Expert Insight

Sep
06
2019
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By Chirosree Basu
Mission possible

Mission possible

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Prof. Surjya K. Pal, Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Professor-in-Charge, DHI Centre of Excellence in Adv Manuf Tech (http://www.coeamt.com ), Associate Dean, Alumni Affairs, Chairman, Steel Technology Centre, Executive Adviser, Science and Technology Entrepreneurs' Park (STEP), added another feather to his cap recently. He has been appointed Lord Kumar Bhattacharyya Chair Professor of Manufacturing in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of IIT Kharagpur for 2019-22. The Chair was set up in April 2019 by Prof. Tapan Bagchi (DSc/2012/IM), alumnus of the Institute, former Director, NITIE, Mumbai, and former Dean of SP Jain Mumbai and Dubai. The Chair was instituted in…
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Sep
02
2019
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By Chirosree Basu
Written on the walls

Written on the walls

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As a former detention centre for freedom fighters during the Raj and then as the first Indian Institute of Technology that laid the foundation of the IIT system, IIT Kharagpur’s heritage is widely known and acknowledged. The academic building, together with a host of early structures in the campus, stands testimony to a momentous era. Do they bear any other secret? Prof. Priya Jain, Associate Director, Center for Heritage Conservation and Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University, believes they do. “IIT Kharagpur was the first large scale campus that was designed in the modernist style in India,”…
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Aug
15
2019
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By Chirosree Basu
Look back in hope

Look back in hope

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Can there be looking ahead without looking back? The 73rd Independence Day of India could be a good time to ask the question. But as Prof. Anjali Roy’s just-released book on the ‘memories and post memories of Partition’ makes obvious, the question is a complicated one, for looking back itself is a complicated task. One reason that has complicated the ‘looking back’ at Partition –a fact of history indissociable from Independence - is the deafening silence surrounding it. Part of this is because of the conscious erasure of the disturbing memories of Partition in order to promote the triumphalist narrative…
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Mar
19
2019
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By Chirosree Basu
Build small, think big

Build small, think big

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“The duty of universities, more than ever now, is to train students to think critically,” said Prof. Ben L. Feringa during his visit to IIT Kharagpur Professor Ben L. Feringa won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry together with Jean-Pierre Sauvage (France) and Sir James Fraser Stoddart (UK) for their work on the development of molecular machines. He has been a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Groningen since 1988. In 1999, his discovery of the 'molecular motor' - a light-driven rotary molecular motor -was widely recognized as a spectacular scientific breakthrough. Prof. Feringa is internationally recognized as a…
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Jan
28
2019
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By Chirosree Basu
An Interaction with the Partition Archive

An Interaction with the Partition Archive

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Three young boys, almost painfully conscious of addressing what they believed was a way more mature audience than what they probably had in mind. Yet they represented a wisdom that is perhaps as tall as a mountain. The three of them were from  “The 1947 Partition Archive”, a globally important organisation.  The Partition Archive, a non-profit organization born at Berkeley, with an office in Delhi, has been collecting, preserving and sharing first-hand accounts of the Partition since 2010. The three bright young scholars, who have worked for the organization and continue to work with it, were invited to IIT Kharagpur’s…
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Nov
01
2018
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By Chirosree Basu
Beyond the horror and heartbreak of Partition

Beyond the horror and heartbreak of Partition

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Dr Anjali Gera Roy's ongoing project, “After Partition: Post-memories of the Afterlife of Partition 1947”, is part of the worldwide initiative to record the stories of the victims of Partition as they orally recount their horror and heartbreak A house by the river. Moonshine on the waters. And an amazing sunrise every day. That is how Sova Mukherjee recounts the idyll she had to leave behind in Noakhali when political vagaries and Partition drove them away from their land. The family got divided as they shifted to Ganderia in old Dhaka and then to Kolkata before coming together again. Sova…
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