Lewis Hamilton produced a
masterful performance to win a wet, chaotic, crash-strewn Brazilian Grand Prix
and take the title fight to the final race.

His ninth win of 2016 came
in a race with several high-speed accidents, two stoppages and five safety
cars, BBC reported on Sunday.

The victory cut the lead of
his Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg, who finished second, to 12 points.

Rosberg will secure the
championship if he finishes third in Abu Dhabi on November 27 even if Hamilton
wins.

As one of the most dramatic
races for years unfolded, Hamilton was supreme at the front in treacherous
conditions, lapping consistently faster than anyone.

After each restart, Hamilton
cruised easily away from Rosberg – building at one stage an 18-second lead in
14 laps before another safety car cut his lead to nothing.

His victory is the 52nd of
his career, making him the second most successful race winner of all time ahead
of Alain Prost (51). Michael Schumacher is way ahead on 91.

Not too bad, huh,” said
Hamilton. “I was generally just chilling up front. When it rains it’s
usually a good day for me. It was tricky for everyone. There were definitely
opportunities for aquaplaning, which everyone did.

“No mistakes, no
issues, no spins. It was kind of interesting to hear how many people were
spinning, but I didn’t have that problem.

In the wake of the prevailing currency crisis, the Assam government is mulling extension of the deadline for making payments in scrapped currency notes to help those undergoing treatment at government hospitals, Assam Finance Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on Sunday.

Although the central government has extended the deadline to accept the old currency notes in government hospitals to November 14, the state government plans to extend the deadline further by another week to help those undergoing treatment in government hospitals, Sarma said.

“The Central government's deadline will end tomorrow. Let's see if the central government extends the deadline further. In case the Centre does not extend this, we might go for extending this by another week,” the Minister said.

The Minister, however, said the same cannot be extended to private hospitals, as the central government had not included the private hospitals in its earlier order.

Admission to various post-graduate courses in Manipur University usually begins in June-July and by September the campus bristles with events and activity. This year the campus wore a deserted look. There were no tribal students because they refused to seek admission when the university authorities did not adhere to the reservation of 31 per cent seats for Scheduled Tribe students. They held demonstrations in front of the university gate.

Thangtinlen Haokip, a student of the education department and president of the Manipur University Tribal Students’ Union, said Meitei student groups like the Manipur University Students’ Union, Kangleipak  Students’ Association and the  Manipur Students’ Federation were against the 2012 amendment for 31 per cent reservation for  Scheduled Tribes.

Haokip, who is coordinating protests and economic blockades, said tribal students called an indefinite economic blockade from midnight of 28 October along the National Highways 39 and 53, claming it was their democratic right to protest silently.

I also met V Shatshang, general secretary of the  All Tribal Students’ Union, Manipur, and he said that ever since Manipur University came to be designated a Central university it followed the reservation policy of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act 2006. Under this, 7.5 per cent  seats were reserved for  Scheduled Tribes, 15 per cent for Scheduled Castes and  27 per cent  for Other Backward Classes. He said these did not correspond with the population of Manipur. He explained that the tribal population numbered 902,740 (Census 2011), which amounted to  35.1 per cent of the state’s population ( 2,570,390).  Manipur  has  an SC population of  97,042 — only  3.8 per cent of the state’s total. With no mention of OBCs in the Census, he wondered how the calculation for the percentage of reservations for the said OBC category was arrived at.

Until 2005, when Manipur University was under the state, the reservation for STs was 31 per cent.It fell to 7.5 per cent in the new 2006 Act, while the reservation for SCs was two per cent until 2005 and went as high as 15 per cent in 2006.  Meanwhile, reservation for OBCs was 17 per cent until 2005 and this was raised to 27 per cent under the Central University Act, 2006.

Haokip and Shatshang said there had been numerous representations and lobbying to review the policy. After five years, the 2006 Act was amended in 2012. As per Gazette of India notification, the following amendments were made in Section 2 of the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Amendment Act, 2006 (hereinafter referred to as the principal Act), after clause (i), the following clauses of Section 2 shall be inserted, namely: “(a) specified north-eastern region” means the area comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura and the tribal areas of Assam referred to in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution”.

