Tag: helped

Noori, Kashmir’s First Cloned Pashmina Goat Died, Helped the Dream Live

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by Faiqa Masoodi
SRINAGAR: The world’s first cloned female Pashmina goat, Noori, is no more. She died a natural death on March 15 after living a life of 11 years and already being a grandmother.
The goat was the first ever animal that SKUAST-K produced through cloning. Her birth was a major development in veterinary science in Kashmir.
The goat kid was born in 2012 after the strenuous efforts of years put in by Dr Riaz Ahmad Shah and six other researchers who brought cloned Noori, into the world on March 9, catapulting Kashmir straight into the international limelight.
All her life, Noori lived at SKUAST and mothered seven kids, two female and five male.
Defying all notions that cloned species are susceptible to various ailments, Noori lived a healthy life and reached an advanced age in good health.
It was after the premature death of Dolly sheep, the first mammal to be cloned that scientists developed doubts that cloning accelerates the ageing process and other related problems. However, Noorie proved this isn’t the case as cloning also follows routine motherhood after the initial stage.
Dr Riaz said that Noori lived a healthy life of more than 11 years since her birth which is the average life span for this species. She died of old age and passed away peacefully at sheep and goat research station SKUAST-K leaving behind a great legacy.

“Age-related issues had started to show up in Noorie and she had stopped food intake,” Dr Riaz said. “Her teeth were falling out making it difficult for her to graze adequately.”
Noorie, meaning light, was seen as a ray of hope by scientists who knew that the female kid would pave the way for mass production of silky soft wool, the prized fibre.
Noori, when born, had such a shiny lustrous coat that my colleague Prof Maqbool Darzi named it Noori, and the light that she brought into the world of science will continue to inspire us to do better in our field, Dr Riaz said.
“We are aiming to diversify the cloning process and are trying to get hold of the gene editing process and transgenic animal research. If that happens, we will be able to have mass production of pashmina,” Dr Riaz, who is literally the father of cloning in India, said. Currently, he is the Chief Scientist at Animal Cloning and Transgenic Laboratory, Division of Animal Biotechnology, Faculty of Veterinary Sciences SKUAST-Kashmir.
“The average pashmina production in a pashmina goat is around 200 grams. If we are successful in creating a Gene-edited cloned goat, the first of its kind, we can take the pashmina production up and have 300 grams of production per goat,” he said while offering an idea about the focus of his current research.
Before Noorie happened, a doctoral student at National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI) in Karnal, Dr Riaz had invested painstaking efforts and expertise in developing the first buffalo clone Garima many years ago. It was for the first time he switched to a comparatively easier and cost-effective technique; different from the one utilized to produce Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep in 1996.
Buoyed by the success, Dr Riaz submitted a proposal jointly with the NDRI to the government of India. He hoped to secure assistance for furthering research in Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer, a key technique that later went on to make the project Noori happen.
“While NDRI continued to carry out its research on buffaloes, we zeroed in on a different species,” Dr Riaz said.
Project Noorie was different; she was from our native place and had tremendous economic importance.
Subsequently, Rs 2 crore funding package for a four-year period breathed life into his project. From a sufficient amount, he created a world-class laboratory before roping in the finest battery of research scholars and scientists who helped him hit the target. In this process, Riaz said, they also learned how to skilfully preserve an embryo and transfer it to recipients.
In the next three years, a near-miraculous development happened. Scientists isolated an egg cell from a goat before extracting out its innards, creating space for administering the DNA, a biological rulebook, of a Pashmina goat.
Once the DNA was integrated, the egg cell was rammed into the skin cells of a Pashmina goat, giving rise to an embryo that would further journey towards becoming a foetus. “The new offspring was an exact duplicate of the Pashmina goat whose DNA had been extracted from its skin cell,” Riaz said.
His department is rearing a huge herd of Pashmina goats that defies the tradition that these goats cannot survive outside Ladakh. However, the wool output of these goats is slightly low. If cloning becomes a success, Kashmir finally can have Pashmina herds too.

