Hyder Ali, who is famously known as ‘the Nepoleon of South India’ for his relentless fighting against the conspiracies of the East India Company and its henchmen and for checkmating the British ambitions of expansion in South India, was born in 1722 at Devanahalli village, Karnataka state. His father was Fateh Mohammad Ali and mother Mujidan Begum.
Though he did not have any formal learning, he received training in martial arts. Hyder Ali was sharp in intellect, strong in will, capable of handling multiple tasks simultaneously and was brave at heart.
He had participated in Devanahalli war in 1749 as a young soldier of Mysore State. Recognizing his gallantry, Nanjaraj, the Minister of Mysore kingdom, honoured Hyder Ali with the title of ‘Khan’ and promoted him as the Chief of a battalion in the Mysore army.
They attacked Mysore several times with the help of the East India Company.
Though Hyder Ali suffered initial losses, he resisted them successfully and proved a virtual nightmare to East India Company. Even then, the British rulers provoked Hyder Ali again which led to the second Mysore war in July 1780. He went to the battlefield along with his son, Tipu Sultan.
While Hyder Ali captured the Arcot, his son Tipu defeated the East India Company troops and captured Kanjeevaram, which was about 50 miles from Madras. This sent shivers to Warren Hastings, the Governor General of East India Company.
He immediately sent additional troops from Culcutta, Madras with abundant funds under the control of his Commander General, Sir Eyre Coote. While fighting against the foreign enemy on one side, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan taught a befitting lesson to Malabar Nayars and chieftains, who revolted against him with the active support of Nizam of Hyderbad.
Hyder Ali, while leading his troops towards successive victories, fell ill and died in the battlefield on 7 December, 1782, near Narasingarayuni Peta village, which is now in Chitoor district of Andhra Pradesh.
source: http://www.siasat.com / The Siasat Daily / Home> Featured News / by Nihad Amani / August 22nd, 2020
Sikandar Begum with her prime minister, left, and second minister. The photo was published in “A Pilgrimage to Mecca” (1870). (The Asiatic Society of Bombay via AN)
One of the most interesting aspects of Sikandar Begum’s account is her open criticism of Ottoman governance in Makkah
Imprecise library records obscured access to the original Urdu manuscript for decades
Warsaw :
History recently came to life in a manuscript with royal stamps discovered in the archives of SOAS University of London. The historic find? A tantalizing insight into the journey of the first ruler from the Indian subcontinent to set out for Hajj.
In November 1863, the ruler of the princely state of Bhopal, Sikandar Begum, began the sacred pilgrimage many other sovereigns of her time could not make for fear of losing power — in the 19th century, sea travel from India to Makkah meant long months of absence from the throne. Unlike them, Sikandar was safe. Her Hajj included a mission to compile a travelogue for those who guaranteed her reign.
Bhopal had gained independence from the declining Mughal Empire under Dost Mohammad Khan, a Pashtun warrior who, in the early 18th century, founded the Muslim state in today’s Madhya Pradesh. Under British rule, for more than a century the country was led by four women. Sikandar, who ruled from 1844 to 1868, was the most reform-oriented of them. She reorganized the army, appointed a consultative assembly and invested in free education for girls. She was also the first Indian ruler to replace Persian with vernacular Urdu as the official language.
In late January, SOAS librarians came across a title recorded in their archives’ catalogue as “‘Journal of a trip to Mecca’ by Skandar Baigam, Ra’isah’ of Bhopal. Bound manuscript in Urdu. Written at the suggestion of Major-General Sir Henry Marion Durand, 1883.”
“I was really intrigued that such a beautifully bound-in-silk manuscript with obvious royal stamps in its colophon could be linked to such an opaque and short library record,” SOAS Special Collections curator Dominique Akhoun-Schwarb told Arab News.
“It quickly became obvious that there was a bit more story and depth behind the note ‘written at the suggestion of Major-General Sir Henry Durand,’ when the author was a queen herself, a pioneer, since she was the first Indian ruler to have performed the Hajj and authored an account of her pilgrimage.”
The imprecise note had for decades obscured access to the text for researchers. A deformed transliteration of Sikandar’s name had compounded the issue.
