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Mumbai boy wins National Taekwondo championship

Chembur school student Atharva Samant bagged two gold medals at the National Taekwondo championship which was held in Daman two days ago.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

There’s no stopping this boy from winning gold. Chembur-based Atharva Samant (14), who is already a known name in Maharashtra’s juniors Taekwondo circuit for his penchant for winning gold medals, has done it again. The Class 8 student of Swami Vivekanand School, Chembur won two gold medals at the recently-concluded National Taekwondo championship held at Diu and Daman – he was representing Maharashtra after his big wins at the State championships held last month in Mumbai.

Atharva won gold at his favoured events – aekwondo Poomsae and Taekwondo Sparring in the Under-14 category. After the win, he credited his coach Shrikant Mishra for his recent win and all his wins thus far. He has won gold at previous national meets held in Mumbai, Surat and Amritsar.

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Do you work for elders? This award could be yours

The Karmaveer Chakra 2014-15 National Award for exceptional work in elder care is inviting nominations. Do nominate someone you know.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

The award season is upon us already, but this is one award that is worth your while.

The Apeejay-Karmayuga ‘Karmaveer Chakra 2014-15’ Award for exceptional work for senior citizens is inviting nominations from Indian individuals working in the field of elder care. The award was instituted in 2011 and is a highly prestigious prize. The Award is promoted by iCONGO and Silver Innings Foundation; both organisations work with the elderly in India.

To be eligible for the award, the entrant must be an Indian or a person of Indian origin, he or she must be currently working on a project for elder care for a minimum of three years, or be a social entrepreneur in the field. Those working in the field as volunteers are preferred.

The Award will be given at a ceremony in Delhi on March 21, 2015. Last date for applying is December 20, 2014.

Want to apply for the Karmaveer Chakra 2014-15? Send your application with one signed passport photograph by email to silverinnings@gmail.com. You can also courier your application to Silver Innings Foundation, c/o Sailesh Mishra, Arena III, 801/802, Poonam Garden, Mira Road (East), Mumbai – 401107. 

 

(Picture courtesy smallbusiness.chron.com)
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Sachin Test farewell image wins national photo award

Mumbai’s Mid Day photojournalist Atul Kamble continues to win laurels for his iconic image capturing Sachin Tendulkar’s last Test match.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

Atul KambleMumbai-based news photographer Atul Kamble’s world-famous image of cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar’s last Test appearance in Mumbai has won the prestigious MFI-Yes Bank ‘Picture of the Year 2013’ award at the National Press Photo Contest 2014.

Mid-Day photojournalist Atul Kamble’s iconic photograph captures Sachin Tendulkar step out of the dressing room at Wankhede stadium to bat in his final Test innings as spellbound fans jostle to capture the historic moment, last November. The photograph was chosen among over 8,000 images submitted by over 240 photojournalists from across India for the MFI-YES BANK National Press Photo Contest 2014.

The photograph was selected unanimously as the ‘Picture of the Year 2013’ by the three-member jury of the contest which included award-winning photojournalists Pablo Bartholomew, Arko Datta and Rafeeq Ellias.

41-year-old Kamble, whose image also won the first prize in Sport category, will be awarded the grand prize of Rs 75,000 at an awards ceremony scheduled in Mumbai on December 19, 2014. 22 other photojournalists who won prizes in six categories will be also awarded cash prizes worth Rs 50,000, Rs 30,000 and Rs 20,000 at the ceremony.

“I am very happy. I have been participating in MFI-YES BANK National Press Photo Contest since its inception and it is wonderful to win this prestigious award,” said Kamble after learning of his win.

Jury member Pablo Bartholomew, multiple award-winning photojournalist known for his iconic image of a child victim of Bhopal Gas Tragedy, said “The photograph captures Sachin Tendukar’s retirement from sporting life. The picture sort of epitomises an icon within that frame and that’s why it is important. For once, we are not leaning towards issue-based or conflict-based image, but it is a historic moment.”

“A cricketing legend bidding goodbye, bathed in a warm light, ‘alone’ –– despite the adulation of his cellphone waving fans. There were indeed events of more far-reaching impact during the year but no picture seemed to capture them as decisively and as poignantly,” said Rafeeq Ellias, who straddles many worlds that include photojournalism, advertising, cinema and design.

