The remembrance of our freedom struggle involves a lot of nostalgia – romanticized and commemorated by the country as best as possible. But there are a few names which have been lost over the years. Names which do not enter the hyped mainstream media responses on freedom fighters; which are subaltern and marginalized. Here is a list of some of those names, of people who formed a very important part of our freedom struggle and are yet, not as well known as a few others.

1. Pingali Venkayya

He was a devout follower of Mahatma Gandhi and was also known as Diamond Venkayya for his knowledge on diamond mining. He was an authority in geology, agriculture and also an educationalist. His major contribution to the movement was the design of the national flag of India, which was first modified and adopted as the flag of Indian National Congress and later modified again to be the national flag of India.

2.Tanguturi Prakasam

A politician and a freedom fighter, he was first the Chief Minister of the Madras Presidency and then the Chief Minister of the Andhra state. He started his career as a lawyer, but gave up his practice in 1921 and was drawn to the freedom movement. One of his most famous acts was in 1928 during the protests against Simon Commission in Madras. The police had imposed a ban on protests in some areas, and had warned of shooting people who violated orders. He faced the police, tore open his shirt, bared his chest and dared them to shoot if they could. This singular act of defiance won him the title of Andhra Kesari (Lion of  Andhra).

3.veerapandiya kattapomman

He was a courageous Palyekar chieftain from Tamil Nadu in the 18th century. He waged a war with the British sixty years before the Indian War of Independence (the 1857 rebellion) occurred in the Northern parts of India. He was captured and hanged in 1799 CE. His fort was destroyed and his wealth was looted by the British army. He basically protested against the sovereignty of the East India Company and refused to pay their taxes.

4.The Trio: Benoy, Badal & Dinesh

The trio is mostly remembered together for their attack on the Dalhousie Square in Kolkata. Their full names are Badal Gupta, Dinesh Gupta and Benoy Basu and all of them hailed from Bengal. Col N.S. Simpson, the Inspector General of Prisons, was infamous for brutally oppressing prisoners. The revolutionaries decided not only to murder him, but also to strike terror among British officials by launching an attack on the Secretariat Building – the Writers’ Building  in Dalhousie Square, Kolkata. The three of them were dressed as Europeans when they went and killed Simpson, but they did not wish to get arrested. So, Badal consumed poison, while the other two shot themselves using revolvers. The Dalhousie Square was renamed as the B.B.D. Bagh after them.

5.Surendra Sai

The man died in obscurity despite protecting Western Orissa from the British rule along with a few other comrades. Eligible as the next in line to the throne of Sambalpur after the death of Maharaja Sai in 1827, he helped the lower caste tribal people in Sambalpur against the British by encouraging their language and culture development.  Affectionately called Bira by the local people because of his swordsmanship, he began protesting from the age of 18 and spent some 17 years in jail after that. But he continued the protest till 1862, when he surrendered and went to jail. He spent 20 years in prison after his surrender.  Also, Sambalpur was the last patch of land to be occupied by the British except for the princely state, and it is said that it was largely due to the efforts of Sai.

Though most historical accounts cite the revolt of 1857 as the ‘first war of independence’ in India against the British, they seem to overlook a valiant chieftain from Tamil Nadu in the late 18th century who refused to align with the sovereignty of the British East India Company, and singlehandedly waged war against the colonialists.

Born to Jagaveera Kattabomman and Arumugathammal on 3 January 1760, Veerapandiya Kattabomman belonged to the Bommu and Aathi Kattabomman clan in the village of Panchalankurichi in Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu.

His father was a Palayakarar (a feudal title for a class of territorial administrative and military governors appointed by the Nayaka dynasty in southern India during the 16th and 18th centuries), from whom Veerapandiya assumed the position of the 47th Palayakarar when he turned 30.

So how did the British manage to maintain a stronghold in the region? It was a well-calculated move. They lent huge sums of money to the Nawab of Arcot and demanded to be repaid through taxes and levies from all the Palayakarars under the Nawab’s domain.

As the Nawab was in severe debt, watched as his people were plundered by the British in the name of tax collection.

Except for Veerapandiya, every other Palayakarar yielded to the diktat of the company. In fact, the British were quite crafty and tried to establish cordial alliances with all the regional statesmen, who in turn tried advising Veerapandiya to ally with the former and live in peace.

Emerging as an undesirable element in the plan that the British had for the region, they began working on different conspiracies to bring the rebellious chieftain down. However, they remained unsuccessful in their schemes until the British army suddenly decided to raid Panchalankurichi under the command of Major J. Bannerman in 1799.

As the entire village had been in Thiruchendur for a temple festival, the British hoped to ambush Veerapandiya unawares. But he had already learnt of the attack through his informers and had prepared well in advance.