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( With inputs from : kashmirlife.net )

March 26, 2023
The crypto ‘contagion’ that helped bring down SVB

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As U.S. banking regulators begin their post-mortem of Silicon Valley Bank, some pundits are pointing the finger at crypto markets, whose own collapse over the past year left the tech-focused lender hopelessly exposed.
The conventional wisdom about crypto is that it’s “self-referential” — a separate universe to conventional finance — and that its inherent volatility can be contained. The emerging “contagion” theory is that there are enough linkages for extreme turmoil to spill over, much as a virus can sometimes jump from one species to another.
That’s what happened here, according to Barney Frank, the former U.S. congressman who wrote sweeping new banking rules after the banking crisis in 2008, and joined the crypto-friendly Signature Bank as a board member in 2015.
“I think, if it hadn’t been for FTX and the extreme nervousness about crypto, that this wouldn’t have happened,” Frank told POLITICO this week. “That wasn’t something that could have been anticipated by regulators.”
FTX, the crypto exchange that collapsed in November amid allegations of massive fraud, capped a year of turmoil in crypto markets, as investors began withdrawing funds from riskier ventures in response to rising interest rates, which in turn exposed the shaky foundations underpinning the industry. The ensuing “crypto winter” saw the value of the industry plummet by two-thirds, from a peak of $3 trillion in 2021.
Policymakers sought to reassure the public that volatility in the crypto market, blighted by scams and charlatans who sought to profit from investors’ fear of missing out, would naturally be contained. With the collapse of SVB, that claim is facing its biggest test yet.
Patient zero
Under the contagion theory, “patient zero” could be traced back to the implosion of TerraUSD, an “algorithmic stablecoin” that relied on financial engineering to keep its value on par with the U.S. dollar. That promise fell short in May last year following a mass sell-off, creating panic among investors who had used the virtual asset as a safe haven to park cash between taking punts on the crypto market. The origin of the crash is still subject to debate but rising interest rates are often cited as one of the main culprits.
TerraUSD’s demise was catastrophic for a major crypto hedge fund called Three Arrows Capital, dubbed 3AC. The money managers had invested $200 million into Luna, a crypto token whose value was used to prop up TerraUSD, which had become the third largest stablecoin on the market. A British Virgin Islands court ordered 3AC to liquidate its assets at the end of June.

The fund’s end created even more problems for the industry. Major crypto lending businesses, such as BlockFi, Celsius Network and Voyager, had lent hundreds of millions of dollars to 3AC to finance its market bets and were now facing massive losses.
Customers who had deposited their digital assets with the industry lender were suddenly locked out of their accounts, prompting FTX — then the third largest crypto exchange — to step in and bail out BlockFi and Voyager. Meanwhile, central banks continued to raise rates.
The contagion seemed under control for a few months until revelations emerged in November that FTX had been using client cash to finance risky bets elsewhere. The exchange folded soon after, as its customers rushed to get their money out of the platform. BlockFi and Voyager, meanwhile, were left stranded.
Outbreak widens
This is the point where the outbreak of risk in the crypto industry might have jumped species into the banking sector.
Silvergate Bank and Signature Bank, two smaller banks that also failed last week, had extensive business with crypto exchanges, including FTX. Silvergate tried to downplay its exposure to FTX but ended up reporting a $1 billion loss over the last three months of 2022 after investors withdrew more than $8 billion in deposits. Signature also did its best to distance itself from FTX, which made up some 0.1 percent of its deposits.
FTX, the crypto exchange that collapsed in November amid allegations of massive fraud, capped a year of turmoil in crypto markets | Leon Neal/Getty Images
SVB had no direct link to FTX, but was not immune to the broader contagion. Its depositors, including tech startups, crypto firms and VCs, started burning their cash reserves to run their businesses after venture capital funding dried up.
“SVB and Silvergate had the same balance sheet structure and risks — massive duration mismatch, lots of uninsured runnable deposits backed by securities not marked to market, and inadequate regulatory capital because unrealized fair value losses excluded,” former Natwest banker and industry expert Frances Coppola told POLITICO.
Eventually, the deposit drain forced SVB to liquidate underwater assets to accommodate its clients, while trying to handle losses on bond portfolios and an outsized bet on interest rates. As word got out, the withdrawals turned into a bank run as frictionless and hype-driven as a crypto bubble.
Zachary Warmbrodt and Izabella Kaminska contributed reporting from Washington and London, respectively.
This article has been updated to correct the value of the crypto industry.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )

March 14, 2023
Opinion | I Helped Write the Jan. 6 Committee Report. Here’s What Tucker Carlson Left Out.