Until the chance discovery a few months ago, all scholarship on the Bhopal ruler’s pilgrimage had to rely on two translations of the text as the original Urdu version had been missing for some 150 years. One was the abridgment of Sikandar’s account in Persian, compiled by her daughter, Shah Jahan Begum. The other one, “A Pilgrimage to Mecca, was an English translation by Emma Laura Willoughby-Osborne, wife of a British political agent in Bhopal, which was published in 1870, two years after Sikandar’s death. The two texts are quite different.
In the English version, Sikandar quotes a letter she received from Durand, the British colonial administrator mentioned in the SOAS record, and his wife: “He was anxious to hear what my impressions of Arabia generally, and of Mecca, in particular, might be. I replied that when I returned to Bhopal from the pilgrimage, I would comply with their request, and the present narrative is the result of that promise.”
The letter is nowhere to be found in the Persian text.
A preliminary reading by Arab News of the Urdu manuscript, which has been digitized by SOAS, reveals that Durand’s letter is mentioned in the very first pages of the text. The correspondence and accuracy of other parts, however, are not immediately obvious.
In the preface to “A Pilgrimage to Mecca,” Osborne said that the Urdu manuscript consisted of “rough notes” demanding some arrangement. According to Dr. Piotr Bachtin, from the Department of Iranian Studies of the University of Warsaw, who studied female pilgrimage of the era and translated the Persian version of Sikandar’s account, the English translator’s note immediately raises questions regarding Osborne’s interference in the text.
Osborne’s assurance that the only license she had allowed herself had been the “occasional transposition of a paragraph” seems to be an understatement. It appears that the text was heavily edited. Bachtin suggested that Sikandar might have been a “reporter” entrusted with a specific task and became an “incidental informer” in the service of the British Empire.
The most interesting aspect of the travelogue, which the manuscript may verify, was Sikandar’s political involvement with and open criticism of Ottoman governance in Makkah. One of the most prominent instances of Sikandar’s criticism is the following:
“The Sultan of Turkey gives thirty lakhs of rupees a year for the expenses incurred in keeping up the holy places at Mecca and Medina. But there is neither cleanliness in the city, nor are there any good arrangements made within the precincts of the shrines,” Sikandar wrote, adding that had the money been given to her, she would have made arrangements for a state of order and cleanliness. “I, in a few days, would effect a complete reformation!”
Sikandar’s political commentary is completely missing from the Persian version of her text. “Only in the English translation did she openly criticize both the Pasha and the Sharif of Makkah, going as far as to say that she would have managed Makkah better herself!” Bachtin said, “However, we must remember that her book was commissioned by Sir Henry Marion Durand. For me, this paradoxical dynamic is particularly interesting.”
With the original manuscript now available to researchers, further study should soon reveal how much of the Hajj account was informed by the colonial circumstances Sikandar faced at home, and to what extent it was guided by her own ambitions to be a modern and reformist Muslim ruler.
source: http://www.arabnews.com /Arab News / Home> Latest News> Middle East / by Natalia Laskowska / August 02nd, 2020
Sadia Dehlvi, master storyteller who chronicled capital, dies at 62
Dehlvi was also a close friend of celebrated author Khushwant Singh, who dedicated his book Not a Nice Man to Know to her. (File)
Of all the roles that 62-year-old Sadia Dehlvi played in her life, the one she mastered was that of a storyteller. From her childhood memories, she dug out stories of “nihari Sundays” at home, the jinns that inhabited Shama Kothi where the Dehlvis lived, and the family’s contribution to society in the form of the iconic Urdu and Hindi magazines called Shama and Sushma.
On Wednesday night, Dehlvi — author, activist and food connoisseur — passed away after a long battle with cancer. She had been admitted to the hospital for a few days, and on August 1, her son Arman Ali Dehlvi posted a “cancer treatment fundraiser request” for his mother on social media. A close friend of Dehlvi’s said she passed away at home on Wednesday night.
Activist John Dayal, who also knew Dehlvi’s father, told The Indian Express , “I wished her on her birthday in June, she was fighting cancer so bravely. Her family contributed immensely to the syncretic culture of the city, and so did she. She popularised Mughal cuisine with her writing.”
City chronicler Rana Safvi recalled several meetings with Dehlvi at the Nizamuddin Dargah. Safvi said, “I love her writing, especially her book The Sufi Courtyard: Dargahs of Delhi. I used to often see her at the Dargah… With her gone, the dargahs will feel empty.”
