SINGAPORE, WEEKEND OF FRIDAY,
SEPTEMBER
1,
202
3
MCI (P)
079/1
0/202
2
BEAUTY
CONTESTS ARE
SO IRRELEVANT
PAGE 10
THE MOON
FOR EVERY
INDIAN MUM
PAGE 5
DIRECTOR CALLS
BOLLYWOOD
STARS DUMB
PAGE 8
REPORT ON PAGE 4
Outsider Ramaswamy emerges as
US Republican Party’s new darling
Vivek
plays his
Trump
card
PHOTO: AFP
Page 2
September 1, 2023
tabla
!
INDIA
Indian officials preparing for the
G20 summit next week have
hired teams of “monkey-men”
and erected primate cut-outs to
deter marauding monkeys from
munching on the floral displays
laid out for global leaders.
New Delhi’s city council
hired more than 30 monkey
“wallahs” who mimic the hoots
and screams of the aggressive
langur monkey.
“We can’t remove the
monkeys from their natural
habitat, so we have deployed a
team of men who are trained to
scare away monkeys,” New
Delhi Municipal Council
vice-chairman Satish Upadhyay
told AFP on Wednesday.
“We will deploy one man
each at the hotels where the
delegates would be staying, as
well as in places where monkey
sightings have been reported.”
No monkey business during G20 summit
PHOTO: REUTERS
An SPH Media Limited publication
Editor-in-Chief
(English/Malay/Tamil Media group)
Wong Wei Kong
Editor
Jawharilal Rajendran
Contributing Editor
V.K. Santosh Kumar
For editiorial matters,
write to us at
For advertising enquiries,
write to
Advertise with us by calling
9366
5277 (Maheswari) or
9863
3894 (Kalim)
For home delivery, call
6388-
3838
(Mon to Fri
9am to
6pm)
or e-mail
Catch us online at
Kashmir to host Miss World
beauty pageant
The Miss World beauty contest will be
held in Indian-administered Kashmir
as part of a month-long series of
events across India.
Miss World Organisation chair Julia
Morley said India will host events for
the annual international beauty
pageant in November and December.
“This is a blessed place for
tourism,” she said in Srinagar on
Monday.
Competitors will take part in
“talent showcases, sports challenges
and charitable initiatives” before they
are shortlisted for the grand finale in
December, the organisation said.
Q2 economic growth estimated to
be India’s fastest in a year
India’s economy grew at its fastest
pace in a year in the last quarter,
driven by services and manufacturing,
data showed on Thursday – though
economists warn of a slowdown
ahead.
According to the median forecast in
a Reuters poll of economists, India’s
gross domestic product grew 7.7 per
cent in the period – up from the 6.1
per cent growth in the previous
quarter, and its fastest expansion since
April-June 2022.
Foreign minister dismisses
China’s territorial claims
India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar
dismissed China’s claims on contested
territory as “absurd”, saying on
Tuesday the areas belonged to India.
The Times Of India newspaper
reported on Tuesday that China has
released its “official standard map”,
including the state of Arunachal
Pradesh and the Aksai Chin plateau, a
Chinese-administered area claimed by
India, as its official territory.
“Making absurd claims on India’s
territory does not make it China’s
territory,” Jaishankar told NDTV.
School closes after video of
slapping goes viral
The authorities in Uttar Pradesh have
shut down a private school after a
video of a teacher asking her students
to slap their Muslim classmate went
viral and sparked outrage.
The state police registered a case
against the teacher, Tripta Tyagi, as the
video of the Aug 24 incident spread
online.
Senior police officer Satyanarayan
Prajapat said the teacher told students
to hit the boy “for not remembering
his times table”. But the teacher also
mentioned the boy’s religion.
The teacher from Neha Public
School in Muzaffarnagar district
admitted she had made a “mistake”.
India’s Sun observatory to be
launched on Saturday
India’s first space-based observatory to
study the sun will be launched on Sept
2, the Indian Space Research
Organisation announced on X on
Monday.
The announcement comes days after
India became the first country to land a
spacecraft on the unexplored South
Pole of the moon.