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I served as a senior professional staff member on the January 6th Select Committee and helped write its final report. I got a close look at some of the video evidence that Carlson obtained — and his manipulation of the audience was immediately obvious to me. Here’s why.
First, the premise of his “investigation,” that the USCP footage was being withheld to cover up the full story, was always false. Working with the Select Committee’s members, the investigative team and staffers reviewed the USCP’s recordings, which provided new angles at some key locations. But it did not change our basic understanding of what transpired. How could it? The riot is one of the most widely covered events in history. There is no dearth of footage from that day.
In addition to the USCP’s surveillance video, the Select Committee reviewed footage recorded by cameras worn by Metropolitan Police Department officers, the work of documentary filmmakers and countless open-source videos, including clips recorded by the rioters themselves. Many Americans have already seen some of this footage with their own eyes. They know the mob was not at the Capitol primarily for sightseeing, as Carlson claimed.
On Monday night, the Fox News host showed just several minutes of cherry-picked footage. Cameras inside the Capitol and on its grounds recorded many more scenes that he did not play for viewers. Some of this footage has long been available online. For example, you can watch rioters ramming their way through USCP officers at the Senate Wing door, members of the mob smashing the ornate East Rotunda doors before other rioters open them from the inside, and the melee at the west plaza tunnel (at the two-hour, 14-minute mark). You can also view a timeline of events used by federal prosecutors, who relied on the USCP’s camera footage. Carlson’s team had access to this footage, and more, but chose not to show any of it to Fox News viewers Monday night. It’s easy to see why. The full USCP cache tells a very different story from the one Carlson wants people to see.
There is another fundamental problem with Carlson’s presentation that may not be so easy for the casual viewer to spot. He has repeatedly whitewashed the key role played by far-right extremists, namely, the Proud Boys. Their story, including how then-President Donald Trump inspired them, is told in Chapters 6 and 8 of the January 6th Select Committee’s final report. The Proud Boys and other extremists led the mob, but Carlson refuses to let his viewers know it.
Let us compare one of Carlson’s conspiracy theories to the well-established facts. For more than two years, Carlson has chased a bogeyman, arguing that provocateurs working for the federal government (or, alternatively, agitators on the left) somehow tricked Trump’s “patriots” into rioting. He still cannot identify any federal agents working for the so-called “deep state.” Carlson and others have focused on a lone individual who has not been charged, Ray Epps, insinuating that he was a secret FBI plant. This claim is baseless. They’ve produced no evidence connecting Epps, a Trump supporter, to the FBI or any other federal agency.
Meanwhile, Carlson has ignored nearly all of the evidence collected against the approximately 1,000 January 6th defendants who have been charged. That evidence reveals the real parties responsible for channeling the mob’s anger.

Tucker Carlson has repeatedly whitewashed the key role played by far-right extremists, namely, the Proud Boys.
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Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
In fact, one of the most important January 6th trials is currently ongoing in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. Five members of the Proud Boys, including the group’s chair, Enrique Tarrio, have been charged with seditious conspiracy and other serious crimes. The Department of Justice claims the Proud Boys “conspired to prevent, hinder and delay the certification of the Electoral College vote, and to oppose by force the authority of the government of the United States.” Moreover, on Jan. 6, 2021, the Proud Boys “directed, mobilized and led members of the crowd onto the Capitol grounds and into the Capitol, leading to dismantling of metal barricades, destruction of property, breaching of the Capitol building, and assaults on law enforcement.”

