From the Military to the Police and Bureaucracy, Officersâ Spouses Pull Rank Too
In the army, commanding officersâ wives operate within a fixed spousal hierarchy and unchallenged chain of command over younger women that mirror the positions their spouses occupy.
Representative image. Photo: ADGPI - Indian Army/Facebook
Society10/Jan/2021
Chandigarh: There is an axiom in Indian official circles that the spouses of military officers, police officers and bureaucrats, especially at senior levels, behave as if they are a rank or post higher than the officers they are married to.
Anyone familiar with life in cantonments, mofussil areas, medium and small towns, or all three across the country, will definitely endorse the reality that official spouses have, over decades, emerged as a formidable force in their respective environments, their overbearing aura largely a reflection of the exalted position they are married to.
Most of the world is generally familiar with the fact that China experienced a great famine in 1959-1961. The death tolls published in the West tend to be greatly exaggerated, some reaching 80 million lives or more, but from everything I can learn from the original sources the actual total appears to be about 20 million lives or perhaps a bit more. In discussing the cause, the Western media, columnists, authors, and book publishers casually mention the series of natural disasters, the multiple large typhoons, persistent excessive rainstorms, plant diseases that simultaneously inflicted China, but tend unanimously to focus on and allocate the blame to Mao Zedong. The official Western narrative is that Mao so terrified all his lieutenants that they reported totally fictitious grain harvest volumes so as to avoid possible repercussions, which resulted in Mao misallocating most of the food distribution and therefore now shoulders almost all the blame for those deaths. It s a good story b
11 of the Most Memorable Acts of Civil Disobedience in History
Here’s a short list of what might be called “great moments in civil disobedience.”
Friday, January 8, 2021
Clockwise from top left: Rosa Parks, Robert de Bruce (from Braveheart ), Gandhi, Antigone (fictional), Robert Smalls, Sam Adams
“Civil disobedience” evokes a range of reactions when people hear the term. Some instinctively wince, regarding it as anti-social or subversive.
Others, like me, want to know more before we judge. What is prompting someone to engage in it? Who will be affected and how? What does the “disobedient” person hope to accomplish? Are there alternative actions that might be more effective?
The former head of the British Army left part of his £490,000 estate to the Gurkha Welfare Trust after his death aged 95.
Field Marshal Lord Edwin Bramall, who was a part of nearly every major UK military campaign from the Second World War until his retirement in 1985, passed away at his home in Crondall, Hampshire in November 2019.
He had landed in Normandy at the age of 21 in charge of a platoon and was wounded twice before fighting his way through Holland towards Berlin, winning the Military Cross, becoming a Knight of the Garter and, eventually, Chief of Defence Staff.
Lord Bramall, who became a life peer as Baron Bramall of Bushfield in 1987, left the majority of his £486,259 estate to his children Nicolas and Sara and his grandchildren.
Nasana Bajracharya
January 3, 2021
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There are more than 55,000 fonts of Latin/Roman alphabets (in which English is written), but there are only a few hundred of Devanagari, or Nepali, fonts. Not many people like typing in Nepali, but the number gets even lower when we think about the actual number of fonts we use while typing Nepali.
But, why is the number so low? Does the country lack resources such as skilled human resources? Yes, say veterans of the field.
Fonts ‘of Nepal’
Devanagari script was derived and developed from the Bhrama Lipi (script) in India 2,000 years ago, including Tamil, Marathi, Telegu. It flourished here as it shared similarities with the Sanskrit language during the Lichhavi and Malla period. But, it was James Prinsep, an English scholar, archaeologist and philologist for British East India Company, who developed a simplified, readable and writable Devanagari script in 1837.