Apart from The Sufi Courtyard, Dehlvi also wrote Sufism: The Heart of Islam in 2009, and Jasmine and Jinns: Memories and Recipes of My Delhi in 2017. She also scripted the hugely popular TV show, Amma and Family, starring Zohra Sehgal. Dehlvi founded Al Kauser, the restaurant in Chanakyapuri, with her mother in 1979.
In 2017, she had told The Indian Express, “Al Kauser was the first roadside kebab shop in New Delhi. It became quite the rage in the ’80s and ’90s. The kitchen was in our house.”
The Dehlvis, who were essentially traders, moved to Delhi in the early-17th Century and took the name “Dehlvi”, which means “the one from Dehli (Delhi),” said writer Sohail Hashmi. “The family started publishing Shama, one of the first Urdu magazines on Hindi cinema, which also served as a quasi-literary magazine. Then came Sushma, a magazine in Hindi. Actor Dilip Kumar was a patron of the magazines,” he said.
Dehlvi was also a close friend of celebrated author Khushwant Singh, who dedicated his book Not a Nice Man to Know to her.
Later, Dehlvi produced a television serial called Not A Nice Man to Know, in which Singh was the anchor.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Books and Literature / by Somya Lakhani / New Delhi / August 06th, 2020
First free community chartered flights benefit 395 Indians stranded in UAE due to COVID-19
South Indian superstar Mammootty in Dubai, / earlier.Image Credit: Virendra Saklani/Gulf News
Dubai:
For the first time, two free community chartered flights repatriated 395 stranded Indians in the UAE to their hometowns in Kerala today.
While one flight was organised by Malayalam TV channel Kairali TV, under the leadership of its chairman superstar Mammootty, the other one was sponsored by the community group Overseas Malayali Association (Orma).
Kairali TV flew 215 stranded Malayalis home on an Air Arabia flight from Sharjah to Thiruvananthapuram at 6pm today, said E.M. Ashraf, the channel’s Middle East director for news and programmes. “Under the COVID-19 relief programme Kaikorthu Kairali, we had announced 1,000 free flight tickets to Keralites stranded in the Gulf countries. While we had given away some tickets to deserving candidates, we decided to also charter some flights from the UAE,” he told Gulf News on Sunday morning.
At least four free chartered flights are being planned for repatriation from the UAE with the contribution of several community members, businessmen and actors apart from Mammootty.
“We have also received the support from community groups in the UAE such as the Indian Social Centre in Ajman and MAS in Sharjah for organising today’s flight,” said Ashraf.
He said the channel had invited applications from the most deserving members of the community and a committee shortlisted the passengers from stranded visit visa holders, those who lost jobs, elderly patients and the like.
First from Dubai
While several community organisations in the UAE have chartered flights to repatriate stranded Indians, with some offering free tickets and subsidised fares, the first free chartered flight for repatriation by any Indian community group was the one arranged by Orma from Dubai to Kannur on Sunday.
Also on Sunday, a GoAir flight flew home 180 stranded Malayalis hailing from various districts of Kerala, said N.K. Kunhammed, a coordinator of the flight and a delegate of the Loka Kerala Sabha (LKS), a global body of expatriate Malayalis.
He said priority was given to stranded labourers, part-time maids, visit visa holders, pregnant women and families in distress.
Rajan Mahe, an invitee of LKS, who also coordinated the flight, said the group had been trying to arrange free chartered flights for some weeks under the initiative ‘Fly with Orma Care’.
“With the support of the Indian Consulate in Dubai, and the offices of the Kerala chief minister and Assembly speaker, we finally managed to make all the arrangements,” Mahe added.
He said the state government would facilitate the transportation of the repatriated passengers to their respective districts once they land in Kannur International Airport.
“We have arranged dinner for them through the Kannur local administration. If there are people who need further help to reach home from there, we will arrange that also,” he added.
Vipul, the Consul General of India in Dubai, appreciated the charity initiatives.
“I understand that both of these are free chartered flights that will be of great help to the community, especially in this hard economic times due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” Vipul said, appreciating the efforts of all those who had contributed to sponsor the tickets for distressed Indians.
Distressed passengers express gratitude
Distressed and stranded Indians who got a chance to fly home for free on Sunday’s chartered flights expressed their gratitude towards those who had organised these flights.