The DOJ’s allegations are consistent with the Select Committee’s findings, as well as the investigative work done by real reporters. Law enforcement officials have collected overwhelming evidence, including text messages and videos, showing how the Proud Boys conspired against America’s democracy. They discovered that Tarrio told his men to “storm the Capitol” in the days leading up to the joint session of Congress.
While the attack was underway, Tarrio also claimed responsibility, messaging his men: “Make no mistake…” and “We did this.” Then, on the night of Jan. 6, Tarrio posted a video on the conservative social media site Parler that he titled, “Premonition.” The video shows a masked man, dressed as a super villain, standing in front of the Capitol. The figure is presumably Tarrio himself and the clip, recorded prior to Jan. 6, implies that he had foreknowledge of that day’s events.
You can watch “Premonition” here. It’s the type of spooky scene, set to foreboding background music, that makes for good television. Carlson did not show it to his viewers. In fact, he did not mention the Proud Boys at all.
The Select Committee’s review of video footage from multiple sources, including the U.S. Capitol Police, showed that the Proud Boys were conspicuously present on the front lines and at key breach points throughout the attack. Prosecutors are currently relying on the same type of footage, as well as additional sources of video, to make their case to a jury.
For example, Proud Boy leaders Joe Biggs and Ethan Nordean riled up the crowd at the Peace Circle Monument just outside of the U.S. Capitol. The Select Committee showed how the Proud Boys marched from the Washington Monument, around the Capitol, and then instigated the first perimeter breach at this key location. By attacking the police officers stationed between the monument and the Capitol, sweeping away security fences in the process, the Proud Boys and their associates opened a clear path onto the Capitol’s grounds. Thousands of Trump’s supporters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and through the Peace Circle after leaving the president’s rally at the White House Ellipse.
Dominic Pezzola, another Proud Boy, was responsible for the first breach of the U.S. Capitol building itself. Pezzola smashed in a Senate Wing window with a stolen riot shield. This allowed the mob to swarm into the Capitol through both the window and a nearby door. Pezzola bragged about his actions in a video he recorded of himself inside the Capitol. While smoking a victory cigar, Pezzola said: “I knew we could take this motherfucker over if we just tried hard enough. Proud of your motherfuckin’ boy.”
During his presentation Monday night, Carlson focused on Jacob Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman, pretending that he is the central figure in the January 6th story. Carlson claimed that we still don’t know how he entered the building. That’s not true — even the footage shown by Carlson makes it clear that Chansley entered through the Senate Wing door next to the window Pezzola bashed in.
There is much more evidence against the Proud Boys. Some members of the group have already pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and other charges, admitting that their comrades planned to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. And the Proud Boys were not the only far right extremists involved. Members of two anti-government groups, the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, attacked the Capitol as well. Some Oath Keepers have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy, while juries convicted the group’s leader and other members of the same crime. White nationalists were also among the extremists who stormed the Capitol.
The Fox News audience did not hear any of this. Nor did they hear how Trump summoned these extremists to Washington, D.C., for Jan. 6 via his tweets and statements. This part of the story is explained at great length in the Select Committee’s final report.
Tucker Carlson wants people to believe that phantom government agents were responsible. No one who relies on facts and logic will be fooled.

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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

March 10, 2023
How American energy helped Europe best Putin

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U.S. companies provided 50 percent of Europe’s liquefied natural gas supplies in 2022, along with 12 percent of its oil. Russian oil and gas shipments to the continent have shriveled by half, beset by boycotts, sanctions and an EU price cap. Global oil and gas trade routes have been redrawn and renewable energy development has received a massive financial and political shot in the arm.
The turnabout has put a new spotlight on the United States’ role as the world’s biggest energy producer, whose foothold in Asia has also strengthened in the past year. At the same time, the EU and the Biden administration are working more closely together to develop the next generation of clean energy — one that doesn’t include Russia — a transition that will lean heavily on U.S. fossil fuel in the coming few years.
“Europe’s energy divorce from Russia is nearly complete,” said Andrew Lipow, president of oil industry and market consulting firm Lipow Oil Associates. “We’re seeing a permanent change as far as how Europe gets its energy in the future. One result is the United States and European energy policy are going to be more closely intertwined.”
Europe’s reaction against its largest energy supplier’s attempt to remake the map has sent shockwaves through global markets. These were felt most acutely on the continent, where electricity and natural gas prices surged as much as 15-fold, prompting governments to spend more than $800 billion to ease consumers’ financial burdens.
The rapid reshuffling in oil and overseas gas shipments began after the February 2022 invasion and continued through the imposition of price caps on Russian shipments imposed late last year and earlier this month — shifts that will be felt for years.
“The energy world has changed,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said last week at an Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the invasion’s aftermath. “It has changed in the here and now.”
“It’s astonishing what’s happened,” Assistant Energy Secretary Andrew Light said at the same hearing. “This energy struggle will continue. It changes the world.”
U.S. fossil fuel exports, particularly liquefied natural gas, played a huge role in keeping the European alliance together over the past year, said Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global and author of “The New Map,” a book examining the geopolitics of energy. Putin had hoped to use gas as a weapon to shatter European support for Ukraine, he said, a miscalculation that so far hasn’t come to fruition.