“Sports images are rarely given the highest honour in any photography competition but this was a compelling image that stood out… It is an image that beautifully combines form and narrative,” said jury member Arko Datta, whose iconic images of 2002 Gujarat riots, and the Indonesian Tsunami, are well-known.

The MFI YES BANK National Press Photo Contest is currently in its fourth year. The ‘Picture of the Year’ award has been won by independent Kashmiri photojournalist Showkat Nanda in 2011, India Today’s Mandar Deodhar in 2012, and Delhi-based photojournalist Chinky Shukla in 2013.

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When children take up the cleanliness challenge

Two Mumbai based research organisations are taking the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan to the city’s schools, one initiative at a time.
by The Editors | editor@themetrognome.in

The Narendra Modi-led Swachh Bharat campaign continues to find resonance among the country’s populace, and Mumbai is already witness to several individuals and organisations taking up the challenge. What’s interesting, however, is that organisations are rightly seeing that such initiatives need children’s involvement to really become successful.

Two Mumbai-based organisations – Observer Research Foundation and Mahatma Gandhi Centre of Cleanliness, Sanitation and Community Health – have jointly decided to keep children in the city’s schools at front and centre of the Abhiyaan in the city. They recently observed the ‘Bal Swachhta Week’, a sub-celebration of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, with the release of the ‘10 commandments for Swachh Bharat’ pamphlet at Nityanand Municipal Primary School, Andheri, with the support of Ms Mansi Apte, the local Education Officer.

Snapshot-of-pamphletThe pamphlet focusses on the key themes of Clean Self, Clean School, Clean Surroundings, Clean Water, Clean Food, Clean Toilets.

The pamphlet has been conceptualised by the ORF-CASER (Change Agents for School Education and Research) team of Aparna Sivakumar, Adithi Muralidhar, Ameya Pimpalkhare and Hamsa Iyer, and is presented like a comic book that opens out as an accordion, making it a simple and exciting novelty for kids to safely keep and make swachhta exciting. The artwork was done by artists Nilofer Rehman and Chetna Morkhade.

Says Adithi, “The focus of the comic-based commandments is on personal hygiene (brush, bathe, grooming, trim your nails and hand wash), healthy food and active lifestyle, conserving and drinking safe water, not littering, good toilet etiquette and the principle of Refuse-Reduce-Reuse-Recycle.”

She added that the Week witnessed a flurry of activity, from children’s round tables to self-fulfilling shramadans and from the ambitious launch of making Councilor ward 92 a ‘Zero Garbage Ward’, inaugurating the place-making of a park with provision for walk, play, talk for people of all ages, women and sanitation issues, and concluding with a vital discussion on upliftment of safai karmacharis’ lives.

“At CASER, we believe that children are the change agents for the Swachh Bharat. During the  November 13 Children’s Roundtable, what was absolutely thrilling was how children spoke about the current scenario, narrated their personal tales of them fulfilling their responsibility and shared perceptions about many issues. They even went on to share how they dealt with problems and discussed do-able solutions.

“Some of them stated that they should be responsible for cleaning their schools and even toilets, critiqued the civic education that does not prepare them to be ‘better, active citizens’ imparted in schools and acknowledged their responsibility towards the environment. With such an approach from our children, our future is in good hands.”

The pamphlet will soon be available in high resolution and multiple languages, and will be registered under Creative commons for all to reuse and share across the country.

(Pictures courtesy CASER)

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An app to help find missing children

Mumbai techies have developed the app ‘Helping Faceless’ that uses face recognition and data analytics to help trace and return missing children.
by Vrushali Lad | editor@themetrognome.in

It is a burning problem that grows in strength every year. And yet, apart from police detection, there is not much to fall back on when it comes to finding missing children in India.

Except, these Mumbaikars know what can be done – albeit in a long-drawn out process. The app they’ve developed, ‘Helping Faceless’, uses face recognition and data analytics to help trace, and hopefully return, missing children in India.

shashank singhSpeaking to The Metrognome, Shashank Singh (29), founder of Helping Faceless, says, “India has a big problem on its hands. Over 1,00,000 children go missing every year all over the country. Of these, most are kidnapped while some run away voluntarily. Many of them land up in begging rings,or are forced into the flesh trade, or end up as labourers in eateries or factories, or as domestic help. What’s more, many instances of missing children are under-reported. Something needs to be done to find these children before they are lost forever.”