Sahira Beevi / Image Credit: Supplied
Sahira Beevi, who had come to Dubai after her son had fractured his leg, following a fall at a worksite, was among the stranded visit visa holders who were were being flown home by Orma.
“I struggled a lot because my son had already lost his job and was facing Dh30,000 in overstay fines. I had approached many associations for help. It was one Ansari and Orma members who helped us,” she told Gulf News.
“I am thankful to Orma for sending me home. I hope they will help repatriate my son also. He will be able to fly only when his condition improves a bit. He will try for repatriation along with my niece, who had also lost her job and came back on visit visa.”
She also thanked Emirates Companies House for presenting her a ‘Gulf Gift Box’ containing goodies that the company was gifting to returning expatriates.
Two other passengers on the same flight were Nafeesa Kutty and her daughter-in-law Majida Farsana, who had come on visit visas five months ago.
“She came looking for a job and I tagged along. But we didn’t expect the situation to change so fast. She didn’t get any job and my son’s salary was cut. Finally, we have to go back like this. We are thankful to Orma for helping us fly home for free,” she said.’
Gineesh Oliyil and colleagues / Image Credit: Supplied
Gineesh Oliyil, an employee of a four-star hotel in Sharjah, and six of his colleagues who have been left unpaid for three months, were among the lucky passengers on the Kairali flight.
“We served people quarantined in the hotel for a month. But, the hotel was shut in April and we have not been paid since then. We were only provided two meals per day.”
He said the members of MAS Sharjah supported them with food kits and also helped them register for the free chartered flight arranged by Kairali TV.
“We somehow wanted to reach home in these uncertain circumstances. We are grateful to MAS Sharjah and Kairali TV for helping us. The free chartered flight is a great initiative that is benefitting many distressed people like us. This is the first time we are hearing about such an initiative and I hope they will fly home more distressed people, including our remaining colleagues.”
Saravan KH / Image Credit: Supplied
Another passenger on the same flight was Saravanan K.H. He said he was hospitalised for a month after he had a fall in the washroom of his labour accommodation.
“Doctors said my brain was affected due to the head injury and I needed help to move around. It was Shameer from my native place who helped me after I got discharged, at a time when nobody dared take care of a patient.”
He said he had approached many groups to fly home for further treatment and physiotherapy. “Finally, Shameer managed to register me on the Kairali flight and their help has come as a big boon for me,” said Saravanan.
source: http://www.gulfnews.com / Gulf News / Home> UAE / by Sajila Saseendran, Senior Reporter / June 21st, 2020
Mohammad Akhtar says elephants came to him as family heritage. Photo: IANS
Patna:
Even as the death of an elephant in Kerala in extremely tragic circumstances, is raging on social media, an animal lover in Bihar comes under the spotlight after he bequeathes his entire wealth to two elephants. He says one of them had saved his life from a criminal.
Mohammad Akhtar (50) from Janipur in Phulwari Sharif near Patna has two elephants aged 20 and 15 years. Moti and Rani live with him.
Akhtar says elephants came to him as family heritage, and that Moti and Rani are the “children” of those elephants. “I have lived with them since my childhood. The two are my family members,” he said, adding there are people who would like him to take care of the animal brought by them.
Akhtar is also chief of the Asian Elephant Rehabilitation and Wildlife Animal Trust (AERAWAT), an NGO. “I gave my 6.25-acre land to the two elephants to ensure that when I am not alive, the animals do not suffer hunger,” Akhtar told IANS.
He also revealed how Moti saved his life. “Moti had gone along with a mahout to Bhojpur district’s Shahpur area, where he fell ill. I had to rush there to treat him. One day, while I was asleep there, I was woken up by Moti’s roar. I saw one man pointing his gun just outside the window. I ran away to save my life,” recalls Akhtar.
He alleged that some of his own family members had joined hands with animal smugglers and were trying to sell the elephant by killing him.
Akhtar says he still fears for his life from his own family members because he has registered his land for the two elephants. He has written to Chief the Wildlife Warden and Patna police chief alleging threat to his life from his family members.