Bengaluru man kills live-in partner
with pressure cooker
A 29-year-old man has been arrested
for beating his live-in partner to death
with a pressure cooker at their rented
Bengaluru home, police said.
The incident took place around 5pm
on Saturday when the two were
fighting over the man’s suspicion that
his partner was cheating on him.
Police said Vaishnav and Ms Deva,
24, both from Kerala, had been living
together in Bengaluru for about two
years. They knew each other from
college and worked at a sales and
marketing firm in Koramangala.
Central government cuts prices of
cooking gas as inflation bites
The Central government cut the price
of cooking gas for households on
Tuesday by about 18 per cent to rein in
inflation.
It reduced the price by Rs200
($3.27) on a 14.2kg cooking gas
cylinder sold to 330 million
households.
The decision will impact about 100
million low-income families that have
felt the pinch of the rise in food prices
over the last few months, as India’s
annual retail inflation hit a 15-month
high in July.
Man nabbed for bicycle theft
committed 38 years ago
Bengaluru police have arrested a man
who had stolen a bicycle in 1985 in the
KR Puram area, reported The Times of
India.
A 22-year-old Pasha Jan stole the
bicycle in Kolar Gold Fields and was
arrested within a month but was
granted bail and fled the town.
Lawyers said that more than 200
warrants were issued for his arrest but
Pasha could not be found. Police
managed to track him down only
recently.
The autorickshar driver initially said
the police had come looking for the
wrong person. But he was caught after
his fingerprints matched those of the
bicycle thief.
India on track for lowest monsoon
rains in 8 years
India is poised for its lowest monsoon
rains in eight years, with the El Niño
weather pattern seen crimping
September precipitation after an
August that is on track to be the driest
in more than a century, two weather
department officials told Reuters on
Monday.
The monsoon, vital for India’s US$3
trillion economy, delivers nearly 70 per
cent of the rain the country needs to
water crops and refill reservoirs and
aquifers. Nearly half of the farmland in
the world’s most populous nation lacks
irrigation.
The summer rainfall deficit could
make essentials such as sugar, pulses,
rice and vegetables more expensive and
lift overall food inflation, which jumped
in July to the highest since January
2020.
Lower production could also force
India – the world’s second-biggest
producer of rice, wheat and sugar – to
impose more curbs on exports of these
commodities.
Google introduces generative AI to
Search in India
Google said on Wednesday it
introduced generative artificial
intelligence to its Search tool for users
in India and Japan that will show text
or visual results to prompts, including
summaries.
The feature, available in English and
Hindi, was rolled out this week in
India, and users will have the choice to
opt in for it.
Google’s feature is meant to be used
for seeking information, such as
locating something to purchase. It is
different from its chatbot Bard, which
has a persona that can hold human-like
conversations to, for instance, generate
software code.
Disney gambles on free cricket to
turn the tables in streaming war
Walt Disney is attempting to revive the
fortunes of its streaming business in
India by offering free cricket on
smartphones, betting that the strategy
will boost advertising revenue and
offset the impact of a subscriber
exodus.
The India streaming operations,
which were Disney’s biggest last year
globally by users, posted a loss of
US$41.5 million on revenue of US$390
million for the year to March 2022, its
last disclosed results.
The company will stream live
matches of the Asia Cup from Aug 30
as well as the World Cup in
October-November that users of 600
million smartphones in the cricket-mad
nation can watch without paying
anything.
NEWS
tabla
!
September 1, 2023
Page 3
An Indian-American computer scien-
tist is hoping to become the first woman
to skydive from the stratosphere at an
altitude of 42.5km above the Earth,and
shatter four records.
Ms Swati Varshney is one of three
candidates selected by the Hera Project
of United States non-profit Rising Unit-
ed, which seeks to empower women in
science and technology.
If she makes it to the skydive in 2025,
Hera Project expects her to break four
current records: The free fall record by
1.1km from the highest altitude, the
longest free fall time, breaking the
sound barrier unaided by 264kph, and
the highest crewed balloon flight by
over 1km.