What gave him the idea to start the app over a year ago? He pauses for a while, then says, “As a child, I spent some years in UP, in the 90s. When I was about six years old, I was kidnapped for five hours. I have no recollection of the incident, I only know what my parents have told me. It turns out that I was helped by a stranger and returned to my parents.”

That incident, though he has no memory of it, always stayed with him for one fact alone – that a stranger had helped him out from a potentially disastrous situation. “When I came to Mumbai in 2012 and later when I started working on this app, I realised that strangers helping each other was an extremely powerful idea, especially if it was scaled to a level where millions could help each other. My team and I hence developed ‘Helping Faceless’ to help these millions of missing children find their way back home.”

Though he started work on the app alone, today there is a small team in place, with Amol Gupta as co-founder.

How does it work?

The app is simple to use – if you spot a child in distress (either being abused, or working in hostile conditions, etc.), all you have to do is take a picture of the child, and the app auto-relays the picture back to the team’s server. “From here, the photos are referenced with the pictures in our database. When we find a match, we see the details for that missing child and contact partner NGOs and organisations in that place to seek their help in returning the child,” Shashank explains.

However, users are encouraged to talk to the child and build confidence to get details. They are also instructed to give begging children food instead of money. “Even a simple gesture such as giving a child chocolates will help the child speak with you. We encourage users to help the child in any way they can,” he says.

The team works with SOCH (Society Of Children), a TISS organisation which does the back-end work and helps guide the team through the legal steps to follow after a child’s pictures match. “SOCH also helps us figure out potential partner organisations in other cities to coordinate the process. However, each case is different and we have to work as per the requirements,” he says.

Currently, the team has over 60,000 photographs of missing Indian children in its database. “These were sourced from available police records. We are constantly building the database and uploading more pictures and information, while also reaching out to more partners. It’s a long process to begin the journey from tracing a child’s current location and returning the child home, but in a year, we have had success with three children – two from Ludhiana and one in Mumbai. That is a modest number, but the process moves at a glacial speed,” Shashank says.

Also, users must be a little careful about taking pictures of children. “Though there are no laws in India about taking a picture of a child in a public place, provided the child is clothed, we still discourage users from forcefully taking pictures. Also, sometimes it may happen that another person may stop you from taking a picture. Many users have been frightened off,” he says.

What ‘Helping Faceless’ hopes to achieve

“Essentially, we are a business that goes against another business – in this case, we are up against a $36 billion ‘illegal’ business,” Shashank says. “The best way to dismantle a business is to make it unprofitable. Using an app like this, though it seems like a small step, will help us hit back.” He adds that the crux of the app’s ethos lies in the public and police working together to solve these terrible crimes. “The bigger goal is, in four to five years, to have enough data to be able to predict a crime, and data analytics allows us that. The difference between trafficking and crimes of passion is that there is a time lag involved – the trafficked child is taken from spot to spot by public transport normally, there are specific train routes that traffickers use. We can empower the RPF to use the data and intercept the crime in real time,” Shashank explains.

He has shown the app to police officials in some Indian cities, and says that cops are interested in it because the same technology is also useful to catch criminals. “I would say that the same technology can be used to find all missing persons, criminals or not. However, we realise that currently there is a high churn rate among the app’s users. So we are working to make it more community-based and engaging to the user. We have about 3,000 people installing the app per month and signing up, but many of them drop out later on.” The improved app will roll out in two weeks’ time, he says, and so will its iOS version.

Currently, the team has about 30 dedicated volunteers, most of them from Mumbai. “We have found the highest response from Mumbai and Bangalore, while Delhi has the poorest response to the problem,” Shashank says. “Unfortunately, public support is lacking for initiatives like this. People are happy to give money to a child that begs, instead of talking to the child and taking a small step towards helping him or her out.”

‘Helping Faceless’ is available on Google Play Store and on Facebook: /helpingfaceless. 

(Featured image courtesy borgenproject.org. Image is used for representational purpose only)

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How a few youngsters are looking to heal Kashmir

A group of youths initiated ‘Project Pheran’, to help those devastated by Kashmir floods deal with the impending harsh winter.
by Mamta D | @silverlightgal on Twitter

The natural beauty of Jammu and Kashmir is known all over the world. Movies, books, songs, poetry – all of these have celebrated its charms and scenic landscapes.