Right before the attack, Veerapandiya was ordered to surrender unconditionally through a messenger sent by Bannerman. “We are the sons of this soil. We live with prestige, honour and dignity and we let our soul die for the prestige, honour and dignity of our land. We don’t bow down to the foreigners. We will fight until death,” was the smarting message taken back to the army commander.

Veerapandiya and his men held the fort quite valiantly against British troops, who couldn’t quite match up to their expertise and had to withdraw. However, Veerapandiya knew that his fort would not be able to withstand the onslaught if the British were to unleash their cannons.

Upon receiving information about their hideout, the British threatened the king of Pudukottai, Vijaya Raghunatha Tondaiman to trace and handover the elusive chieftain or face similar consequences.

Buckling under pressure, he sent his soldiers to track down Veerapandiya, who was subsequently arrested at Kayathar on October 1, 1799. Following an interrogation stretching over 15 days and a ridiculous trial, Veerapandiya was sentenced to public execution.

Even in the face of death, he didn’t flinch and continued to stand by his ideals of honour, dignity and prestige. He even boldly argued for the right of his homeland and admonished the British for their immoral and illegal occupation.

Veerapandiya Kattabomman was hanged on October 16, 1799, thus putting an end to the first ever known revolt against the Empire.

The remnants of his old fort at Panchalankurichi is protected by Archaeological Survey of India.

On October 16, 1999, a postage stamp commemorating the bicentenary of Veerapandiya’s execution was released by the government of India in his remembrance.

Every year, the district administration of Tirunelveli honours the legend and his heroic deeds by celebrating the ‘Veerapandiya Kattabomman festival’ at Panchalankurichi on his birth anniversary. Besides, there is an Indian Navy communications centre at Vijayanarayanam, which is named INS Kattabomman after the brave freedom fighter.

On his 258th birth anniversary, let’s remember the valiant Palayakarar from Panchalankurichi who refused to bow down to the British and sacrificed his life for his homeland.

All the kids

, chin up, smile and celebrate the day dedicated specially to you! November 14 is celebrated as Children’s Day (also called Bal Diwas) in our country and the occasion also commemorates the birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India. As the schools and colleges gear up to celebrate this day, here is all you need to know about the history, importance and significance of the occasion.

Nehru was known for his affection and love for kids, whom he regarded as the ‘future of the country’ and was fondly called as Chacha Nehru. “The children of today will make the India of tomorrow. The way we bring them up will determine the future of the country,” he exclaimed once. He always emphasised on the education of children and played a major role in establishment of colleges in the country which are still considered one of the best in the country

After his demise in 1964, his birth date, November 14, was decided to be celebrated as Children’s Day every year.

On this day, schools and colleges organise various programmes like plays, competitions, cultural events etc., and sweets, books, stationary and other gifts are distributed to children. Also, November 20 is celebrated as the Universal Children’s Day, as declared by the United Nations.

The day is a reminder that every child deserves education, nurturing and the best of everything. They are the building blocks of the nation and hence, the future of the nation depends how well they are brought up. To those who are now an adult, keep the kid inside you alive!

In India, 5th September is celebrated as Teachers’ Day as a mark of tribute to the contribution made by teachers to the society.

5th September is the birth anniversary of a great teacher Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who was a staunch believer of education and was a well-known diplomat, scholar, the President of India and above all, a teacher.

When some of his students and friends approached him and requested him to allow them to celebrate his birthday, he said, “instead of celebrating my birthday separately, it would be my proud privilege, if 5th September is observed as Teachers’ day”. From then onwards, the 5th of September has been observed as Teachers Day, in India.

In the year 1965, some of the prominent students of Late Dr S. Radhakrishnan organised a gathering to pay obeisance to that Great Teacher of repute.

In that gathering, in his speech Dr Radhakrishnan expressed his deep reservation regarding his birth anniversary celebration and emphasised that his birth anniversary should be celebrated as ‘Teachers’ Day’, by paying homage to other Great Teachers of India and Bangladesh.

Since the year 1967, 5th September is celebrated as Teachers’ Day till date.

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who was one of his closest friends throughout, had many great things to say about Dr. Radhakrishnan: “He has served his country in many capacities. But above all, he is a great teacher from whom all of us have learnt much and will continue to learn. It is India’s peculiar privilege to have a great philosopher, a great educationist and a great humanist as her President. That in itself shows the kind of men we honour and respect.”

Java has been around for a long time, and over the past few years it has undergone significant changes to keep it relevant. It is still the most popular programming language among developers, according to a 2019 report. But it may not hold onto that title forever. While it’s still at the top of lists of programming languages, other languages, like Python, are closing in on it. In fact, it is predicted that in the next few years, Python will surpass Java (and C) as the most popular programming language. And Python is not Java’s only competition. The rise of Kotlin has also taken some of Java’s share away, especially once Google started supporting Kotlin for Android development.

