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India Today
3 days ago
- Science
- India Today
India wins 4 medals, including 2 golds, ranks 6th at Chemistry Olympiad 2025 in UAE
India's four-member student team has returned from the 57th International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) 2025 in Dubai with a strong showing, bringing home two gold and two silver medals. Held between July 5 and 14, the competition saw participation from 354 students representing 90 countries and five observer nations. This marks India's 26th appearance at the gold medals were won by Devesh Pankaj Bhaiya from Jalgaon, Maharashtra, and Sandeep Kuchi from Hyderabad, Telangana. The silver medals went to Debadatta Priyadarshi from Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, and Ujjwal Kesari from New performance placed India in sixth position in the overall medal tally, alongside countries like Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and AND TRAINING The students were chosen through the National Olympiad Examinations conducted by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Mumbai, which serves as the national nodal body for Olympiad preparation under the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).The selection process involved multiple stages, including written exams and training team received mentoring from Professor Ankush Gupta (Head Mentor, HBCSE), Professor Seema Gupta (Acharya Narendra Dev College, Delhi), and scientific observers Dr Neeraja Dashaputre (IISER Pune) and Dr Amrit Mitra (Govt. General Degree College, Singur). Before departing for Dubai, the students underwent a rigorous training programme including theory sessions and lab work at 'S RECORD AT THE EVENTIndia has a consistent record at the IChO since its first appearance. According to official data, Indian participants have won 30% gold, 53% silver, and 17% bronze medals the last 10 editions, gold medal wins have increased to 38%, while silver medals have accounted for 58%, showing a steady rise in performance SUPPORT FOR STUDENTSThe participation of Indian students in international science Olympiads is supported by the National Steering Committee on Science agencies such as the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Space (DOS), and the Ministry of Education (MoE) provide funding and administrative support to ensure continued representation in global year's IChO outcomes reaffirm India's position among leading nations in pre-university science education and global academic success also highlights the importance of early mentoring and institutional support in building international-level scientific talent from India.- Ends
Indian Express
4 days ago
- Science
- Indian Express
India wins 2 gold, 2 silver medals at International Chemistry Olympiad 2025
India's four-member student delegation to the 57th International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) 2025 has returned with two gold and two silver medals. The competition was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from July 5 to 14, and featured participation from 354 students representing 90 countries, along with five observer nations. This marks India's 26th appearance at the IChO. The gold medal winners from India are Devesh Pankaj Bhaiya from Jalgaon, Maharashtra, and Sandeep Kuchi from Hyderabad, Telangana. Debadatta Priyadarshi from Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, and Ujjwal Kesari from New Delhi earned silver medals, as per a press statement. With this performance, India secured the sixth position in the overall medal tally, along with countries such as Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Israel. The Indian team was selected and trained by the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (HBCSE), Mumbai, under the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). HBCSE functions as the nodal centre for the selection and preparation of students for international Olympiads across multiple subjects. For the Chemistry Olympiad, students were shortlisted through the National Olympiad Examinations conducted by HBCSE. The mentoring team for IChO 2025 included Prof Ankush Gupta (Head Mentor, HBCSE), Prof Seema Gupta (Mentor, Acharya Narendra Dev College, Delhi), and Scientific Observers Dr Neeraja Dashaputre (IISER Pune) and Dr Amrit Mitra (Government General Degree College, Singur, West Bengal). The students underwent intensive training, including orientation and pre-departure camps at HBCSE. India has maintained a steady record of high performance at IChO since its first participation. Historically, Indian participants have won 30% gold, 53% silver, and 17% bronze medals. Over the last 10 editions of IChO, there has been an increase in higher-tier achievements, with 38% gold and 58% silver medals. The Indian participation at IChO is supported by the National Steering Committee on Science Olympiads and facilitated by several government agencies. These include the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Department of Space (DOS), and the Ministry of Education (MoE). Their continued funding and policy support enable India's engagement with international science competitions.
The Hindu
17-06-2025
- Science
- The Hindu
TANSCHE to annually train 180 UG and PG students during vacations for national level entrance tests
The Tamil Nadu State Council for Higher Education (TANSCHE) will train 180 UG and PG students of basic sciences annually to get them ready for national level entrance examinations. According to a government order issued earlier this month, 30 students each from and programmes in Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics will be selected from government colleges through a merit-based screening test. During summer and winter vacations, they will be put through two five-day residential workshops 'aimed at enhancing the conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills'. This would help the students face national entrance examinations such as Joint Admission Test for Masters (JAM), Joint Entrance Screening Test (JEST), Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), National Eligibility Test (NET) and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) Graduate School. The government has allocated ₹28 lakh per annum for the two residential camps. The programme seeks to provide a level the playing field for students from poor and marginalised backgrounds and increase their enrollment into premier institutions such as Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER) and National Institute of Science Education and Research (NISER). At the two camps, the students will be trained by qualified faculty members with proven expertise in problem-solving and examination coaching and will be provided with curated study materials free of cost. Academic support will also be extended to the students round the year through online session.
Hindustan Times
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
A tale of Homi Bhabha, MF Husain and a trove of art at a science institute
MUMBAI: In the foyer of 'A' Block at the campus of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) is an M F Husain that took top honours at an unusual competition. The area is not accessible to visitors in the government-funded, high-security campus, but the mural's expanse and sharp lines are visible even from a distance, through the tall glass facade. The mural came to adorn this 9ft x 45ft wall in 1962 because Homi Bhabha, who founded the institute in 1945, invited the finest Indian artists to compete for a chance to grace a wall at TIFR's then-new Navy Nagar premises with their work. Unbeknownst to them, Bhabha had reached out to Pablo Picasso too, hoping the legendary Spanish artist would oblige. 'As a result of our conflict with the Chinese, it is quite impossible for us to pay anything in foreign exchange, leave aside the type of price that would be appropriate for Picasso,' he wrote to his friend, Irish scientist JD Bernal. 'However, I did suggest we could pay him a first-class return air fare to India and a month's stay at our expense, together with arrangements for visiting and seeing some of the country's famous archaeological monuments,' went the letter. The attempt to entice Picasso did not work out, but Husain's massive mural, Bharat Bhagya Vidhata, lent the campus a special touch, blending the pride of a modern Indian identity with his artistic genius. This was one of the tales narrated by Mortimer Chatterjee, co-founder and director of the gallery Chatterjee and Lal, at a talk that inaugurated TIFR's first Art & Archives Colloquium, organised in collaboration with Art Mumbai. Chatterjee, who has been associated with TIFR's acclaimed art collection for 15 years, spoke of how the collection was acquired between the '50s and '70s, and what it says about Indian art of that time. While Husain's mural was the first painting created for the new campus, Bhabha had been building the institute's art collection for the better part of the previous decade. Bhabha, one of India's premier nuclear physicists, had not traded art for science; he paid keen attention to the campus's architecture and gardens too. He was, after all, an artist himself. 'While Bhabha was the steering force of the collection, he had a whole band of art insiders around him keeping a close eye on the exhibitions and new work being produced. Chief among them was Phiroza Wadia, called 'Pipsy', whom Bhabha painted a few times. Also among them was mathematics professor KS Chandrasekharan, art critic Rudolf von Leyden and Kekoo Gandhy of the Chemold Prescott gallery,' Chatterjee recounted. 'Gandhy would invite Bhabha over the day before his exhibitions opened, for him to have the first pick, while his staff held up frames for Bhabha to visualise. He would get lost in a trance, forgetting that there was someone holding them up,' said Chatterjee, to a rapt audience, on Monday evening. 'Often the paintings would stay hung at TIFR for a while, before purchase, for Bhabha to evaluate them in the setting, just as he did with paintings for his home,' he added. During the eight years it took to build the Navy Nagar campus, the 102 acquired paintings were displayed on the walls of the old Bombay Yacht Club. Then owned by Bhabha's aunt, it served as TIFR's home before the move to Navy Nagar. Few of the paintings had anything to do with science, really. The collection was entirely contemporary. For this, Chatterjee compared Bhabha to 'the spirit of Medici', the Italian patron that fostered Renaissance art, including that of Leonardo da Vinci. The then-budding group of artists known as the Progressive Artists' Group, led by Husain, SH Raza and FN Souza, among others, inevitably took the spotlight in TIFR's art collection, but a wide range of Indian artists is actually represented across it. Bhabha's love of art needed funds to support it. He secured permission, Chatterjee said, to spend 1% of TIFR's budget on art. Bringing things full-circle, Husain helped broker deals between artists and TIFR too. After Bhabha's death in 1966, aged just 56, his successor at TIFR, MGK Menon, continued his mission, building the institute's art collection up to its current strength of 250-plus masterpieces.
Scroll.in
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
Twinkle, twinkle, little star: Cosmology and the composition of verse
Knowing someone on the field as a fellow cricketer is one thing. So too becoming privy to his engaging forays into Maharashtrian antiquities. Quite something else it is to listen to Professor Girish Kulkarni of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research giving a public lecture on the properties of the Universe in its first billion years. Among Girish Kulkarni's beguiling analogies and metaphors, I am particularly struck by his comparison of the way the further you venture out into space, that is also, given the speed of light, back in time, what is known becomes more fragmentary in the way archaeologists digging down under a modern city usually find fewer remains as they go until there is nothing at all. To this model or metaphor, apparently, there is one exception. At a certain distant 'epoch' in space, beyond the imagining except in esoteric mathematical formulae, there is a 'zone' so clear it is as if an archaeologist, digging down into ever lower levels, has come upon a city – some lost Harappa or Pompeii – relatively well preserved. This is a surprise and creates a puzzle for cosmologists since it fits ill with the otherwise established pattern of a diminishing series. History of poetry: 'The Star As a woolly-minded versifier, I find myself provoked to toy with the possibility of an analogy between this riddle of contemporary cosmology and the surprises that can be thrown up by the composition of verse as well as its history. First, a historical example. Let me ask a question such as Girish Kulkarni might ask about versification. Which is the most widely known verse of English poetry? Perhaps something by Shakespeare? Or Wordsworth? Or Byron? Well, that might be so but my own random sample taken from many rambles across the world might suggest by way of answer a verse with which you will surely be familiar. By chance, it is curiously appropriate for cosmology: 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky, Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are'. I have found so many people, especially but not exclusively children, from Beijing to Budapest, from Madrid to Montreal, who, even when knowing little English, can recite this verse. I have seen copies of it inscribed on plates and on wall-hangings. Of course you know this verse, surely we all do, but, since we tend to remember poetry just in fragments, do you remember – I didn't – how it goes on and elaborates on the theme of the twinkling star? The movement of the verse is tied to a constant refrain of its iconic first line in a way that is common to Indian prosody. It returns to it finally via a line no doubt equally congenial to cosmologists as they confront newer objects of astronomical ignorance such as black holes and dark matter: 'Though I know not what you are, twinkle, twinkle, little star'. As with much poetry, often assigned for reasons good as well as bad to Anon, you may have forgotten or never known the name of the author of 'The Star'? It is Jane Taylor who, along with her sister Ann, was a phenomenally successful and well-loved writer in the Victorian era and beyond, at home and abroad. If you have seen the film PK, you may also be surprised to learn that it is indirectly, as stories by Browning and Mark Twain were directly, indebted to another of Jane's works, 'How It Strikes a Stranger'. This moral tale pioneered a genre whereby a stranger from outer space – Jane's from her twinkling Evening Star – arrives on Earth and exposes while experiencing the absurdities of human behaviour. Jane's particular target was Man's greed for wealth and possessions in the face of mortality. Composition of poetry: The Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám That it is out of an inchoate chaos the coherent patterns of polished poems are salvaged and constructed may be illustrated by the story of a poem as widely read among free-thinking adults of all classes in late Victorian times as the works of the Taylors were among religious families – pirate editions appearing in India as well as England and America. To an astronomer and mathematician, Omar Khayyám, is ascribed a series of verses, none or few of which he may have composed at all. These are the Persian versions of rubaiyát better known to us in Edward FitzGerald's English translations – transcreations more like, even occasionally total inventions. The rubai is, like the ballad, a people's form from the countryside and it is ironic that many of the Persian originals, made available to FitzGerald by his teacher, Edward Byles Cowell, a professor of Sanskrit in (then) Calcutta, were composed in the sophisticated courts of north India. Whether or not Omar Khayyám ever did toss off a rubai or two at the end of his lectures on science, FitzGerald gathered a selection of the ever increasing number attributed to him and, having first tried some in Latin, tesselated them, as he put it, into a mosaic, stringing the disparate and discrete originals into a coherent sequence they never had – and so providing us with a whole galaxy of twinkling stars. Readers frequently return the collection to its former fragmented state by singling out a particularly memorable quatrain, perhaps, for example: 'And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not thy hands to It for help – for It Rolls impotently on as Thou or I' FitzGerald, who invariably deferred to his – younger – teacher, Professor Cowell, only once rebuffed him and that was to insist on his own more sympathetic rather than his teacher's far more laboured - if faithful – versions of Omariana being