Surprisingly, tribal students were kept in the dark about the 2012 amendment. Shatsang said, “We came to know about the amendment only after two years when we met President Pranab Mukherjee when, in April 2014, he came for the 14th convocation. When we met the Presidfent to submit a memorandum, he told us that the amendments had already been made.

“Whenever we made inquiries we were given vague replies, like the intimation letter with regard to the amendment was mistakenly sent to a wrong address — Manipal University — and therefore did not reach Manipur.”

Two vice-chancellors have resigned over the impasse. A new, Professor AP Pandey of (Benaras Hindu University) has taken over.

According to Haokip, classes were to start by 7 November but till then no tribal students had sought admission.

The university  reportedly agreed to the 31 per cent reservation and signed a memorandum of understanding on 7 November.  When things were looking up, the vice-chancellor made a U-turn and reportedly signed another agreement with other student  groups like the Manipur University Students’ Union, Kangleipak Students’ Association and the Manipur Students’ Federation, all valley-based Meitei groups and opposed to the 31 per cent reservation.

Students are caught in a power tussle between the university authorities and the University Grants Commission. While Manipur University is hell bent on exercising its (lost) authority, the UGC is under pressure to uphold its principles  and norms. Currently, there is silence in the university, with several other issues cropping up and students’ concern taking a back seat. Who bothers about education and the future of youth anyway? This is not the first unrest the university has witnessed over the reservation issue. As in other years, this issue will crop up every now and then unless the university authorities are prepared to followed norms and policy, and are committed to transparency

— Ninglun Hanghal

(The writer is an imphal-based freelance contributor.)

One of the most outstanding literary names in Urdu
literature Qurratulain Hyder , is best known for her magnum opus, Aag Ka Darya
(River of Fire), a novel first published in Urdu in 1959, from Lahore,
Pakistan, that stretches from the 4th century BC to post Partition India. Popularly
known as “Ainee Apa” among her friends and admirers, she was the daughter of
writer and pioneers of Urdu short story writer Sajjad Haidar Her novels and
short stories trace human destinies in the whirlpool of history, especially in
the tension between different cultures like Hindu and Muslim, Indian and
European, and between private wishes and public demands. She has created some
very impressive female figures and shown in her choice and treatment of themes
a lasting willingness to experiment and to make innovations. Qurratulain Hyder
is often said to be the grand old lady or grey eminence of Urdu literature.
Plainly this towering figure of 20th century Urdu literature is acknowledged
and admired but also viewed from a distance. She comes from a family of notable
writers including not only her parents but also an aunt, and has a nearly
photographic memory enlivened by a streak of fantasy. Qurratulain Hyder let her
first stories appear in literary periodicals in the 1940s then rose to fame in
1948 on the wings of her first novel, which is about the division of the
subcontinent into India and Pakistan only a year earlier.

Pakistan was meant to grant Indian Muslims a homeland free
from administration by a Hindu majority but proved to be problematic. The Partition
came in the way of the cultural interaction which had for centuries typified
North Indian life are significant themes of Hyder’s works for the rest of her
career. Qurratulain Hyder Nirbachita Galpo, an Urbee Prakashan publication
seeks to acquaint the Bengali readers with the works of an author who was not
chary of penning the follies and foibles of her class. Derided as “Pompom
Darling”, a description meant to be an invective but falls far short of its
target to belittle her literary efforts. The popularity of her works on both
sides of the border in India and Pakistan is not the sole pointer to her claim
to fame. Reading between the lines of the smartly written account of the life
and times of the upper classes, one finds and Hyder zeroed in on warts and all
in the lives of both the haves and have-nots. Thanks to Biswajit Sen who has
not ably translated Hyder’s works but also captured the mood down to t he swish
of silk in a tony party and the sigh of unfulfilled desires during the social
whirl. Kudos to Urbee for bringing out this literary gem

The consortium
that approves emojis has signed off new ones, including a woman wearing a
hijab, woman breastfeeding a baby and a person doing yoga.