Java happened to be in the right place at the right time, similar to how Python now happens to be in the right place at the right time with the explosion of interest in AI and machine learning. According to Rich Sharples, senior director of product management at Red Hat, when Java was created 25 years ago, it was designed with the network in mind, and had a lot of features for network communications. It also came about around the time that multiprocessor systems were gaining traction and it was one of the first languages to make use of those hardware advances without the developer having to do too much more work. In addition to those features, it also had big backing in the industry, from Sun Microsystems, IBM and Oracle. All of these factors combined to make Java a highly successful language and a top choice for many developers for decades.

The reason that it has stayed so popular is because it still meets the needs of working across networks. And of course, there’s also the fact that it is open source. “Pretty much anything interesting happening in tech is happening around open source. And it was relatively early in mainstream open source as well. So, it’s checked all the boxes from a technical point of view,” he said.

Java was well suited to the environments of its time, but hasn’t really aged well as technologies change. Sharples explained that Java does a lot of “cool dynamic stuff,” but those sorts of capabilities aren’t really needed in technologies like microservices and serverless. According to Sharples, when working in those types of environments, developers tend to just start fresh when they run into an issue. So, all of those dynamic capabilities Java has aren’t really needed anymore. “What you get is a lot of baggage that doesn’t really provide much value in those modern architectures…If you think back, Java was designed to run on big multi-process machines. You could pretty much guarantee that you owned the machine and you could run multiple applications for each JVM (Java Virtual Machine) or app server. That’s just not the world we live in today. So, a lot of those capabilities bring a lot of weight and complexity and offer little value. So, if you look at functions as a service, you don’t see Java mentioned an awful lot.”

But Sharples doesn’t believe Java is going away quite yet. He believes Java will likely still experience growth for many years, or even decades. There are many projects that let Java thrive in today’s environments, such as Oracle’s GraalVM, which allows for interoperability in shared runtimes, and Red Hat’s Quarkus, which is a Kubernetes-native Java framework.

Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, which oversees Java Enterprise Edition, also believes Java itself is going to evolve to support these technologies. “I think that there are going to be changes to Java that go from the JVM all the way up,” said Milinkovich.

Sharples also believes Oracle has done a pretty good job of “keeping the innovation going without breaking the stability.” Oracle currently has several active projects focused on facilitating innovation for Java:

•Valhalla, focused on introducing value types to Java

•Panama, which is about updating the form function for Java

•Loom, which focuses on scaling Java

•Amber, which is focused on finding ways to simplify the language

•Metropolis, which is trying to see how much of the JVM can be written in Java so that both JVM and Java can evolve faster

“Languages are hard to change, so Java will continue to lead. It will be interesting to see if other languages begin to use the JVM. Not just JVM dialects like Scala and Kotlin but other languages with their own user bases, like Ruby, JavaScript, or Python,” said Mark Little, VP Middleware Engineering at Red Hat.

Love comes in all forms. It would be wrong to say that a person cannot marry someone just because they are not from the opposite sex. The world is evolving more than ever and we need to keep up with times. Same-sex marriage is when any person chooses to marry the same sex instead of the opposite. We should not shun this concept anymore.In other words, gone are the days when people had to be ashamed because of their sexuality. In today’s accepting world, we must make way for every human being irrespective of their gender. One needs to realize that there are more than two genders. The society needs to be more inclusive of all kinds of people. It will make the world a happier place when everyone feels they are accepted and appreciated.

 

IMPORTANCE OF SAME SEX MARRIAGE

All of us are human beings at the end of the day. Before labeling each other with the religion we follow or the people we choose to love. Everyone must realize this fact and act like it. Same-sex marriage is more than important in today’s time as the world is progressing.

Moreover, people can finally be themselves and own their individuality. Just because someone does not love a person from the opposite sex, it does not make them wrong. We can love anyone we want.

In addition, it is better to spend the rest of your life with someone from the same sex you love rather from the opposite sex whom you don’t even like. People will obviously lead happy lives with their loved ones rather than being forced to marry someone.

Same-sex marriage gives the other people hope that they can also have a future. In addition, it paves a brighter path for the LGBTQ community. This community has already suffered enough due to discrimination. They deserve to be able to marry whomever they wish irrespective of gender or sex.

 

CONCLUSION

Same-sex marriage in India especially is not encouraged. There are many countries which have stringent laws against it yet the people are open-minded. In India, neither are the laws lenient but the people are also very narrow-minded.

