1. India’s largest radio telescope plays vital role in detecting universe’s vibrations

India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) was among the world’s six large telescopes that played a vital role in providing evidence confirming the presence of gravitational waves using pulsar observations, said scientists on Thursday.

An international team of astronomers from India, Japan and Europe has published the results from monitoring pulsars, called ‘nature’s best clocks’, by using six of the world’s most sensitive radio telescopes, including India’s largest telescope, the Pune-based uGMRT.

“These results provide a hint of evidence for the relentless vibrations of the fabric of the universe, caused by ultra-low frequency gravitational waves. Such waves are expected to originate from a large number of dancing monster black hole pairs, crores of times heavier than our sun,” said a statement issued by the city-based National Centre for Radio Astrophysics-Tata institute of Fundamental Research (NCRA-TIFR).

The team, consisting of members of European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) and Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) consortia, published their results in two papers in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal on Thursday and shared that their results hint at the presence of such gravitational waves in their data set. A time aberration was observed in the signals emerging from these pulsars, their studies suggest. Pulsars are a type of rapidly rotating neutron stars that are essentially embers of dead stars which are present in our galaxy. A pulsar is like a cosmic lighthouse as it emits radio beams that flashes by the Earth regularly akin to a harbour lighthouse.

As these signals are accurately timed, there is a great interest in studying these pulsars and to unravel the mysteries of the Universe. In order to detect gravitational wave signals, scientists explore several ultra-stable pulsar clocks randomly distributed across our Milky Way galaxy and create an ‘imaginary’ galactic-scale gravitational wave detector.

2. T.N. Governor ‘dismisses’ Minister, backtracks later

R.N. Ravi communicates to CM’s office that his order on Senthilbalaji has been put on hold with immediate effect; Stalin had earlier said that Governor did not have authority to dismiss Minister

In an unprecedented move, Tamil Nadu Governor R.N. Ravi on Thursday evening unilaterally “dismissed with immediate effect” arrested Minister V. Senthilbalaji from the Council of Ministers, only to hurriedly backtrack his decision late in the night.

Sources in Chief Minister M.K. Stalin’s office told The Hindu that Mr. Ravi had communicated that his order dismissing Mr. Senthilbalaji was being put on hold with immediate effect. “The Governor said his decision was being kept in abeyance,” a source privy to the development said. Earlier, Mr. Stalin told journalists that the Governor does not have the authority to dismiss a Minister. “We will face this legally,” he had said.

Mr. Senthilbalaji was earlier this month arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in an alleged money laundering case. The DMK leader, who was hospitalised after his arrest, underwent a beating heart coronary artery bypass surgery recently.

On Thursday evening, a Raj Bhavan press release said, “There are reasonable apprehensions that continuation of Thiru V. Senthilbalaji in the Council of Ministers will adversely impact the due process of law including fair investigation that may eventually lead to breakdown of the Constitutional machinery in the State. Under these circumstances, Honourable Governor has dismissed Thiru V. Senthilbalaji from the Council of Ministers with immediate effect.”

No legal provision cited

The release did not specify the legal provision under which the Governor took the decision.

Incidentally, nearly a month ago, the Chief Minister had rejected Mr. Ravi’s demand to drop Mr. Senthilbalaji, who was then holding the Electricity and Excise and Prohibition portfolios from the Cabinet. At that time the Supreme Court had cleared the decks for the police and ED to proceed with their respective investigations against the Minister.

3. Spiralling food prices

Policymakers must guard against inflation to ensure sustainable growth

Indian households find themselves yet again struggling to cope with a sharp surge in the prices of essential kitchen staples — ranging from tomatoes, onions and potatoes to tur dal and rice. Tomato prices have more than doubled month-on-month with the all-India average retail price as on June 29 soaring to ₹53.59 a kilogram, from ₹24.37 on May 29, data from the Consumer Affairs Department’s Price Monitoring Division show. And while the rise in onion and potato prices over the same one-month period is a seemingly far more benign 7.5% and 4.5%, respectively, the overall trajectory in price gains across the wider food basket is symptomatic of the unsettling build-up of underlying inflation pressures in the economy. For instance, the price of tur dal, a key protein source in the diets of vegetarian households, continues to keep rising; it had climbed 7.8% month-on-month to ₹130.75 a kilogram on June 29, as per the government’s data. Official retail inflation data for May, released earlier this month, had shown that prices of pulses, which includes tur dal, had quickened by 128 basis points year-on-year to a 31-month high of 6.56%. The government’s imposition of stock limits on urad and tur on June 2 seems to have so far done little to cool price gains in lentils.