The elephant lover also trains mahouts. He says if the government does not intervene to protect the elephant, “the time is not far when we would see the elephant only in books. He says the elephants are headed for villages in search of food.
source: http://english.manoramaonline.com / OnManorama / Home> Lifestyle> News / by IANS / June 10th, 2020
The Spanish Flu’s name comes from the fact that even as wartime censorship in the United States and most of Europe suppressed news of the influenza, the media in neutral Spain reported on it extensively. Photo: Wiki Commons
June 1918. A debilitating disease suddenly swept through Mumbai. Thousands fell ill, complaining of debilitating fever and cough, sometimes with intestinal problems.
For hundreds of unfortunates, their lungs filled with fluids and they died as their body was starved of oxygen. This was the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which killed an astounding 50 million worldwide. Recent estimates put the death toll in India at a staggering 12 million.
Scientists refer to Spanish influenza as the ‘mother of all influenza pandemics’, since it is the common ancestor of human and swine flu viruses. The disease is inextricably associated with World War I.
The name comes from the fact that even as wartime censorship in the United States and most of Europe suppressed news of the influenza, the media in neutral Spain reported on it extensively, including when their king Alfonso XIII fell ill with it.
Spanish influenza’s first wave reached Mumbai when soldiers returned from Europe, carrying the virus with them. An even more lethal second wave hit in September.
When the pandemic reached Mysore State, it hit it hard. The State had still not shaken off the plague. Wartime shortages had pushed up the prices of food and other essentials. To make matters worse, the monsoon failed that year.
The disease first passed through Bengaluru in late June without causing much harm. The second wave in mid-September was deadlier. Suddenly, entire families fell ill.
Higher fatality
Dispensaries, clinics and hospitals were overcrowded. Doctors, nurses and compounders were completely overwhelmed. Corpses piled up. Unlike COVID-19, Spanish influenza had a far higher fatality among the young and able-bodied than the old.
Offices emptied as people across all professions and classes fell ill, among others, the health officer in Bengaluru and the then Chief Secretary of Mysore State.
In early October, Bengaluru’s City Municipal Council, under the leadership of the President KP Puttanna Chetty, took several quick, creative and effective steps to deal with the health crisis. Temporary dispensaries were opened, some housed in municipal schools that were closed at the time.
Mobile dispensaries were set up to ensure medicines reached everyone. All dispensaries were directed to stay open for longer hours and to stock enough of the medicines required, including thymol, which was prescribed a preventative.
Since hospitals were filled beyond their capacity, temporary tents and sheds were set up to accommodate the sick. Retired medical staff and medical students were brought in to help with the workload. Health officers went around neighbourhoods to see if there were any infected people and to persuade them to move to the hospitals or the camps to prevent the disease from spreading.
Leaflets in Kannada and English were distributed, which explained the symptoms of influenza, how it spread, and how it was important to ‘separate the sick from the healthy,’ and to avoid ‘the entire family congregating in the sick room.’
People were advised to ‘tie a clean handkerchief on which a teaspoon of eucalyptus oil is sprinkled, across the nose and mouth’ when entering the sick room, to provide a certain extent of protection. They were also strongly urged to avoid crowded places.
A striking feature of the response to the influenza pandemic was the voluntary effort in providing relief. Much like today, when several people are working, often with the police and the BBMP, to ensure the poor are not forgotten during the lockdown, in 1918 too, volunteers helped ensure relief supplies reached the poor and families where there was no one left to tend to the sick.
In Bengaluru, the relief operation was coordinated by Chief Officer R Subba Rao. He divided the city into several blocks with a relief party in charge of each. Supplies included medicines, milk and kanji, a lot of which was prepared at a government facility and then distributed by car, carts and even lorries.
Municipal councillors and volunteers who worked ceaselessly included Father Briand, Ramachandra Rao Scindia, Rev D A Rees, B Usman Khan, B Chinnaswami Setty, Ghulam Dastangir, B K Garudachar, R Gopalaswami Iyer and many, many others.
Assisting them were the Social Service League, Young Men’s Christian Association, students of the Wesleyan, London Mission and National High Schools, and many others. Puttanna Chetty toured the city himself to assist the relief works and ensure they went on smoothly.
By the end of November, the disease was finally under control. More than 1,95,000 people died in Mysore State, 40,000 in Bengaluru alone. With the compounding problems of agrarian distress, rural areas were affected much worse.
source: http://www.deccanherald.com / Deccan Herald / Home> Spectrum> Spectrum Top Stories / by Meera Iyer / April 08th, 2020
In the anxiety to label Indian architecture as Hindu, Buddhist, British imperial and Islamic, the buildings lost some of their power to evoke wonder and surprise.