Most importantly, they never give these people a chance to prove themselves. Indian society does not like change. It is not as adaptable as western countries. India still needs time to be okay with the concept of same-sex marriage.

However, not knowing about the concept is a different thing and completely opposing it is different. Not only in India, but in other countries, people do not support same-sex marriage because they think it is against their religion.

Thus, this creates a lot of problems for them. People do not want the LGBTQ community to get the right to marry their lovers. This takes away their very basic human rights. The LGBTQ community has fought for a long time for their rights. Yet there is a far way to go.

When we talk about India, we see how it is on its way of progress. Like how it ended Section 377, which criminalizes homosexuality. However, we still have a long way to go in terms of the LGBTQ community. We must not any form of love be it same-sex marriage or anything else.

A sleeping evil awakens under the castle of Hogwarts. Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets is the second series of the Harry Potter series. A sequel that gives what we were looking for an solidifies a desire to read the entire series.

Introduction:

In June 1999 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was released. This book is slightly longer than the previous entry clocking in at 341 pages,  J.K. Rowling takes us into another mystery for Harry, Ron and Hermione to solve involving the heir of house Slytherin.

Plot:

The book was started with Harry Back and Privet Drive and it has been writing to his friends but has not been receiving letters back. Now that he has experienced the wizarding world, he wants nothing more than to return to it. However a house elf named Dobby appears and tells him not to go back to the school and that something really bad will happen there this year. Harry finds out that Dobby has been holding back his letters and chases him. This causes him to interrupt the dinner party his aunt and uncle are having when Dobby uses a hover charm to float a cake over one of the guests head and drop it.  This was the cause by which Harry get trapped in a room but eventually Ron Weasly and his two brothers Fred and George come to rescue him and take Harry back. It also allows us to learn more from several new characters that were not touched on very much aside from names in the previous book.

That was the biggest strengths oof this book. It builds very off the previous book with very little recap needed. The section in Diagon alley for this book tacks on the idea more heavily of celebrities in the wizarding world with Gildoroy Lockheart. An author who has achieved many fantastic tasks. We also see the view of another section of the wizarding world for the first time. This is the darker side, the evil side if you will. It introduces some more of Malfoy’s family and also shows how the wizarding world also has political divides. The return to Hogwarts is handled differently than the past book as well.

This book noticeably does less school lessons with more time devoted to moving the plot of the mystery of the Chamber of Secrets. Harry Potter gets himself in trouble being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This spirals downward and leads to detention and eventually isolation with the whole school no longer trusting him. The derogatory term “Mud Blood” is uttered by Malfoy to Hermione and we get once again a better sense of the bullying and political differences of families in the wizarding world.

The conclusion oof the book is the best with comparison to other book. There are some tropes that can be pulled from the fantasy genre here but at the end of the day, the end of the book pays off nearly all the established questions and leaves me asking for more after a satisfying battle that I am trying not to spoil my review.

Conclusion:

The Chamber of Secrets does it is best and good effort of living up to the first ever series of the series. It grows the wizarding world and gives us the reader to be more invested in characters that are not the three main leads. We also get a good idea for where the series is planning on heading in the future as Voldemort is still a major threat to the world. This book meets the goals that J.K Rowling set out to achieve.

Without a doubt, one of the greatest gifts in the universe is the friendship of children. No matter how old we are, playing times with friends can take us back to a time when life was perfect and fun. It is easy to assume that such moments are a global and proven child experience, however, sadly it is not. Children raised in orphanages often miss out on the joys of contact with fellow orphans because such experiences are not available to them in an orphanage. Today is a great day to think about why friendships are so important to children. For children, friendship is an important part of their mental, physical, and social development. Children need opportunities to play together to form friendships. Through friendships, children learn to communicate with others in social situations. They also improve their physical health by competing with their peers in sports and by pushing the limits of their physical abilities. Friendship during childhood is an important part of a child’s emotional development and promotes good mental health. Through friendship and playfulness, toddlers and young children learn to interpret social media and learn to communicate with others. Children are naturally inclined to think of them and their needs. Through childhood friendships, children learn to understand how others feel and how their actions can affect others. Friendship teaches children empathy which is an important life skill that helps them understand why a person feels a certain emotion. Children’s friendships built into a noisy playground create a sense of security for children. They are able to form strong bonds with their peers, as well as with their caregivers and teachers. This has the added benefit of improving their learning skills and creating better opportunities for academic success. The benefits of childhood friendship extend to adulthood. Adults who have built strong relationships from childhood will have great success in their personal and professional lives. The benefits of childhood friendship are undeniable. Play is the child’s first chance to build a relationship. By creating an environment in which children can form friendships with their peers, we are investing in their long-term success.