“The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that U.S. LNG exports are not only of economic energy importance,” Yergin said in an interview. “They’ve also now taken on a strategic importance. U.S. LNG has become one of the foundations of U.S. and European energy security, part of the replacement for Russian gas and has even become part of the arsenal of NATO.”
The U.S. supplied Europe with half of its LNG supply last year and is expected to cement its position as a steady source of the fuel to Germany and other EU member states. Enough export facilities, particularly around the Gulf Coast, are slated to open in the next three years to nearly double export volumes to 20 percent of overall U.S. natural gas output.
Frank Fannon, a former State Department first assistant secretary for energy resources under the Trump administration, said the decision by U.S. companies to structure their multi-year delivery contracts to allow buyers to ship the gas wherever they wanted played a major role in overcoming Russia’s switching off its pipelines. That market innovation allowed European buyers to persuade the Asian companies that held the gas contracts to reroute them toward the EU — for a price.
“I would find it unimaginable there would be a chance of weathering the storm in Europe but for American LNG,” said Fannon, who is now managing director of energy and geopolitical advisory firm Fannon Global Advisors. “It’s absolutely inconceivable. It isn’t just the volumes of U.S. gas, but also the way that American companies have transformed the market.”
Russia’s loss of major markets for its natural gas will continue to hurt Putin’s geopolitical influence and could have further implications for Russia, Fannon added. Moscow last year agreed to ship more natural gas to China, which is becoming one of its biggest customers for energy — a fact that may give Beijing more leverage over a Russia that’s increasingly isolated from the West, Fannon said.
“Russia is on its way to becoming a client state of China,” Fannon said.
In addition to the surge in gas shipments to Europe — from the U.S. as well other producers, such as Qatar — this year’s mild winter will probably help prevent a repeat of the spike in gas prices seen last year, when the benchmark in the Netherlands spiked to levels more than ten times the U.S. price. Europe’s storage started this year at more than 80 percent full, making it far easier to top them off by the time temperatures turn colder this fall.
By itself, the United States’ relatively recent role as the world’s largest gas exporter doesn’t necessarily add geopolitical clout to the White House, said Ira Joseph, global fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. That’s because unlike its counterparts in the Middle East and other energy powerhouses, the U.S. government doesn’t have direct control over its oil and gas export industry.
While the Biden administration publicly said it was pressing allies to divert their LNG cargoes to Europe, it’s unlikely companies in Japan or elsewhere needed much persuading given how much money could be made selling their supplies of U.S. gas to desperate European companies, Joseph said.
“U.S. LNG is going to Europe because they’re paying a higher price,” Joseph said. “It’s not a natural gas Marshall Plan here. There’s no American Inc. exporting LNG.”
In the oil market, U.S. crude exports rose by more than 10 percent for the first 11 months of 2022 compared with the same period of 2021, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Shipments hit record highs in the final quarter of the year.
Some of the increase came as global economies gained steam after pandemic supply chain disruptions began to ease. What has changed, analysts said, was that the United States was becoming a supplier of choice for European and Asian countries that were stepping away from Russia.
At the same time, Exxon Mobil and other major U.S. oil companies are still loath to invest their bumper profits in new oil field projects, instead preferring to return money to shareholders. That’s a signal that even with Russia’s withdrawal from Europe’s oil markets, the good times for U.S. oil may eventually fade, said Morgan Bazilian, public policy professor at the Colorado School of Mines.
“It’s sort of changed the scale of that American energy landscape,” Bazilian said. “Will it last? You’re seeing more financial responsibility, but that will not translate to a lot more oil and gas.”
The future looks brighter for U.S. LNG exports, which actually fell in 2022 after having risen for years. An explosion in June forced Freeport LNG, the Texas company that is the country’s second-largest LNG exporter, to shut down, eliminating 20 percent of U.S. gas shipments abroad. Freeport started shipping out gas in limited quantities earlier this year.
Europe’s growing demand for LNG has caused Germany and other EU countries to spend billions on new natural gas import terminals. That should feed demand for more U.S. natural gas at least in the short term, analysts said.
Where LNG may have a bigger influence in Europe is in reinforcing the more traditional role the United States has had in Europe — that of military protector, said Matt Gertken, senior vice president for geopolitical strategy at BCA Research.
“Increased European reliance on liquefied natural gas entails increased reliance on maritime trade and supply line security, wherein the U.S. Navy plays an indispensable role for Europe,” he said.
Still, an increased flow of oil and gas east across the Atlantic may be a relatively short-term phenomenon, analysts said. Instead, Europe is accelerating development of renewable energy in a way that could lead to less need for U.S. oil and gas in the not-too-distant future.
It has added some LNG import terminals to bring in more gas, but it is also investing heavily in hydrogen infrastructure, electric vehicles and a new generation of small, modular nuclear plants — the sorts of projects that the Biden administration has been pushing in the United States. Carbon capture technologies to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere — heavily promoted in Biden’s climate law — are also expected to find fertile ground in Europe.
Countries in the European Union had planned even before the war to shift away from oil and gas in the long term. But Putin’s decision last year to turn off the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines has convinced European leaders to “supercharge” their move toward manufacturing as much of their own energy as possible, said Maroš Šefčovič, the commission’s vice president.
“It has accelerated all our efforts in getting as much as possible from indigenous European [energy] sources, which are renewables,” Šefčovič said in an interview.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

