(pronounced as le-o-nine)
Meaning: An adjective, leonine means relating to or resembling a lion.
Origin: The first-known use of the word was in the 14th Century. The word has its origin from the Latin word leoninus which means “pertaining to a lion.”
Usage: Running his fingers through his leonine head of curls, the musician said that the new single is a take on the glorious period of Woodstock.
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(Pronounced rah.bid)
Meaning: Used as an adjective, rabid means extremely violent, furious, going to extreme lengths in expressing one’s opinion, or having a fanatical belief in something. It also means an animal affected with rabies, a viral disease.
Origin: The term rabid originates from Latin rabidus meaning “furious, frenzied”, from rabere meaning “to rave or be mad“. The word has been in use in English since the early 17th century in the sense “madly violent or furious.”
Usage: My friend was bitten by a rabid dog. The office building was attacked by hundreds of rabid supporters of the leader who lost the elections.
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Meaning: This noun refers to one who loves rain, or finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days.
Origin: The word pluviophile comes from the Latin word for rain ‘pluvial’ and phile, which denotes a person who has a fondness for a thing.
Usage: My mother is a pluviophile.
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English author Jane Austen’s novels employ wit and humour to decipher the sheltered lives of the upper classes in rural England. Her novel Emma explores the baffling collision of emotions and etiquette. Let us revisit this story and see what makes it a classic.
About the author
Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England. She was the second daughter and seventh child of Reverend George Austen and Cassandra Leigh Austen. Her father was a rector and a scholar who encouraged and inculcated a love for learning in his children. The authors mother was a woman of quick wit, popular for her impromptu stories in her circles. Austen shared a special bond with her elder sister Cassandra, who was her lifelong companion as neither of them married. She was mostly homeschooled by her father and brothers due to the poor financial condition of the family. However, as an avid reader, she grew up perusing classics by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Alexander Pope, David Hume, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Jane Austen began writing at a very young age. She finished early drafts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice in the late 1790s. Her novels shed light on distinct expectations of a woman’s proper role in society and studied the frustrations of her gender, in a society that saw no use for their talents.
Long considered the English authors most perfectly executed novel, Emma is the only one of her books that is named after its heroine. Published in 1815, this titular protagonist is the first and the only one of Jane Austen’s heroines who has something close to power. Emma Woodhouse is generous, smart, rich and in the prime of her youth. She had lost her mother at a very tender her sister is married off, and her father is completely dependent on her. So, she age, runs the household and has the liberty to act according to her will. The novel, many critics argue, is Austen’s homage to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and chronicles Emma’s near-disastrous meddling in the lives of others. Austen famously said this about her heroine Emma Woodhouse “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”.
The mould of a heroine
What is a heroine? All six of Jane Austen’s novels teasingly ask this question. The formulation of a typical heroine of the 19th Century as described by Austen was “Heroine, a faultless character herself – perfectly good, with much tenderness and sentiment, and not the least Wit”. Heroines that dominated the English novel before and in Austen’s time had to be morally impeccable. Breaking away from the trope of the pious heroine, Austen, through her rebellious, mischievous, and flawed female protagonists, broke the unrealistic societal expectations that forced women to lead their lives as pictures of perfection.
The Artistry
One thing about Jane Austen’s writing style that sets her apart from her contemporaries is her way of narrating the story through the consciousness of the characters. Modern novelists call it free-indirect speech. Although Austen didn’t invent this technique, according to Austen scholar Juliette Wells, “she’s certainly the one who took it the farthest and established its primacy, its necessariness.”
According to English critic John Mullon, the most sophisticated use of this technique can be observed in Emma, where most of the novel is seen through the eyes of a heroine who is mostly wrong about everything. So while reading it one is sharing her delusions and misjudgement.
This technique makes us as readers fall in love with Austen’s characters for their humanity and the capacity to make mistakes and learn from them.
Janet Todd, Professor Emerita from the University of Cambridge, said, “Emma is the culmination of her career and it is the cleverest, the most subtle and the one in which she thinks about her artistry as well as putting artistry into the book…. think it is her masterpiece.”
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Inspired by Karthyayani Amma, who passed the literacy examination at the ripe old age of 96, chef Vikas Khanna has directed Barefoot Empress, a film tracing her journey. He also aims to help educate five million girls in India
In 2018, Karthyayani Amma hailing from Kerala wrote the Aksharalaksham literacy examination conducted by the Kerala State Literacy Mission Authority. She scored an impressive 98 out 100- bagging the first rank, and shot to national fame. What is so impressive about scoring 98 when students score 100 on 100 all the time, you ask? Karthyayani Amma was 96 years old when she took the test! A widow “who had never gone to school and used to work as a domestic help and cleaning staff, her determination and perseverance was duly acknowledged. On International Women’s Day in 2020, she was awarded the Union government’s Nari Shakti Puraskar.
And, to this day, she continues to inspire people. Among them is Michelin Star Chef Vikas Khanna. He has directed Barefoot Empress, a 15-minute short film, produced by Oscar-nominated Doug Roland. It chronicles her remarkable journey, displaying tremendous courage and resilience “when she joins a first grade class at the age of 96”. The chef highlights that Barefoot Empress a “love letter to never giving up on your dreams” while also shining a light on the lack of educational opportunity for girls in certain parts of India. It has been garnering critical acclaim globally and won the Biogen Award for Best Short Film at Tokyo’s prestigious Short Shorts Film Festival this year.
He’s not stopping with just the film, though. Vikas Khanna is now focussed on setting in motion a movement that involves rehabilitating classrooms for better educational environment, improving nutrition by providing healthy meals, providing basic educational supplies in partnership with non-profit organisation Leap to Shine, and training girls in culinary skills to be financially independent. Inspired by Barefoot Empress, Leap to Shine has named Amma a global ambassador and pledged to educate five million girls in India.
For Khanna and his team, the “mission around Barefoot Empress is focussed around starting a movement to bring girls back to school while impacting education and livelihood skills. Our goal is to deliver this for five million girls”. The movement to bring five million girls back to school in three years will include rehabilitating and renovating classrooms and creating an enabling learning environment. While 18 classrooms were renovated recently, the plan is to rehabilitate 25 classrooms in phase one. The movement also aims to focus on nutrition, the lack of which leads to school drop outs. Khanna’s team estimates that it takes 10 dollars to support and provide meals to a girl child for one year and they plan to serve 1,00,000 meals. Under the initiative, school bags, pencils, books and tablets are being distributed to girls in marginalised schools to bridge the educational and digital divide.
He hopes that the one step that Amma took at the age of 96 towards a school will herald in hope and possibilities for millions of young girls in India and beyond to fulfil a similar dream that Amma nurtured for decades – that of a good education.
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Scientists say that even in urban environments, when we create the right conditions, things get better environmentally, and native species come back. Detroit’s sprawling metro area illustrates how such human actions can boost rewilding. In five points, let’s look at how urban rewilding happens and what its benefits are
WHAT IS REWILDING?
Rewilding generally means reviving natural systems in degraded locations -sometimes with a helping hand. That might mean removing dams, building tunnels to reconnect migration pathways severed by roads, or reintroducing predators such as wolves to help balance ecosystems. But after initial assists, there’s little human involvement. The idea might seem best suited to remote areas where nature is freer to heal without interference. But rewilding also happens in some of the world’s biggest urban centres, as people find mutually beneficial ways to coexist with nature.
DETROIT IS AN EXAMPLE
Hundreds of thousands of houses and other structures in Detroit, the U.S., were abandoned as the struggling city’s population fell more than 60% in the 1950s. Many were razed, leaving vacant tracts that plants and animals have occupied. Non-profit groups planted trees, community gardens, and pollinator-friendly shrubs. With this, urban rewilding in Detroit has been more organic than strategic.
THE BENEFITS
Conservation projects reintroduced ospreys and peregrine falcons. Bald eagles found their way back as bans on DDT and other pesticides helped expand their range nationwide. Anti-pollution laws and government-funded clean-ups made nearby rivers more hospitable to sturgeon, whitefish, beavers, and native plants such as wild celery. The Detroit River International Wildlife Refuge, just a half-hour drive from downtown, consists of 30 parcels totalling 6,200 acres, including islands, wetlands, and former industrial sites. It’s home to 300 bird species and a busy stopover for ducks, raptors, and others during migration.
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR LEARNING
The project in Detroit connects wildlife with local residents, some intrigued by coyotes and raccoons in the neighbourhood, others fearful of diseases or harm to pets. But people can also learn about proper trash disposal, resisting the temptation to feed wild animals, and the value of healthy, diverse ecosystems. It is also a chance to prepare communities and environments and societies to anticipate the presence of more and more wildlife in urban areas as we’re changing their habitats. Studies also show that time in natural spaces improves people’s physical and mental health.
OTHER EXAMPLES
The German cities of Hannover, Frankfurt, and Dessau-Rosslau designated vacant lots, parks, lawns, and urban waterways where nature could take its course. As native wildflowers have sprung up, they’ve attracted birds, butterflies, bees, and even hedgehogs. In a 2.7-km stretch of the Kallang River has been converted from a concrete-lined channel into a twisting waterway lined with plants, rocks, and other natural materials and flanked by green parkland. In the U.S., Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium and the non-profit Urban Rivers are installing “floating wetlands” on part of the Chicago River to provide fish breeding areas, bird and pollinator habitat, and root systems that cleanse polluted water.
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When a person writes, graphite particles wear off the pencil tip.
Erasers are used to remove the graphite marks made while writing on paper with a pencil. Erasers are generally made of ‘sticky’ substances like plastic, rubber, vinyl, gum, etc
When a person writes, graphite particles wear off the pencil tip and get interlocked with paper molecules. The soft action of the eraser causes the graphite particles to stick to it instead of the paper, as graphite has a stronger attraction to the eraser molecules than to paper. The ‘dust left over after rubbing consists of worn rubber clumps mixed with graphite particles. Some types of erasers tend to remove the top layer of paper along with the graphite particles and rubbing the same spot repeatedly can make holes in the paper.
Did you know graphite has a stronger attraction to the eraser molecules than to paper?
Picture Credit : Google
When a person writes, graphite particles wear off the pencil tip.
Erasers are used to remove the graphite marks made while writing on paper with a pencil. Erasers are generally made of ‘sticky’ substances like plastic, rubber, vinyl, gum, etc
When a person writes, graphite particles wear off the pencil tip and get interlocked with paper molecules. The soft action of the eraser causes the graphite particles to stick to it instead of the paper, as graphite has a stronger attraction to the eraser molecules than to paper. The ‘dust left over after rubbing consists of worn rubber clumps mixed with graphite particles. Some types of erasers tend to remove the top layer of paper along with the graphite particles and rubbing the same spot repeatedly can make holes in the paper.
Did you know graphite has a stronger attraction to the eraser molecules than to paper?
Picture Credit : Google
A rare natural phenomenon, ice circles are observed mainly in Scandinavia and North America.
Ice circles are thin, perfectly round discs of ice which float on slow flowing water. It is a rare natural phenomenon that is observed mainly in Scandinavia and North America. Ice circles were first mentioned in 1895 in Scientific American, a popular magazine.
Scientists are not yet clear as to how ice circles are formed. It is thought that they are formed on the outer bends in a river. The slow moving river currents create rotating eddies which grind a free piece of ice against the ice that is connected to shore. Due to the water’s swirling motion, the chunk of ice becomes perfectly circular in shape.
In May 2009, astronauts aboard the International Space Station noticed the formation of two ice circles in Lake Baikal, Russia.
UFO enthusiasts, however, like to think that like crop circles, they are the creations of visiting aliens!
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