-part documentary about the genre, a series that labours under the vanilla title Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five only drop The Message in the last five minutes. Instead, we are given an hour-long history lesson on New York City in the 60s and 70s – the decades leading up to hip-hop’s birth.

    This, however, is the correct approach, and it signals that Fight the Power will treat its subject with the respect and rigour it deserves – not surprisingly, since Chuck D of Public Enemy is an executive producer as well as one of the main interviewees. Any music documentary with ambitions to inform as well as entertain is a trade-off between sociology and musicology: the records say this and sound like that because this is what was happening in the world at the time. In the case of hip-hop, the scene was a more direct response to political circumstances than any popular music before it, and those conditions – black citizens marginalised by racist authorities – have resonance beyond the US and beyond the 20th century.

    Back we go, then, to 1960, and John F Kennedy promising to improve black Americans’ life chances. By the end of the decade, their leaders were assassinated or imprisoned, their political movements infiltrated and undermined, their family members drafted into the US army and killed in Vietnam, their protests viciously put down. Fight the Power namechecks Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud by James Brown, Is It Because I’m Black by Syl Johnson and Seize the Time by future Black Panther party leader Elaine Brown as evidence of revolutionary spirit coursing through records released in 1969.

    The 1970s began with The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron prefacing hip-hop by talking, not singing, about black power on records with “revolution” in the title. Fight the Power’s fine roster of contributors – KRS-One, Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel, Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC, and indeed Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets – recall a decade in which black consciousness continued to rise, boosted by Shirley Chisholm’s run for the presidency in 1972 under the slogan “unbought and unbossed”, and in reaction less to overt state violence and more to administrative oppression. The documentary cites the phrase “a period of benign neglect”, used by one of Richard Nixon’s advisers in a January 1970 memo to the president and taken here as summing up the period when, with social programmes persistently underfunded and the South Bronx bisected by a new expressway that seemed designed to hasten urban decay, richer New Yorkers fled the city’s astronomical crime rates and left the poor black and Hispanic folk to it.

    Fight the Power’s central observation is that hip-hop comes from a community that has been abandoned. The New York police, no longer minded to intervene in poor neighbourhoods, happily allowed hundreds of working-class youths to attend block parties, at which a generation that hadn’t had the money to buy or learn to play instruments made a new kind of music by setting up two turntables, so that a funky horn motif from one record could be segued into a tight drum break from another. The documentary makes the point that one of hip-hop’s most important influences wasn’t musical: at the end of the 70s, no effort was made to stop graffiti covering every inch of the New York subway, so spray-painted slogans and art became an ocean of protest and propaganda, impenetrable to some observers but vital as a form of expression for artists and activists with no other outlet.

    Graffiti was, in other words, exactly what hip-hop lyrics would soon become, and was one of the four phenomena – along with rap, breakdance and DJing – brought together by DJ Kool Herc, credited here as hip-hop’s great pioneer. Then, as the 80s began, Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency by visiting the Bronx – we see him verbally jousting with angry residents in the rubble – and promising more federal aid, before gaining power and instead beginning the further systematic redistribution of wealth from poor to rich. Conditions are now perfect for a fierce new genre of music to take hold, as Chuck D explains: “Hip-hop is creativity and activity that comes out of the black neighbourhood when everything has been stripped away.”

    And so we arrive at 1982 and The Message, with its eerily contemporary lyrics (“Got a bum education, double-digit inflation / Can’t take a train to the job, there’s a strike at the station”). The story of hip-hop itself – some of the greatest American pop music ever made – begins next week. We’re ready.

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    #Fight #Power #HipHop #Changed #World #review #Chuck #brilliant #history #teacher
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Netflix’s Reed Hastings changed the way we watch TV – for better or for worse

    Netflix’s Reed Hastings changed the way we watch TV – for better or for worse

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    Perhaps nothing sums up the legacy of Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings as neatly as a certain Dr Pepper commercial.

    In the 30-second spot, a staple of live sports, a group of friends gather to watch a college football game – but, gasp, the TV has disconnected from the streaming service. A mad scramble ensues to track down a paper slip with the password and painstakingly enter it via arrows on a remote. Once they are logged back in, the room exhales, but not before one fan vents his frustration. “I miss basic cable,” he huffs.