February 24, 2023
Telangana: ‘PM Modi helped Adani make money,’ says IT minister KTR

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Hyderabad: Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao (KTR) at a public meeting on Thursday in Bhupalpally, alleged that prime minister Narendra Modi was helping Gautam Adani become rich.
“Modi indeed helped Adani get that money,” he said referring to the recent Hindenburg research report row. KTR said that the Prime Minister failed to fulfill his election promise to deposit Rs 15 lakhs in Jan Dhan accounts.
“Though the NITI Aayog recommended the Centre to grant Rs.19,000 crore to Mission Bhagiratha and Rs.5,000 crore to Mission Kakatiya, the Centre has not sanctioned a single rupee for these schemes,” he said.
KTR further argued that the PM was responsible for the death of 700 farmers during the protests against the Centre but the BJP leaders still call him God.
“I am asking them for whom he is a God,” he added.
He said that the prices of LPG cylinders have increased from Rs 400 to Rs 1200 during the Modi Government.
Speaking about Congress, he said that people should not get carried away by propaganda spread by the party that was conducting foot marches in the state. “But what did Congress do for the united Andhra Pradesh when it was in power for five decades? The state will suffer a lot if they are given power again,” he said.

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( With inputs from www.siasat.com )

February 23, 2023
ICP’s Free Coaching Helped A Dozen Students Qualify JKAS

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by Fahd Khan
SRINAGAR: In last year’s Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Services examination, the result of which was declared last week, a dozen students enrolled with the Initiative for Competition Promotion (ICP) cracked the coveted examination.
An ICP event in which the civil services aspirants are being made aware of the syllabus and methodology
The ICP, a registered trust, was home to 35 students for a year when they were being trained by a few bureaucrats who run the centre for free. The centre provides mentoring and coaching to civil services aspirants.
“I enrolled in the interview programme of ICP and it helped me to qualify for the exams. It is a good initiative in Kashmir as people lack guidance and environment which is available in Delhi and even in Jammu,” Saqib Rashid, a professional engineer, who secured 10th rank in the recent examination said. “The Institution provides hostel and library facilities for students from far-flung areas. These students get an environment to study which they lack at their homes.”
Besides, nearly two dozen other lateral candidates from different regions of the UT, who were trained for the interview programme through offline and online orientation classes, expert lectures and mock interviews, have also made it to the service.
Riyaz Ahmad Rather, who secured 104th rank in the JKAS exam recently said, “Honestly saying, I was groomed at ICP, I was a full-time resident from the last three years. They provide services at minimal charges; it has a suitable environment for doubt clearance. One gets admission to the resident programme only after qualifying entrance exam. Students qualifying mains exam are then admitted to the interview programme.”
ICP conducts screening test for free coaching program for Civil Services Exam-2020
Yasir Farooq, who secured 120th rank in the examination said, “I owe my selection to ICP. I appeared in KAS 2018 but failed to go through. ICP played the most important role in my selection. I enrolled in 2018 till I qualified. They provide accommodation, test series and guidance. The teachers treat us like their own children. I had an issue with answer writing but the teachers used to evaluate my answers which helped me a lot. I have also twice appeared in the mains examination of the Indian Administrative Services.”
This year a fair number of female candidates from the ICP made it to the final list of JKAS. Saima Ahad from Gandebal secured 26th rank; Rakshan Peerzada and Hafsa Mohidin placed 31st and 130th in rank respectively this year. Zarqa Naquib, who has secured 74th rank also took regular guidance from ICP.