To be sure there is a seasonality component to the prices of farm produce and their supply is largely determined by factors including timing of the harvest and the prices prevailing at the mandis when the farmers transport their crop to the markets. Just last month, tomato growers in rural Maharashtra had dumped sizeable quantities of their produce on the roads after being offered unremunerative prices. However, prices of several of these food items, including tomatoes, are still substantially higher than even the same time last year with the modal daily weighted average arrival prices at the mandis as per the government’s agmarket website revealing tomato prices almost tripled year-on-year to ₹5,579 a quintal as on June 29. The same arrival price data show a 35% jump in tur dal and a 19% increase in common paddy (rice). With the monsoon rains 13% in deficit so far this year, and the outlook for spatial and temporal distribution in the coming months clouded with uncertainty by the El Niño, there is a real risk that food prices could cause retail inflation to accelerate again. Policymakers need to walk the talk and retain laser focus on taming inflation. After all, as the Reserve Bank of India’s economists noted in the latest bulletin, “the path to high but sustainable inclusive growth has to be paved by price stability”.

4. Has the Bhadralok culture in Bengal faded?

The intellectual class of West Bengal, euphemistically termed the Bhadralok, has long held a pivotal role in shaping culture, politics and policy in the State. From producing timeless cinema to dominating political power to setting policies on welfare, reforms and state interventions, this segment of Bengali society performed an outsized role. But all indications are that its influence is fading quickly in the State and beyond. Surajit Chandra Mukhopadhyay and Sandip Roy ponder the relevance of the Bhadralok in a discussion moderated by Shiv Sahay Singh. Edited excerpts:

What is the Bhadralok culture in West Bengal and has it faded?

Surajit Chandra Mukhopadhay: The Bhadralok, historically, was composed of three castes: Brahmins, Baidyas, and Kayasthas. It evolved through colonial intervention in the sense that the caste could transform into a status group. So, people from other castes could, theoretically speaking, gain Bhadralok status if they had certain kinds of attributes. Now, if you take it literally, it (Bhadralok) just means being gentlemanly. The opposite of this is ‘Chhotolok’. If you look at the caste combination of the Chhotolok, there are Shudras and Namoshudras and the so-called outcastes. On an everyday basis, when we say ‘you’re not behaving like a Bhadralok’, it means you are not conforming to certain normative ideals. And these ideals are applicable both in the public and private sphere.

SR: Bhadralok is about caste but not limited to caste. You can have people from the upper castes who are not Bhadralok, and other people can aspire to become more Bhadralok. It is a very Bengali and, you could say, elitist construct. We don’t often think that when we are calling ourselves Bhadralok that we are, by default, calling people who are not part of our class and do not have a similar educational background as Chhotolok. The writer Manoranjan Byapari used to always complain that he was never read because he was Chhotolok, which you could translate as subaltern. He would say, ‘they see me with a gamcha around my neck and wonder how can someone like me write books’. It is a colonial construct because ‘bhadra’ (Bengali for gentle) is about manners and it was the Babu (elite Bengalis) who had proper manners and could engage with the colonial masters.

Now, with the way politics has evolved in this State, all the others actually count for much more electorally than the Bhadralok in Kolkata. Thirty years ago, most Bhadralok in Kolkata would have no idea that there were groups like Koch, Rajbangshi and Matuas who politicians are catering to. Even though they (Bhadralok) culturally still maintain a kind of monopoly in real terms, they don’t (count electorally now). Their relevance has obviously changed. And it’s worth noticing that when Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee first came onto the scene, one thing held against her by some was that she was not Bhadralok or ‘Bhadramahila’ (feminine form of Bhadralok) enough compared to her predecessor Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who was translating Russian poetry and was therefore like a quintessential Bhadralok.

So, what triggered the slide of the Bhadralok? There is a perceived slide in the quality of cinema and books being produced in Bengal.

SCM: I think the demographics have overtaken the Bhadralok. Joya Chatterji, an important historian of our times, has a very definitive work on the Bhadralok and says that their era is over. If you look at Bengali societal power, maybe the Bhadraloks still have some political power, but they have never enjoyed economic power.

We have also moved from the elite concept of what democracy is to the rough and tumble of democracy. The subaltern, and others who relate to the subaltern, have found their place, and rightly so. And we have become a market society where everything is transactional. And therefore, people with much more money power obviously overwhelm the Bengali Bhadralok, because the Bengali Bhadralok never had money to begin with. They had cultural capital. When we talk about films, for example, we talk about Satyajit Ray whose films have a distinct Bhadralok imagery.

