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@Evening: 😰 Indian IT Professionals In The US Are Scrambling For Jobs After Large-scale Layoffs
1. 🆕 What's New: 📰 Catch-up
Make that three in two weeks — another Hindu temple in Melbourne was vandalised by Khalistan supporters.
"Matter of grave concern" that parts of IB and RAW reports were put in the public domain by the SC Collegium, says Law Minister.
India's own mobile operating system is developed by a company incubated at IIT Madras.
Optical fibre cable infrastructure to line 25,000 km of national highways over the next three years.
Amazon Air launches in India; Boeing aircraft will be used to provide faster package deliveries.
2. 🤔 Tweet for thought: 🧑💻 Indians in the US caught in the layoff storm
Thousands of Indian IT professionals in the US are scrambling for jobs within the period set on their work visas to stay in the country.
The jobs were lost due to the recent layoffs at large technology companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon.
Earlier this month, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said the company would lay off 10,000 workers, about 5 per cent of its total workforce.
Microsoft joined Facebook and Amazon, among others, to cut jobs.
According to The Washington Post, nearly 200,000 IT workers have been laid off since November last year.
Indian IT professionals, many of them on H-1B and L1 visas, made up between 30 to 40 per cent of these job losses.
What's more, Google is pausing green card processing. Other companies might follow suit.
3. 📚 Word-watching: 🥇 Sahitya Akademi's best books of 2022, at a glance
The Sahitya Akademi awards were announced for books in 24 Indian languages at the end of December 2022.
The books were selected on the basis of recommendations made by a jury of three members for each of the languages.
The award-winning books comprise seven poetry collections, seven novels, two story collections, two literary criticisms, one literary history, three plays, one autobiography (essays), and one collection of articles.
Books published between 1 January 2016 and 31 December 2020 were eligible for the awards.
The awards will be presented in New Delhi.
The Sahitya Akademi is India's National Academy of Letters, established in 1954 by the Government of India.
It has been recognising literary works annually in any of the major Indian languages since 1954 through awards, fellowships, grants, and so on.
🎧 Swarajya audiobook: 🗣️ Dr Subhash Kak on Indian history
Dr Subhash Kak and Abhijit Chavda are in conversation for a Swarajya audiobook on Indian history.
Dr Kak — a Padma Shri awardee — is an author and scientist, and previously a contributor to Swarajya.
He is the Regents Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oklahoma State University and a member of the Prime Minister’s Science Technology and Innovation Council.
Abhijit Chavda is the host of a podcast called "The #AskAbhijit Show."
Dr Kak talks about coming to history as a scientist; the Sanskrit language; the Mahabharata era; the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism, Zen and Vendanta; when India was really born, and so on.
4. 📷 Photo Speaks: 🦆 Rare duck species spotted after 84 years in Kashmir
The "long-tailed duck" was sighted in Wular Lake in Kashmir’s Bandipora district after 84 years.
Five ducks were spotted in the lake on 22 January, the Kashmir News Service reported.
The species is marked as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.
The scientific name of the duck is Clangula hyemalis.
Wular is the second-largest freshwater lake of Asia, situated on the foothills of Haramuk Mountain. It is fed by the Jhelum River.
5. 💡 Culture Cutlet: 🎶 On this day, India gets national anthem and song
The national anthem and national song of India were officially adopted by the Constituent Assembly of India on this day, 24 January, in 1950.
National anthem. Jana-gana-mana was composed by Rabindranath Tagore, originally in Bangla.
It was translated into Hindi before being adopted by the country.
The full song is five stanzas-long. However, the first stanza makes up our national anthem.
The playing time of the anthem is about 52 seconds.
National song. Vande Mataram was composed in Sanskrit by Bankimchandra Chatterji.
It was part of Chatterji's most famous novel, Anand Math (1882).
"The song Vande Mataram, which has played a historic part in the struggle for Indian freedom, shall be honoured equally with Jana Gana Mana and shall have equal status with it," the president at the time, Dr Rajendra Prasad, said on this day in 1950.
Listen to or download the national anthem and national song if you like.
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Aimed only at serious readers and those who appreciate the nuances of political undercurrents, the project provides a sense of India's electoral landscape. As you know, these reports are produced after considerable investment of travel, time and effort on the ground.
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