Qutub Minar in New Delhi | Commons
In the 1950s and ’60s, visitors to Delhi’s Qutub Minar often saw a crowd of schoolchildren following an unlikely Pied Piper, a frail man in a white kurta and pyjama, wearing a Gandhi cap, and giving them their first lesson in art history. Mohammad Mujeeb was one of those iconic professors who communicated just as easily with schoolchildren as he did with college students and his colleagues. He instilled in them a love for historic cities, made them see the places as works of art.
In those years, the Delhi skyline and groundline were dominated by monuments. For many families, these landscapes were synonymous with Sunday picnics. For art historians, these spaces became popular hunting grounds, and a number of case studies on architecture took shape in the 1970s.
But the lay reader was more familiar with surveys of Indian architecture. Of these, Percy Brown’s books were the most sought after. His volumes, Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu), and Indian Architecture (The Islamic Period), published in 1942, contain amine of information. However, because he divided the theme in a binary, he missed out on capturing the special quality of the 14th-17th centuries — the cosmopolitanism in architecture — when rich and powerful rulers, irrespective of religion, engaged skilled artisans and engineers from across south and west Asia to design beautiful public spaces.
Architectural crossover
In that era of increasing globalisation, artisans met and exchanged recipes for architectural design, and travelled great distances, confident of their patronage. Guilds from the Middle East were employed to design the great pillars of Yorkminster, and Indian stone-masons learned structural engineering from Uzbek architects. Chinese porcelain gave its name to the funerary monument Chini Ka Rauza (China Tomb) in Agra. British tourists to Italy brought back fragments of Roman sculpture to display proudly in their country estates, while Feroz Shah Tughlaq had two Ashoka pillars (only no one knew what they were) ferried to Delhi from Meerut and Topra (Haryana), to embellish his mosque and his estate on the Ridge.
James Fergusson, in the mid-19th century, had sought to make sense of the myriad buildings in India. He found it simplest to classify them by ‘style’. Function, it was assumed, shaped the form, and buildings were labelled ‘Buddhist’, ‘Hindu’ or ‘Islamic’. The term ‘Indo-Saracenic’ was coined to describe styles with elements of both, as well as for the British imperial style, which deliberately included decorative Indian elements. In this anxiety over labels, the buildings lost some of their power to evoke wonder and surprise, to speak to the hearts and minds of the people.
Indian-Muslim architecture
Both mosques and tombs adopted from and adapted to the local environment, which is why Mujeeb insists that they be described not as ‘Muslim’ but as ‘Indian Muslim’. They, and other public areas — streets and walled gardens — made for beautiful cities, with a quality of repose and of camaraderie. Soaring arches and minars (towers) connected the earth to the sky, to heaven. (Mujeeb was too much of a rationalist to fall for the belief that djinns lived in historic buildings and could fulfil people’s prayers.)
Communal practices do shape houses of worship — and there is a fundamental difference of form between a congregational masjid (‘beauty without mystery’) and a mandir, where there is mystic communion between deity and worshipper. As for the tomb: “[It] was a symbol of unifying life, death and eternity; primitive beliefs associated with kingship gave the royal tomb a mysterious significance…The tomb of a ruler was the expression of personality, of a force which the community needed to maintain its self-confidence in a world of conflicts,” Mujeeb wrote in The Indian Muslims (1967). He was not averse to sounding tongue-in-cheek while describing Humayun’s mausoleum: “There is nothing we know of Humayun that would justify our regarding him as an outstanding personality; his tomb is much greater than he.”
The urban architecture of early modern India has some of the features of Persian or Turkish cities, but is most similar to those of Rajput kingdoms, contemporary with those of the Mughals. Both were shaped by the climate, conditioned by topography, the fact that they were built by skilled stone-masons rather than brickworkers, and by the deliberate choice of Indian ornamental motifs.
The Indian-Muslim architect rejoiced in being “free from the beginning, free from fear and hatred, from law and custom, from the conflicts of ideals and interests. There were no limits fixed except those of his own aptitude and means, and the nature and availability of structural material.” They created an architecture that was not just frozen music, but also frozen poetry. It was both the architecture of Urdu poetry and the poetry of our architecture that made cities in India the grandest in the early modern age.
