DR. ZAKIR NAIK WINS KING FAISAL AWARD

     Dr. Zakir Naik wins King Faisal award

                                                           

 

                                                        DR. ZAKIR NAIK

 Dr. Zakir A. Naik, president of the Islamic Research Foundation of India, won the 2015 King Faisal International Prize (KFIP) for Service to Islam on Tuesday. 

Makkah Gov. Prince Khaled Al-Faisal and KFIP Secretary-General Abdullah Al-Othaimeen announced the names of the winners at a glittering function held at Al-Khozama Center. 

Two internationally acclaimed scholars of chemistry, Professor Omar Mwannes Yaghi from the United States and Professor Michael Gratzel from Switzerland, were declared co-winners of the prize in science category (chemistry). 

The award for Islamic studies went to Dr. Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Kaki, a consultant at Madinah Development Authority.

Prof. Jeffrey Ivan Gordon from the US was declared winner of the prize in medicine. Each prize consists of a handwritten Arabic certificate summarizing the laureate’s work, a commemorative 24-carat, 200-gram gold medal and a cash award of SR750,000.

The co-winners in any category share the monetary grant.

According to the citation read out by Al-Othaimeen, Naik, a non-Arabic Indian Islamic scholar, has become a renowned authority on comparative religion. “He has founded a TV channel called Peace TV, which remains the only channel in the world specialized in comparative religion with huge audience profile,” said the citation.

Referring to the prize given in science category, the KFIP secretary-general said that Gratzel, a professor at Swiss Federal Institute, is recognized for “his foundational and practical discoveries in the development of photo-electrochemical systems for solar energy conversion.”

The co-winner in science category, Yaghi, has made seminal contributions in the field of metal organic frameworks.

He applauded the achievements of Kaki in Islamic studies for “his distinguished research on cultural heritage of Madinah.”

The award for Arabic language and literature was withheld as none of the nominees met the criteria laid down by the selection committee this year.

 (Courtesy: Arab News 4th February 2015) 

A dialogue on freedom of speech at IIT- Madras

 http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/chennai/panel-deliberates-democracy-in-all-walks-of-life/article6854433.ece?ref=tpnews

 Panel deliberates democracy in all walks of life

“Any discussion on freedom of speech and expression can’t be removed from its political context. One should not fall into the intellectual trap of seeing an issue as one between free speech and non-free speech,” said N. Ram, chairman, Kasturi & Sons Ltd.

He was delivering a talk, ‘Diminishing democratic spaces’, as one of the four panellists speaking on ‘Reclaiming Democratic Spaces: A dialogue on freedom of Expression’ at IIT-Madras on Tuesday evening.
Stating that it would be an exaggeration to claim that democratic spaces are diminishing in the country, he said threats to free speech had certainly increased after the 2014 general elections.
Independent Islamic researcher and secretary-general of the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought, A. Faizur Rahman questioned the double speak of the Western liberal democracies as he spoke on the topic ‘Is Freedom of expression an absolute right?’

To make his case, Mr. Rahman cited the example of how Sydney Morning Herald was recently hounded into editorially apologizing for an “anti-Jewish” cartoon it had published to depict Israeli State violence in Gaza.

“Praising the apology, the Australian Press Council ruled that the cartoon had an ‘implied linkage with the Jewish faith’, and breached the Council’s standards of practice on ‘the ground of causing greater offence to readers’ sensibilities than was justifiable in public interest. Why can’t anti-Islamic cartoons be judged and restricted based on the same standards,” he asked.

Examining the role and place of women in democracy, Kalpana Karunakaran, faculty member, IIT-Madras, raised a question on existing democratic spaces and democratic institutions. “In India, freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution for a woman is rationed out by caste groups. Social media was thought of as democratic, but are women not threatened with rape and murder for speaking their mind,” she asked.

The last speaker was Arya Prakash, a student of IIT-Madras, who spoke on the democracy of academic spaces in India. “The fear of authority could affect his/her creative faculties. Students must be more engaged to ensure that academic spaces remain democratic,” she said.

Four panellists spoke on ‘Reclaiming democratic spaces: a dialogue on freedom of expression’

(Courtesy: The Hindu dated 4th February 2015)

Tulsi Badrinath's latest work: "Madras, Chennai and the Self"

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http://www.thehindu.com/features/metroplus/a-place-called-home/article6848963.ece

A place called home

Writer-dancer Tulsi Badrinath with her book. Photo: M. Moorthy

Tulsi Badrinath’s latest work of non-fiction, Madras, Chennai and the Self, looks to people and neighbourhoods to paint a picture of the city

Just off the confusion of Adyar’s M.G. Road, is a sliver of a lane that leads into an oasis of quiet. Enter this residential colony, and a few houses in, stands a red gate with a profusion of greenery gushing over its name board: Badrinath. Born in Madras, to parents brought up in Uttar Pradesh, Bharatanatyam dancer and writer Tulsi Badrinath has nourished her insider-outsider relationship with Chennai from this house for about four decades now. Her latest work of non-fiction, Madras, Chennai and the Self, looks to people and neighbourhoods far from her own to paint a picture of this city.

Structured as a series of interview-profiles, the book reflects the city as a pastiche of the people who call it home. The story that emerges is of a city with a foot each in modernity and tradition. “All our lives straddle Madras and Chennai simultaneously, subconsciously. But, somehow, there’s that simplistic understanding of Madras as boring and rigid, and Chennai as hip and happening, which isn’t true. Madras, when it was formed, was modern for its times; it saw the kind of events and changes that the world experienced only subsequently,” emphasises Tulsi. To tell this dichotomy, Tulsi chose for the first of her 12 subjects K. Seshadri, a Hindu priest who went on to make a life as a black-belt in karate. His tale, for Tulsi, embodied that delicate present-day balance between the desires of the individual and the constraints of community.

The famous and the everyday share page space in Madras, Chennai and the Self. In the story of actor Vikram, Tulsi draws out what it means for a man who’d achieved “the dream of millions in the city” to be confined to a hospital room during his accident: “We see him as the superstar who has everything, but its his very fame that curbs his freedom of movement, restricts his experience of the city to the areas where he won’t be mobbed,” says Tulsi. For memories of the city’s tryst with cricket in the ‘70s, Tulsi interviewed V. Ramnarayan, and found the “modern game” co-existing happily with the deeply traditional roots of the classical arts magazine that Ramnarayan edits. And with gynaecologist Uma Ram, Tulsi notes that for all the city’s progress, some of its superstitions are entrenched far in the past. To prove further that all is not rosy in this oft-romanticised city, Tulsi speaks with civil engineer A. Faizur Rahman, from North Chennai, who tells of the landscape from his childhood staying static through his adulthood, for development had often overlooked his slice of the city.

Threading through these stories is Tulsi’s own. From her birth in a house at Foreshore Estate that embedded forever in her the “sound of the sea”, to her years as a dancer, the book slips in quick snapshots from Tulsi’s early memories. “I started learning dance when I was eight. It was there, for instance, that I inherited a whole host of kinship terms — athai, mama, etc — all of which I’d never had, but was now proud to own,” she recalls. Despite her upbringing with non-Tamil parents, Tulsi says, with her “ayoos, and ayyayoos”, she’s grown to be very Tamil in her thinking. It’s these vignettes of her relationship with Madras that fed into her two books of fiction — Meeting Lives and Man Of A Thousand Chances, as well as her previous work of non-fiction Master of Arts: A Life in Dance, set in Chennai’s classical dance milieu. The Madras in her latest book, though, is one that Tulsi says she had little control over: “That’s the difference between fiction and non-fiction, right? With the first, you can set the scene as your imagination wills you to; here, you reflect with honest the story that reveals itself to you.” 

(Courtesy: The Hindu dated 3rd February 2015)