The new emojis are likely to arrive on smartphones
next year after Unicode, the international consortium that sets their global
standards, proposed the 51 icons.

It will take the total number of the cartoon
images, which are increasingly being used to replace words in text messages, to
1,724, The Telegraph reported.

Rayouf Alhumedhi, a 15-year-old from Germany, had
campaigned for the inclusion of the character wearing a hijab emoji, proposing
it to Unicode after realising there was no emoji to represent her.

Among the list of introductions are ‘person with
headscarf’, ‘breastfeeding’, ‘bearded person’, ‘older adult’, reflecting the
current lack of grandparent icons.

Other emojis that will be released in 2017 by
Unicode are a head exploding, a face with open mouth vomiting and a man and
woman practising yoga, The Guardian reported.

The new list, Unicode 10, adds to efforts to make
emojis more diverse. Smartphone makers have included a variety of skin tones,
hair colours and cultural and religious references in recent years following
claims that they reinforce stereotypes.

Google recently called for more emojis that
reflect women in the workplace, while Apple added male and female versions of
some emojis after complaints that many of the female- focused cartoons featured
activities such as cutting hair.

Alhumedhi, whose own proposal was accepted by
Unicode, tweeted that she was “so excited” by the news.

The other new emojis proposed include a zombie, a
vampire, a person holding their finger to their mouth, and a T-Rex.

Unicode, which represents the major technology
companies, proposed a shortlist of the new emojis. They are typically approved
in the following summer and are likely to be added to smartphones in roughly a
year’s time.

In the coming weeks, Apple is set to add the
emojis from the previous set, Unicode 9. They include emojis for facepalm,
selfie, a clown and a pregnant woman.

A special type of
iPad game may effectively help restore visual abilities in children with lazy
eye, a new study has claimed.

Amblyopia also known as lazy eye is the leading
cause of monocular visual impairment in children.

It has traditionally been viewed as a monocular
disorder that can be treated by patching the fellow (opposite) eye to force use
of the amblyopic eye, but it does not always restore 20/20 vision or teach the
eyes to work together.

Sinec amblyopia arises from binocular discordance,
binocular treatments are likely to yield better vision outcomes.

However, it is unclear whether binocular treatment
is comparable to patching in treating amblyopia.

Krista R Kelly, of the Retina Foundation of the
Southwest in the US, and colleagues randomly assigned 28 children of average
age of seven years with amblyopia to binocular game treatment and to patching
treatment.

The action-oriented adventure iPad game required
children to wear special glasses that separate game elements seen by each eye
so that reduced-contrast elements are seen by the fellow eye, high-contrast
elements are seen by the amblyopic eye and high-contrast background elements
are seen by both eyes.

For successful game play, both eyes must see their
respective game components. Children were asked to play the game at home for an
hour a day, five days a week for two weeks making it a total of 10 hours.

The primary outcome was change in amblyopic eye
best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) at the two-week visit.

The researchers found that at the two-week visit,
improvement in amblyopic eye BCVA was greater with the binocular game compared
with patching, with the average visual acuity improvement after binocular
treatment being more than double the improvement found with patching.

This was achieved with less than 50 per cent
treatment time required for patching – which is 28 hours.

Five of 13 children (39 per cent) with binocular
treatment reached 20/32 or better visual acuity compared with one of 14
children (7 per cent) with patching.

At two weeks, patching children crossed over to
binocular game treatment, and all 28 children played the game for another two
weeks.

At the four-week visit, no group difference was
found in BCVA change, with children who crossed over to the binocular games
catching up with children treated with binocular games.

“We show that in just two weeks, visual acuity
gain with binocular treatment was half that found with six months of patching,
suggesting that binocular treatment may yield faster gains than patching,”
researchers said.

“Whether long-term binocular treatment is as
effective in remediating amblyopia as patching remains to be
investigated,” they said.

The study was published in the journal JAMA
Ophthalmology.