Ms Varshney has a PhD in materials
science from the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology and has made over
1,200 jumps with a speciality in vertical
free fall, according to Space.com.
Billed as the “first female mission to
the edge of space”, the project seeks to
have minority women smash the rec-
ords. The other two contenders are of
Latino descent – Eliana Rodriquez and
Diana Valerin Jimenez.
The final candidate will be picked af-
ter 18 months of training, and the other
two, who don’t make it, will provide
ground support and educational ou-
treach.
The project will include educational
programmes for schools to increase in-
terest in science and technology among
girls, especially from minority groups.
Ms Varshney told Space.com that for
her, skydiving “is a lot more similar to
my scientific training than I ever
thought it would have been in the first
place”.
She added: “It was just another ave-
nue for me to pursue this goal of lifelong
learning. My academic progression and
career trajectory have been intertwined
with skydiving as it went along, so I
started skydiving.”
Ms Varshney tried tandem jumping
and found it such a “blast”, that she
took it up as a hobby.
“I really just wanted something that
was totally different, and as a release to
– this is a really cliche way to say it – cut
away right from what I was doing in my
day-to-day life,” she told Space.com.
“It became this never-ending jour-
ney of another pursuit of knowledge
that went alongside my academic ca-
reer.”
On what she hopes to get out of the
experience, Ms Varshney said: “It’s a
perfect combination of some of my
most key interests.It’s science and engi-
neering, my career. It’s skydiving as a
hobby,and then also my passion for rep-
resentation and inclusion in both of
those spheres, actually.
“I’ve done a lot of work on highlight-
ing diversity and underrepresented mi-
norities in the outdoor sports commun-
ity, as well as trying to engage women
and underrepresented minorities to
pursue Stem careers.
“To have all three of those interests
in one spot and one project – and to
have a single thing to work on instead of
my brain split in three different direc-
tions – it’s really incredible.”
The stratosphere is from about 6km
to 50km above the Earth, where it gives
way to the mesosphere.
Indo-Asian News Service
Sky’s the limit for Indian-American
PHOTO: IANS
“It’s science and
engineering, my
career. It’s
skydiving as a
hobby, and then
also my passion for
representation and
inclusion in both of
those spheres.”
– Ms Swati Varshney (right)
India’s moon rover confirmed the pres-
ence of sulphur and detected several
other elements near the lunar south
pole as it searches for signs of frozen wa-
ter,nearly a week after its historic moon
landing, the Indian Space Research Or-
ganisation (ISRO) said in a post on its
website on Tuesday.
The rover’s laser-induced spectro-
scope instrument also detected alumini-
um, iron, calcium, chromium, titanium,
manganese, oxygen and silicon on the
lunar surface.
The Chandrayan-3 craft landed last
Wednesday and is expected to conduct
experiments over 14 days, ISRO has
said.
Its rover “unambiguously confirms
the presence of sulphur” and is search-
ing for signs of frozen water that can
help future astronaut missions, as a po-
tential source of drinking water or to
make rocket fuel.
It will also study the moon’s atmo-
sphere and seismic activity,ISRO Chair-
man S. Somnath said.
On Monday,the rover’s route was re-
programmed when it came close to a
4m-wide crater. “It’s now safely head-
ing on a new path,” said ISRO.
The craft moves at a slow speed of
around 10cm per second to minimise
shock and damage to the vehicle from
the moon’s rough terrain.
After a failed attempt to land on the
moon in 2019, India last week joined
the United States, the Soviet Union and
China as only the fourth country to
achieve this milestone.
India’s success came just days after
Russia’s Luna-25, which was aiming for
the same lunar region, spun into an un-
controlled orbit and crashed. It would
have been the first successful Russian
lunar landing in 47 years.
Russia’s head of the state-controlled
space corporation Roscosmos attribut-
ed the failure to the lack of expertise
due to the long break in lunar research.
The last Soviet mission to the Moon was
in 1976.
Indo-Asian News Service
Moon rover confirms
sulphur, other elements
India’s Chandrayaan-3 rover on the Moon.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