SR: The Bhadralok were supposed to have turned up their noses at money. And there was always the accusation that the Bhadralok came from a class of people who had been trained by the British to become managers and were better at executing things than in making money. I think a lot of people thought of someone like (former President) Pranab Mukherjee as the quintessential Bhadralok who had a long and illustrious career in politics and managed to have the ear of many different dispensations.

Now, in terms of the cultural slide that you speak of, there is still enormous nostalgia and romanticisation of, say, Satyajit Roy and maybe Rituparno Ghosh. People keep looking for another Satyajit Ray-type person even though it’s up for debate as to whether that someone with Ray-like sensibilities would even be popular because society has moved on. This is evident from the fact that during the last Assembly election campaign in 2021, the communists, who had sneered at Ms. Banerjee’s lack of Bhadralok skills and her ‘Epang, Jhapang’-type poems, selected this very raunchy song called ‘Tumpa Sona’ as their anthem.

Does Bengal still have some cultural capital or is it a thing of the past and merely exists as an aspirational idea?

SCM: Whether we want to do away with it (the image of a Bhadralok society) or not doesn’t depend on us. The cultural capital that the Bhadralok had has stretched on for the last century or so. They had hegemony, but hegemony without power, because today, the epicentre of power is the economy, the people who are becoming entrepreneurs. I think the goalposts have changed. You see a decline of one kind of social hegemony, and I’m quite sure that will be replaced by another kind of a social hegemony.

SR: That kind of cultural power that has lasted for such a long period is never going to vanish overnight. For other people too, the cultural power that the Bhadralok had remains aspirational. I think that power has definitely diminished in real terms, but the hold that it has over people’s minds is still very much there.

SCM: I agree. Ms. Banerjee too would like to be seen as someone having that social capital. So, she says, ‘Look, I have written so many books’.

What is at the core of this identity? Politics?

SCM: Of course. Everything in this world is political. It is very difficult to say what the core of this identity is. One of the major sources of the Bhadralok discourse comes from its political sense, and its political sensibilities about equality, inequality, the idea of living life.

Do you see the Bhadralok evolving in any way in the near future?

SR: Identity is very important as the BJP learned in the last election in West Bengal (2021), but the party sort of miscalculated the amount of attachment people have to this identity. I think the Bhadralok played, for better or for worse, an enormous role in shaping that identity. The identity of what it means to be a Bengali today has largely been created, formulated, shaped and articulated by the Bhadralok. So, when Ms. Banerjee rises up to defend Bengal, she uses icons who were very much part of this Bhadralok milieu. Now, as we said, if change is the only constant, that’s where it’ll be the test to see if the Bhadralok identity is itself stuck in time. Or if there can be a Bhadralok which will evolve with the time and will include others and it will all not necessarily be about a Bhadralok-Chhotolok divide.

We think the Bhadralok as fossil. It doesn’t necessarily have to be so, because they were the agents of enormous change that happened in Bengal. You know, it’s funny, because in some ways, when you look at the 19th century and early 20th century, the enormous change that came about here was because of the Bhadralok and now, because of the way times have changed, the Bhadralok is often seen as the conservative person who is clinging on to the past and refusing to change.

5. ‘AI is a growth opportunity for TCS’

The impact of AI and Machine Learning is going to be profound, says TCS Chairman N. Chandrasekaran; he adds that the global energy transition is accelerating and that businesses are making clear commitments towards a sustainable future

Three fundamental transitions that the world is currently navigating through–namely digital & AI transition, energy transition and the transition towards a global sustainable value chain–require significant investments in technology and innovation and offer tremendous growth opportunity for the company, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) Chairman N. Chandrasekaran told shareholders at the company’s Annual General Meeting on Thursday.

“The impact of AI and Machine Learning is going to be profound. There is a transition already underway from predictive AI to generative AI,” he added.

Stating that majority of businesses were still adopting predictive AI and were on the journey of capturing large volumes of data, he said varying levels of adoption were underway in companies across sectors. “Generative AI would further require technology investments and innovation,” he said.

Mr. Chandrasekaran said the global energy transition was accelerating and businesses were making clear commitments towards a sustainable future.

“Every industry is focused on innovation across sustainable products, services, manufacturing, and delivery. New business models are emerging. Again, this transition requires a large investment in technology, including electric mobility, renewable power, hydrogen, and sustainable fuel,” he emphasised.

Highlighting that geopolitical shifts were altering the established supply chains, he said companies were rebalancing their supply chains for resilience and efficiency.

“All the above trends require a large investment in technology, and your company is best placed to partner with clients in their transformation journeys,” he told TCS shareholders.