    During a company earnings call on Thursday, Hastings, 62, announced that he would be relinquishing his daily role as Netflix co-CEO to COO Greg Peters, who will continue working alongside the company’s content chief, Ted Sarandos. The changing of the guard marks the end of an era for the streaming giant, which wouldn’t be an industry leader and cultural force without Hastings – who will continue as the company’s executive chairman.

    His departure was revealed in an otherwise mixed bag of a call on which Netflix touted an uptick in subscribers; this is after the company lost almost 1.2 million subscribers in the first half of 2022 and blamed account-sharing. In fact, the competition among streaming services has never been more intense, running the gamut from HBO Max to Amazon Prime to the NFL+. But none of them would exist if Netflix hadn’t come along.

    Hastings didn’t set out to take over the entertainment industry when he founded the company with Marc Randolph in the summer of 1997. Hastings, a computer scientist and mathematician, claims the idea was born out of panic – that he was six weeks late returning a VHS rental of Apollo 13 and was struggling with how to explain the $40 late fee to his wife. He wondered why video rentals couldn’t work like a gym membership, where subscribers watched as little or as much they wanted. Randolph counters that he and Hastings hatched the idea for Netflix together.

    The business they eventually launched was like some weird Columbia House derivative – a service that allowed customers to browse an online catalogue and rent movies by mail for a subscription fee. This was heady stuff for the turn of the century, when there was at least one video store in every neighborhood and Amazon was just a humble bookseller.

    Hastings, who would invest $2.5m into the startup from a software company he founded and sold, didn’t expect many to sign up for his library of 925 titles. But people took to it so eagerly that two months later, Jeff Bezos offered to buy the business out from under Hastings and Randolph for $16m. In September 2000, after the dotcom crash stymied growth, Hastings and Randolph nearly sold Netflix again to Blockbuster for $50m; Blockbuster, convinced the offer was a joke, declined.

    netflix logo over images from films and shows
    For the price of a frou-frou Starbucks drink, a Netflix subscriber could binge this content ad nauseam without suffering through a single commercial. Photograph: Adrien Fillon/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

    Not long after, Netflix was shipping a million DVDs per day, racking up more than $500m in revenue and putting Blockbuster and mom-and-pop video stores out of business. Before Amazon, an online shopping leviathan by this point, could horn in on Netflix’s market share, Hastings, inspired by YouTube, pushed the company to branch into streaming video. In short order, its library mushroomed from 1,000 titles to nearly 6,000 in the US alone. Under Hastings, Netflix went from signing content distribution deals with television and film companies to making original content.

    For the price of a frou-frou Starbucks drink, a Netflix subscriber could binge this content ad nauseam without suffering through a single commercial – the ideal home viewing experience.

    Hastings helped turn Netflix into a one-stop shop. It streamed hot movies within weeks of their box office debuts, as well as hit original TV series including Orange Is the New Black and cherished network mainstays like The Office. It had Samsung and Sony rushing to integrate Netflix and other major streamers into their TV menus. Before Netflix, we were taxed for receiver boxes, bogged down with too many remote controls and at the mercy of customer support from Time Warner and the like. It took Hastings to show us that TV didn’t have to be so complicated. It could even be on a phone or a tablet.

    Unfortunately for Hastings, Netflix became a victim of its success. It not only prompted Hollywood studios to get into the streaming business, but tech rivals like Amazon and Apple, too. Where Netflix was once the only name in streaming, now it’s one in a smattering of options and hardly the best of the bunch any more.

    As Netflix grew and made Hastings a billionaire, he would struggle to navigate criticism for pulling an episode of the topical comedy show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj in which the host roasted the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and for continuing to bankroll Dave Chappelle and other comedians who court controversy in their standup specials. Hastings’s response – “We’re not trying to do truth to power. We’re trying to entertain” – only made him seem like another out-of-touch corporate tycoon.

    As Silicon Valley leaders go, Hastings is more Tim Cook than Elon Musk, an understated pragmatist at his core. The legacy he leaves behind is immense. Before Hastings came along, watching television was a passive experience. Thanks to him, viewers have more remote control than ever – whether they like it or not.

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    #Netflixs #Reed #Hastings #changed #watch #worse
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )