All your Diwali needs at Woolies

Woolworths helps customers celebrate Diwali with expanded Indian product range

Diwali preparations are now made easier and more convenient with special South Asian products available in selected Woolworths stores across the country. As a traditionally joyful time, Woolworths has embraced the importance the role food plays during Diwali by offering tailored products for the Indian community, available in over 200 stores nationally and also online.

The range of products includes snacks, spices, rice and other cooking ingredients to help you create your special dishes during the Diwali celebrations. Specially sourced to not only offer popular food items from home, the products selected also create greater convenience for the Indian community in Australia when preparing for their upcoming festivities.

Popular Indian snacks such as Haldiram sweets, Britannia and Parle biscuits, Bikano and Haldiram snacks are available, providing the opportunity to easily enjoy these little treats for Diwali.

For those short on time, MTR Tasty Delights Ready to Eat meals are available, along with popular Haldiram’s frozen foods and sweets such as Kaju Katli and Motichoor Ladoo. Accompanied by popular beverages such as

Wagh Bakri, Taj Mahal tea and MTR Badam Drink Cans, Woolworths has customers’ meal, snack and gifting needs covered this Diwali.

Lastly, special prices are offered on key household ingredients such as India Gate Basmati rice, Pillsbury Chakki Atta flour and Sundrop Sunflower oil, used for everyday cooking.

Woolworths Director of Buying, Peter McNamara said, “We understand Diwali is an important time for family gathering, celebration and feasting. We have been working on continuing to expand our Indian product range, to meet the needs of the growing Indian community in Australia. With Diwali, we have the right variety of local and international products offering great value to help our customers during their busy preparations leading into the Diwali festivities.”

“We would also like to wish the community a very happy Diwali,” he added.

The Diwali product range varies from store to store and the Diwali Sale is available from now until Tuesday 29th October 2019, unless sold out earlier.

For more information on Woolworths stores that stock the Diwali range, head to www. woolworths.com.au/diwali.

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Economics Nobel for Prof. Abhijit Banerjee

Indian-origin MIT professor Abhijit Banerjee, his wife and one-time PhD student Esther Duflo, and Harvard professor Michael Kremer have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work which has "dramatically improved our ability to fight poverty in practice."

The trio's work has focused on the poor communities in India and Africa, and their research show which investments in key areas like education and healthcare are worth making and have the biggest impact on the lives of the poorest people.

Born in Mumbai in 1961, Bannerjee is one of the leading development economists and is presently working as a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Author of a large number of articles and books, Banerjee graduated in science from the Calcutta University in 1981 before moving to the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi from where he completed his MA in 1983. He received his PhD from the Harvard University in 1988.

Announcing the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said that the research conducted by this year's laureates has considerably improved the ability to fight global poverty.

"In just two decades, their new experimentbased approach has transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of research," the Academy said.

In 2003, Banerjee founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan, and he remains one of the lab's directors.

Born in 1972, Duflo is the second woman and the youngest person to be awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences, which was not among the five original Nobels and was instituted by the Swedish central bank "in memory of Alfred Nobel" in 1969.

Also a professor at the MIT, Duflo said she is "humbled" by her success in winning the Nobel Prize for economics and hopes it will "inspire many, many other women."

Banerjee is a past President of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a research associate of the NBER and a CEPR research fellow, international research fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a winner of the Infosys prize.

He is the author of a large number of articles and four books, including Poor Economics, which won the Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year award in 2011.

He is the editor of three more books and has also directed two documentary films. He also served on the UN Secretary-General's high-level Panel of Eminent Persons on the post-2015 Development Agenda.

In 2011, Banerjee was named one of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory.

Noted historian Ramachandra Guha said that Banerjee's ground-breaking scholarship apart, he is also a superb cook and a connoisseur of Hindustani classical music.

"He represents the best of Indian culture and scholarship, while always being open to what the world has to offer," Guha wrote on Twitter while congratulating the Nobel laureate.

Indian economy in 'tailspin' warns Nobel laureate Banerjee

The newly-minted economics Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee has warned that the Indian economy is going into "a tailspin" and his prescription is for the government to focus to increasing demand rather than on deficits or stability.

“When the economy goes into a tailspin, you don't worry so much about monetary stability: you worry a little more about demand, the demand is a huge problem right now in the economy," he said at a news conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge after his prize was announced.

The fall in consumption was a warning sign for India, he said while answering a question about the state of the Indian economy.

He said, "The economy is doing very badly in my view. One of the numbers that just came out is the National Sample Survey which comes out every one and a half years or so and it gives you the average consumption in urban and rural areas in India.We see in that, that between 2014-15 and 2017-18, that number has slightly gone down. That's the first time such a thing has happened in many, many years. So that is a very glaring warning sign."

In this scenario, he said that the government was concentrating on deficits and monetary stability when the focus should be on increasing demand.

"The government has a large deficit, but right now, it is aiming to please everybody by pretending to hold onto some budgetary targets and monetary targets," he said.

He criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government over the use of data.

"There is enormous fight going on in India about which data is right, and the government has a particular view that all data that is inconvenient to it is wrong," he said.

"Nonetheless, this is something that even the government is recognising that there is a problem," he added.

Banerjee was reflecting the views of many economists who have questioned the reliability of government data, among them former government chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian, who asserted in a Harvard University paper that India's growth rate may have been overstated by 2.5 per cent for each of the years between 2011-12 and 2016-17.

Banerjee was one of the advisers to the Congress Party in this year’s elections in moulding the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY) programme it proposed to give a minimum guaranteed income to 20 per cent poorest people or 50 million families in India.

Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT and his wife, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics, Esther Duflois the Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics Professor there.

They shared the prize with Harvard professor Michael Kremer for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty," according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Earlier in response to a question about Latin America, Banerjee had said that since they worked on hard evidence and had not studied that area and done the homework he could not give an opinion.

So, Banerjee's wife teased him amid laughter about answering the question about India saying, "He has an opinion."

He replied, "That is a statement not about what will work in the future but about what is going on now. That I am entitled to have an opinion about."

Asked for his response to being the sixth Nobel laureate with a Kolkata connection, starting with Rabindranath Tagore in 1913, he said, "I assume they are all much more distinguished than me.”

Mumbai-born Banerjee received his BSc from University of Calcutta in 1981, his MA from JNU in 1983 and his PhD from Harvard in 1988.

The first person of Indian origin to win the Nobel Prize of Economics is Amartya Sen, and Banerjee follows in his footsteps by researching poverty-related topics like him. Banerjee is at least the tenth person of Indian origin or citizenship to win a Nobel Prize.

Speaking about their research in India, Duflo said that they wanted to find out why parents did not vaccinate their childrenand what would motivate them.

They picked an area in Rajasthan and randomly selected 120 villages for three types of programmes, one where nothing new was done for vaccination, another where regular vaccination camps were held and a third where there was distribution of lentils before vaccination and plates afterwards to parents, she said.

While the rate of vaccination stayed at five percent for the villages with no special programmes, it rose to 12 per cent when camps were held and soared to 39 per cent in the villages with the incentives, she said. It gave an insight into how people make decisions and how social programmes can be made to work, she concluded.

A very big day for us, says

Abhijit Banerjee's alma mater

Calling it a very big day for the institution, the South Point High School in Kolkata rejoiced at its alumnus Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee getting the coveted Nobel Prize for Economics.

"This is a very big day for us. No school can expect more from its students," SPHS Principal Rupa Sanyal Bhattacharya told a hurriedly-convened media meet at Kolkata. Banerjee passed his higher secondary exam from the school in 1978.

"This was expected,” said a beaming Bhattacharya. “For some years, we were hearing that he was being considered for the coveted award for his work."

South Point, the first co-education school in Kolkata and still one of the leading schools in the metropolis, found its name in the Guinness Book of Records (1984-1992) as the world's largest school in terms of the number of students.

Bhattacharya said Banerjee was still in touch with the now retired teachers of the school who taught him. "He replies to e-mails from his teachers till date, despite his busy schedule at the MIT.”

"This is a great quality - a quality of a great human being," she said.

The greening of Delhi’s Gurdwara Bangla Sahib

Gurdwara Bangla Sahib has decided to ban use of all types of plastics in the shrine complex to commemorate 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak.

The heritage Sikh shrine, located in the heart of the national capital, has banned disposable plates, glasses, spoons, thermocol cup and plates, and switched to steel bowls for serving drinking water and steel plates for serving langar (community food) to devotees.

According to a statement, it's also taking several other eco-friendly initiatives to become the cleanest place in the Delhi.

Around 5,000 poly bags/thermocol cupplates used for distributing "prasad" and fruits to devotees daily have been replaced with eco-friendly jute bags and leaf bowls since October 2.

The DSGMC has set up a recycling plant, capable of handling two tonnes of flower, langarwaste and dry leaves a day, to make organic manure and vermicompost.

The plant has been commissioned on an experimental basis on the zero-waste model. It will be fully commissioned later this month. It will process floral waste, minimise environmental footprint besides providing employment opportunities and resources for the shrine.

The DSGMC has shifted to piped natural gas (PNG) for preparing langar for around 35,000 persons daily. Machines have been installed in the langarhall to feed 1,500 people at one go, clean the area, for washing utensils to save water and achieve the best hygienic standards.

He said at all the open places in the gurdwara complex saplings would be planted. A solar system has been installed to check carbon emission and provide clean energy.

Karnataka's legendary saxophonist Gopalnath passes away

Karnataka's legendary saxophonist KadriGopalnath died at a private hospital in Mangalore on Fri 11 Oct. He was 69.

"Gopalnath died due to cardiac arrest after he was admitted to A.J. Hospital on Thursday when he complained of breathing and back pain," a state information department official told IANS.

Gopalnath is survived by his wife Sarojini, sons Manikanth and Guruprasad and daughter Ambika Mohan.

Manikanth is a noted music director.

Hundreds of the musician's admirers and followers flocked to Gopalnath's house at Padavinangady to pay their last respects to him and console the bereaved family.

Born on December 6, 1949 in a Dakshina Kannada village, Gopalnath was son of flute (nagaswara) expert Taniyappa and learnt to play on saxophone from his guru N. Gopalakrishna Iyer of Kalaniketan over five decades ago.

Fascinated by the sound of the saxophone when he heard it for the first time at a concert by the Mysuru palace band, he decided to practice on it and became an expert in a decade.

In recognition of his outstanding performance and contribution to Carnatic music, he was conferred Padma Shri, Sangeetha Nataka Academy award and Karnataka Kalasri award.

Gopalnath was the first Carnatic musician to play at the BBC Promenade concert in 1994 in London's Royal Albert Hall. He also played the saxophone at jazz festivals in Prague, Berlin, Mexico and Paris as well as in Mumbai and Chennai.

Gopalnath also played for Carnatic music programmes of the state-run All India Radio for years, first at Mangalore and later in Chennai. He also performed at several state-sponsored concerts across the country during his heydays.

Mourning Gopalnath, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted that the remarkable musician epitomised excellence.

"Blessed with exceptional diligence and talent, Gopanath made a valuable contribution to Carnatic music. His works were popular across continents. Pained by his demise. My thoughts are with his family and admirers," he wrote.

In a condolence message, Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa said the Carnatic exponent had adapted a foreign instrument like saxophone to the Indian classical music and entertained connoisseurs with his enchanting performances.

"In his death, the world of music has lost a great musician," he added.

A deep love for Tamil and Sanskrit: University of Chicago’s Whitney Cox

He's a master of Sanskrit and Tamil and is currently translating two of their ancient texts. He has also conducted extensive research on Shaivism and the linkages in medieval times between South India and Kashmir. Yet, Whitney Cox, an Associate Professor in the Department of South Asian Languages and

Civilizations at The University of Chicago, modestly says he hasn't "mastered anything" and "there will always be more things to learn".

His recent research has touched on a wide spectrum of issues, including the political history of the Chola dynasty; the centuries-long connections between the southern reaches of the sub-continent and the Kashmir Valley in the north; the transformation of late-medieval textual scholarship; Sanskrit and Tamil literary theory; modes of pre-modern historical writing in Sanskrit; and the pan-Indic traditions of the tantric worship of Shiva.

This has resulted in two books Politics, Kingship and Poetry in Medieval South India: Moonset on Sunrise Mountain (Cambridge) and Modes of Philology in Medieval South India (already published in Europe and the US and soon to be published in India by Primus).

"The first of these is about a royal succession in the late 11th century Chola dynasty: the story about it had fascinated me since I was a young student," Cox told IANS. "There was a Chola king called Kulottunga, who had this mysterious early life before coming to the throne and, some suggest, might have murdered his cousin to become king. While I don't think he did that, the way that the politics of his kingdom were reconfigured around his ascent was both possible to trace in detail, and very consequential: it was a sort of tipping point in Chola history.”

“The second book is about how scholars made and reorganised knowledge in medieval times. The interest for me is that some of these kinds of textual scholarship - for instance, the composition of the new Puranas or tantrascan't easily be understood through received western categories: among other things, the texts anonymous, without attribution to a human author. But they were rigorous and careful, and scholars of the time (such as the great Shrivaishnava philosopher Vedanta Deshika) were aware of the problems that this sort of anonymous writing created for scholarship.”

"Once again, there are connections between South India and Kashmir at work here, which is where this research project first began," Cox explained.

How did his interest in such a wide genre

develop?

"I began studying Sanskrit when I was in university. I had been interested in history my whole life, and I had spent a good amount of time as an undergraduate studying Europe, especially classical and medieval Europe.”

Detailing his experiences on his visits to India as part of his research, which is an ongoing process, he said most of his time is spent in the far South, especially in Tamil Nadu and also in Kerala and Karnataka.

"Chennai, where I've lived the most in India, is certainly one of my favourite cities in the world. Ideally, I would like to visit India every year, but this is difficult with my professional and family responsibilities these days, so my visits tend to be for less time," Cox said.

Dubai-based Indian buys tickets to send prisoners home

A Dubai-based Indian businessman purchased one-way flight tickets for 13 prisoners facing deportation to help them fly back home.

The prisoners from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda, Afghanistan, Nigeria, China, and Ethiopia were released on this month upon completion of their jail term.

"Unfortunately, the men could not afford to pay for the air tickets. Dubai Police works with PCT Humanity on several charitable activities, including blood donation campaigns. Now, we are providing travel assistance to 13 people from different countries so they can fly back home," Joginder Singh Salaria, the Chairman and Managing Director of Pehal International Transport and founder of Pehal Charitable Trust (PCT Humanity) told The Khaleej Times.

"Police authorities provided us with a list of names of prisoners. Most of the convicts were jailed for committing minor crimes such as overstay cases and small disputes with their employers. They did not have anyone to help them out," he added.

Dubai Police, according to Salaria, were very cooperative and supporting in this endeavour. Earlier this year, Salaria installed over 60 hand pumps in a poverty-stricken district of Pakistan's Sindh province. IANS