Even though ICP doesn’t have a centre in Jammu, many aspirants from the Jammu division had also enrolled at the centre in Srinagar.
In 2022, nearly 30 outstation students from Jammu and Delhi also availed the benefit of ICP’s Interview Mentorship Programme, an initiative aimed at preparing for the crucial personality test stage of the examination.
Every year 35 aspirants from across the length and breadth of Jammu and Kashmir enrol with the centre at Raj Bagh. The ICP trust has two small guest houses where all the services including lodging, teaching and library facilities are provided free of cost.
The aspirants are guided by the officers to help them to achieve their civil service dream. Besides the residential coaching programme, the academy also conducts classroom coaching, Test series and regular awareness campaigns about a career in the civil services are conducted at Centre.

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( With inputs from : kashmirlife.net )

January 24, 2023
Stalking the dead: how tracing old photographs helped me resurrect my mother’s past

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My mother had four different first names, depending on which language she was speaking at the time. She was Anka in German, Hanka in Polish, Chanka in Yiddish, and after arriving in Australia on a refugee passport in 1949, she adopted the anglicised version of herself, Hannah. Her surname was Altman, although after she married my father, that vestige of her former life disappeared too. The only remnants of her years in Europe were captured in a few black-and-white photographs kept in an old shoebox, hidden away in the hallway cupboard, together with a leather suitcase and tailored winter coat she never wore. As a young girl, I would secretly rummage through these photos, searching for my mother’s story in the anonymous faces I knew no longer walked this earth.
When the ghosts of her past became too much for her to bear, my mother took her own life. I was 21 years old at the time, left to deal with my own ghosts. More than 30 years later, on one otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon, I tried to resurrect my mother’s past.
I wanted to explain the burnt branches of our family tree to my children, the eldest of whom was turning 21. I had spent my youth running away from my mother’s story. Now, as a mother of the grandchildren she would never know, I felt an urgency to piece together her life. Typing one of the versions of her name into Google – Hanka Altman – up came a link to a photo of her seated in the middle of a group of young men in uniform. She was the secretary for the Jewish Civil Police at Bergen-Belsen’s displaced persons camp in 1946. At 21, she was alone in the world, a survivor of the horrors of the Łódź ghetto, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen in turn. She was smiling.
There was the reason why. Nandi. Top row, fourth from the left. Handsome and tall, I recognised him immediately from the only black-and-white photo my mother would show me from that hidden shoebox.
“He was the love of my life,” she used to tell me.
Hanka Altman (second row, third from left), secretary of the Jewish Civil Police at Bergen-Belsen’s displaced persons camp, and Ned ‘Nandi’ Aron (back row, fourth from left)
And as a young girl, hearing stories of how Nandi made her feel alive again after she had lost her entire world, I kind of fell for him too. She reminisced about how they would go for drives into the countryside on weekends, hiking in the forest, picnicking beside lakes. Licking the wounds of their recent traumas, they spoke headily of a future together, once they could find a country that agreed to take them in as refugees.
The youngest of six siblings, and the sole survivor of her entire family who had all been murdered during the war, my mother had nowhere to go. Nandi had an uncle in America and promised her they would travel there together one day to start a new life. But she told me the love of her life ended up breaking her heart and left Europe without her.
In the photo, she sat looking forward, not knowing how the rest of her life might unfold. She had met Nandi and fallen in love. Although she told me a little about her time in Germany after the war with Nandi, that hopeful moment captured by the camera can never be retrieved. Which leads me back to why I googled her name almost 70 years after the photo was taken. I ached to find out more about their relationship. Who was this man to whom I felt so strangely drawn to?