This article is the seventh of an eight-part series on ‘Reading A City’ with Saha Sutra on www.sahapedia.org, an open online resource on the arts, cultures and heritage of India.
Dr Narayani Gupta writes on urban history, particularly that of Delhi. Views are personal.
Managing Director of Hotel Metropolis handing over a letter to Deputy Commissioner Deepa Cholan in Dharwad on Tuesday offering 46 rooms of his hotel for quarantine purposes.
At a time when apprehensions about the spread of COVID-19 pandemic are increasing, a hotelier from Hubballi has offered a total of 46 rooms in his lodge for quarantine purposes of those who have returned from foreign countries.
Apart from providing 46 rooms in one section of Hotel Metropolis on Koppikar Road in Hubballi, Managing Director of the hotel Ashraf Ali Basheer Ahmed has offered to provide food to those quarantined.
Mr. Ashraf Ali handed over a letter on offering rooms for quarantine purposes to Deputy Commissioner of Dharwad Deepa Cholan here on Tuesday. Lauding the initiative by Mr. Ashraf Ali, Ms. Deepa Cholan termed the act of the hotelier as a model one.
Mr. Ashraf Ali requested Ms. Deepa Cholan to send a team of officials to inspect the hotel. He said that the Metropolis Group had already handed over 70 rooms owned by the group near the international airport in Mumbai to the Government of Maharashtra. The hotel group had taken up the initiative under its CSR activities, he said.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> States> Karnataka / by Special Correspondent / Hubballi, March 25th, 2020
The Century Park building near the new bus stand in Kasaragod would be handed over to the authorities to be converted into an isolation ward
Kasaragod:
Even as authorities struggle to find accommodation facilities for quarantined people amid COVID-19 outbreak, responsible citizens have offered to help.
C I Abdullahkunji of Kudlu in Kasaragod district has informed the authorities that his three-star hotel can be used as an isolation facility for free.
The Century Park building near the new bus stand in Kasaragod would be handed over to the authorities. Eighty-eight rooms of the top three floors of the seven-storeyed building would function as isolation ward.
The daily rent of one room is Rs 1,500.
All rooms have two beds each and the bathrooms have geyser facilities. The hotel has a water tank with a storage capacity of 45,000 litres.
The hotel owner said the necessary precautions have being taken. The water tank has been sanitised and filled up. The hotel premises have also been cleaned.
Municipal secretary S Biju, and deputy DMO Dr Geetha Gurudas carried out an inspection at the building.
source: http://www.english.manoramaonline.com / OnManorama / Home> Districts> Kasargod / by Manorama Correspondent / March 27th, 2020
They dream of pursuing higher education without adding to their parents’ financial burden. And to fund their dream, these three friends decided to start a coffee shop. Thus, the Le Brown Coffee and Restaurant came up near Angadipuram railway overbridge in Kerala’s Malappuram district.
The trio behind this restaurant is P S Sabiq, K T Nabeel, and K T Mohammed Thasleem.
Sabiq from Kodenchery in Kozhikode and Nabeel from Thrithala in Palakkad have completed BSc MLT course, while Thasleem of Vengara in Malappuram secured an MLT diploma.
All three of them are students of MES Medical College at Perinthalmanna. They wanted to pursue higher studies but were reluctant to seek money from their families. Thus, they came up with the idea to start a coffee shop to fund their studies.
But even setting up the coffee shop was an uphill task. They had to run from pillar to post to secure the advance amount for a coffee shop. Then, the husband of a classmate came to their rescue at the last minute.
Since they had been nurturing this dream for three years, the youths had a clear idea about how they wanted to set up the coffee shop. The trio along with their friends arranged the interiors of the shop.
The total cost of Rs 15 lakh was mostly borne by the classmate’s spouse.
And their dream became a reality on January 5. The trio kept their families in the dark about their dream project. The families got a big surprise on inauguration day but even then they found it hard to believe.
The food items are priced at a range that is reasonable for all.
Some of their specialities are selfie chino and smoked barbeque charcoal dosa.
They have also recruited five people to help run the shop.
source: http://www.english.manoramaonline.com / OnManorama / Home> News> Campus Reporter / by Sandeep Chandran / March 19th, 2020