published first. In the event the first edition of his Rubaiyát of 'Omar Khayyám (1859) fell dead from the press, the next edition, published curiously in (then) Madras, did no better and FitzGerald died before quatrains from his poem became as familiar as stars in the sky. Reading poetry: 'The Disillusioned Bride' If the composition and dissemination of verse is as volatile as anything in the cosmos, the reading of it can also be as various and puzzling. Scroll back towards the beginnings of Jane Taylor's career and one poem attributed to her is so unlike anything else she ever wrote that it is widely supposed it cannot be hers. The timbered Guildhall Museum in Lavenham once housed an extensive exhibition of works by the Taylor family. A visiting stranger from the 21st century, as if from another star, would have been struck by the difference as well as coherence of their cultural universe. Their tales and verses all have a strictly moral tone. Throughout the long 19th century, these made a substantial contribution to a strain of English-speaking culture that prized domesticity and duty above all else. The works of the sisters outlived them and they were still superstars of the nursery when an enlarged centenary edition of their Original Poems was published to greet the new century in 1903. Two years later their supernova even survived the threat of collapse into a black hole brought on by their own gravity. In his Cautionary Tales Hilaire Belloc published a series of hilarious parodies of their verses for children in which particular boys and girls don't simply suffer a bit of retribution as do Ann's Meddlesome Matty and Jane's Dirty Jim but all die in agony – and of course quite ridiculously – for such minor misdemeanours as slamming doors or chewing bits of string. Perhaps only that alien stranger to the Taylor family exhibition would have been idle or impertinent enough to look behind a door leading out of the room and find hanging there a manuscript poem that simply doesn't fit the picture at all. An adjacent note attributed it to Jane and gave its title as 'The Disillusioned Bride'. This poem has a newly-married young woman, in twelve increasingly spirited stanzas, berating her husband for growing cool towards her and threatening to leave him if he doesn't pay proper attention to her and her feelings. Surely the attribution of this poem to Jane has to be misplaced? Jane herself never had a husband. But did she perhaps have had a friend who, like a young woman in a later moral tale she wrote, 'Display', jumped into a showy marriage she soon regretted? If the subject of Jane's – never published – poem is puzzling, the form of it (pointed up in the title of a second unattributed variant secreted in a Suffolk archive) compounds the puzzle. Jane's poem begins: 'The twentieth week is well nigh past, Since first in church we two were ask'd, Ah would we had not gone at last! My husband…' This use of a stanza form composed of a triplet followed by an apostrophe was also used by Jane's sister Ann in 'My Mother' (published 1804), a poem destined to become as popular worldwide as 'The Star'. But it was not from Ann that Jane borrowed the form: both sisters were indebted for that to William Cowper, a poet whose works were much admired in Non-conformist circles for their domestic pieties. In 1803, 'To Mary', a poem by Cowper, had been published posthumously. It sadly regretted the terminal illness of a longtime companion: 'The twentieth year is well night past Since first our sky was overcast, Ah would that this might be the last! My Mary…' While it is easy to see why Jane could not have published a poem that explicitly followed the syntax of Cowper's so closely, it is puzzling why she would have chosen to speak at all in a loud spirited tone the very reverse of the quiet piety heard in Cowper's poem. Quite possibly Girish Kulkarni, familiar with the peculiarities of the entire cosmos, would have hit upon the answer rather more quickly than I did. The truth is that the lens of the Telescope of Time through which we now look at Jane's poem has been adjusted, if not changed. It is not Jane but we who have upended and abandoned her customary moral assumptions. In reading a dramatic monologue such as these three poems are, we tend to identify with the speaker – unless and until our own values cause us to take exception to what they are saying. While we today may hear the voice of Jane's disillusioned bride as that of a spirited young woman putting her negligent husband right about the needs of his new partner, Jane would have heard it as that of a strident one who needs to learn, as does the young woman in 'Display', to make the transition from being a petulant bride to a sensible wife. Of course it could still be that something of Jane's heart has gone into her portrait of the bride, even as her head has not. Could it be that her bride is simultaneously an admirable and independently-minded young woman and a pitiable and petulant one? Perhaps she owns a cat called Schrödinger? Cosmos Conceptions of the cosmos, so I understand from Girish Kulkarni's lecture, are likewise composed of fragments that might be perceived diametrically differently and re-arranged coherently in diverse ways. That said, can there really be any comparison between earth-bound scribblers mired in the maya of drafting pretty little verses and cosmologists far out in space intent on measuring as they are wafted along on it what the ancient seers referred to as the Breath of Brahma? Girish Kulkarni's recent public lecture on Cosmology at Kaapi for Kuriosity may be found here. John Drew's latest collection of essays and verses, Bangla File, is available from ULAB Press, Dhaka.