****
I decided to stalk him online. The same photo that was in my mother’s shoebox appeared on the screen. Five people’s names were identified in the caption underneath, one of whom was Ned, an abbreviation for Ferdinand, Nandi’s real name. He had donated his own copy of the photo to the Holocaust museum in Washington. My heart raced as I ran to tell my children that I had found my mother’s old boyfriend. They had grown up with my curious fascination around Nandi. We quickly looked him up in the phone book and found a number in the US.
“Call him!” my son urged.
We rehearsed how I might introduce myself and explain that I am trying to find out more information about my mother. I would tell Nandi she had spoken so warmly of him. With trepidation, I finally dialled the number. A woman with a heavy eastern European accent answered.
“Hullo?”
“Oh, hello,” I said, my voice shaky. “May I please speak to Ned.”
There was a short pause before she sobbed into the receiver, her anguish reaching right across the Pacific Ocean: “He’s dead.”
I had missed Nandi by two years.
When she calmed down a little, I told her who my mother was and why I was calling.
Herszek Altman, Hanka Altman’s brother, who was murdered at Dachau in 1944. These are his work papers from the Łódź ghetto, where he, along with Hanka and their family, were interned from 1941-42
“I remember Hanka Altman,” she said. I thought I heard a tinge of jealousy rising in her voice, even though decades had passed since they would have met. The two of them used to go away together for weekends, she said.
As we kept talking, I learned the reason Nandi and my mother never ended up together. Something she had never told me. He had left her for Anna, who he ended up marrying in Belsen in late 1946. The same woman I was speaking to on the phone.
There was a pause, before Nandi’s widow added: “He was the love of my life.”
****
In her seminal work On Photography, Susan Sontag writes: “Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself – a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness.” My children’s formative years are heavily documented – each birthday, vacation, trip to the beach. Recording these ordinary events, I have labelled them all, carefully placing them in albums which we hardly ever look at nowadays. It seems that in taking so many photos I was somehow trying to compensate for my mother’s undocumented life.
In my mother’s old shoebox, among the pile of photos, are snaps taken on her voyage aboard the SS Sagittaire from Marseilles, via New Caledonia, arriving in Sydney on 27 July 1949. In one of the black-and-white photographs my mother is wearing a swimsuit as she paddles in the shallows on a tropical beach with four other women. She is holding a half-eaten banana in her left hand. Another snap captures her at the wheel of a convertible, dressed in elegant European style as she stares at the camera. In yet another she is standing on a bridge in some European city I feel I should recognise, wearing a tailored frock and clutching a chic handbag. There are no photos of her family in the shoebox. I don’t know which is worse – to have old photos with images of nameless people you knew were once dear to those you loved, or to have no photos at all. Throughout my life I have tried to imagine what my maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins might have looked like.
Hanka Altman (standing, right) in New Caledonia in 1949, en route to Australia
Recently, my husband surprised me with a gift. As I unwrapped it, a photo of a man who looked very familiar stared out at me from the past. I couldn’t place him, but he bore a strange resemblance to my son.
“Who is this?” I asked.
My husband smiled. He had also been stalking the dead. He passed me an official document only recently released from a Polish archive. It was an inmate’s ID card from the Łódź ghetto, dated 11 May 1941. Printed at the top was the name Herszek Altman, born 1911, 43 years of age. My mother’s older brother.
I held the photo of my uncle and gasped for air, feeling like I was drowning in a sea of whispering voices calling out to me from the past. I wondered if it might have saved my mother’s life to have such a tangible link to a loved one.
The people in these photos are now long gone. Yet finally being able to match their names to their faces, I feel like they get to live on just a little longer. “The shortest prayer is a name,” writes Canadian poet Anne Michaels. My mother gazes out from that photo from the displaced persons camp and I wonder what she might ask of me. The faultline between the living and the dead means I can never really know. Perhaps it is simply to ensure that her name, her four names, will not to be lost to history. I do not believe in God, but I am drawn once a year to attend a part of the Yom Kippur service, called Yizkor. Remembrance. The names of those who have died are called out loud by congregants, their presence recreated among the living, if only for a moment. I speak my mother’s name quietly, offering her memory up to strangers. The echoes haunt the synagogue like an incantation, returning her to me in some small way. I could not bear to lose her twice.
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#Stalking #dead #tracing #photographs #helped #resurrect #mothers
( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

January 22, 2023