But the Kashmir of today is vastly different. Following the floods that wrecked havoc in the region September 4, 2014 onwards, the valley has been a site of devastation. Villages have been washed away, homes submerged, lakhs of people rendered homeless and property worth hundreds of millions has been destroyed.

In the last month, rescue and relief efforts by various local and non-local groups have managed to save many a life in the flood-ravaged state. It will be a long time before the former glory of Kashmir is fully restored. What is of immediate concern now is the impending winter.

Hence, to combat the challenge of providing warmth to the flood-affected people, a group of enterprising youngsters have come forward and set up an initiative ‘Project Pheran/Project Warmth’. Through this project, they are collating funds from all over the country and abroad and providing needy persons with warm clothes, pherans (long cloak-like Kashmiri garments), blankets, coal and so on.

The group is quite small, comprising six persons who are not even based in the same city but who scattered across India. All of them are students of higher education in India and abroad, but their hearts and willpower are enormous and their conviction that they will make this project succeed is commendable. The group, which calls itself ‘Heal Kashmir’ connected through social media after the floods, is now a close-knit group and collaborates excellently.

The motley crew comprises Anup Achuthan, a senior finance professional based in Mumbai, Zayd Qureshi who takes care of on-ground distribution in Srinagar, Ruhan Naqash (from Chennai, Burhan Mir (Punjab & Haryana), Armish Riyaz (Punjab), Yasir Khan (Delhi, NCR) and Saqib Nazir (Bangalore) – they are the coordinators in various States across India, garnering funds and necessary materials.

The estimated initial expenses of the massive project is around Rs. 8 lakh using which they will  purchase the fabrics and get it stitched by local tailors who know the requirements of the region well. A textile factory in Sonipat has been identified which offers fabrics at concessional rates.

Says Anup, “We must do all we can to make sure people who survived the devastating floods do not succumb to the harsh winter due to lack of warm clothing and bedding.” He hopes that people of Mumbai will come forward with generous contributions to this project in monetary donations and kind. With lack of godowns and storage spaces, these student volunteers are storing the collections in their own apartments at the moment.

For Yasir, who is also the founder of J&K Disaster Helpline and Relief Organisation, it was a call for rescue that changed his fate. He and two other Kashmiri youths were working in their air-conditioned offices in Delhi when one of the team members, Iqbal Buchh, received a call from his friend who was stranded in his house due to rising flood waters. Yasir overheard the conversation and decided to call one Mr Singh to rescue the youth. After arranging for the youth’s rescue, Yasir had a brainwave – if he and his friends could manage to save one life, they could also try to save many more.

By then, phone lines on ground zero in Srinagar were almost dead, and network connections had fizzled out. Rescue operations had faced stumbling blocks at many areas. That’s when Yasir Khan, Iqbal and a third boy, Rouf Bhat, took two months unpaid leave from their jobs to start a helpline. The idea was to pave the way for smoother rescue operations.

“We started with a makeshift helpline in our apartments by posting our numbers on Facebook so that people could get in touch with us to rescue their families and friends. Within 10 days, we attended to over 45,000 calls, Whatsapp messages, and text messages. We were so engrossed in receiving and attending to rescue calls that we even forgot that our own families needed to be rescued. Fortunately, we soon learnt that our families were safe and sound,” recalls Yasir.

From rescue ops, the group has now progressed on their next mission – to provide warm clothes to the needy for the looming cold months.  As of today, J&K Disaster Helpline and Relief Organization is working in collaboration with Heal Kashmir for Project Pheran.

Armish says, “Mainly, we are collecting woollens, but if people donate other stuff, we accept that too. We have hired transport through a company in Delhi. They will deliver the materials to Srinagar by road. We are planning to put up collection centres in major colleges and universities across Punjab.” The team is hopeful of starting distribution by early November.

The team coordinator from Bangalore, Saqib, has been in touch with the Kashmiri diaspora in the city. Long before ‘Project Pheran’ started, he coordinated with various others to arrange for relief collection and dispatch to Srinagar.  With time, he became part of the Heal Kashmir team.

If you wish to support Project Pheran/Project Warmth, write to healkashmir14@gmail.com, or on Twitter @healkashmir, or Facebook: healkashmir.

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