Prelim Booster News Discussion

LECTURE 11- CULTURE

APRIL, 2019
 RAMAPPA TEMPLE

Why In • Ramappa temple is in the waiting list to be recognized

News as a standalone UNESCO site, the first in Telangana.

Ramappa Temple is also known as the Ramalingeswara

temple. The temple is named after the sculptor Ramappa,
who built it, and is perhaps the only temple in India to be
named after a craftsman who built it, rather than the king
who commissioned it or its presiding deity.
Location: It lies in a valley at Palampet village, near
Warangal, Telangana.

History: An inscription in the temple dates it to the year

1213 AD, during the period of the Kakatiya Dynasty rule.
 RAMAPPA TEMPLE

Features: The temple is a Shivalaya, where Lord Ramalingeswara is

worshipped.

It stands on a 6 ft high star-shaped platform.

The main structure is in a reddish sandstone.

The temple columns are made of black basalt and are carved
as mythical animals or female dancers or musicians, and are
the masterpieces of Kakatiya art, notable for their delicate
carving, sensuous postures and elongated bodies and heads.
 Konyak Dance

• Around 4,700 Konyak Naga women came together in

Why In
News an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for the
“Largest Traditional Konyak Dance”.

Konyak is one of the 16 Naga tribes and

people of this community live mainly in the
Mon district of Nagaland.

They are easily distinguishable from other

Naga tribes by their pierced ears; and tattoos
which they have all over their faces, hands,
chests, arms, and calves.
 Konyak Dance

Key Aoleng, a festival celebrated in the first week of

festivals: April to welcome the spring, is the biggest festival
of the Konyaks.
Another festival, 'Lao Ong Mo', is the traditional
harvest festival celebrated in the months of
August/September.
 Garia Puja Festival

• The festival is held from the last day of the month of Chaitra
Why In
News
till the seventh day of the month of Vaishakha according to
Hindu calendar.

The Garia Puja is a major festival in Tripura.

This festival is celebrated as a harvest festival

by the ethnic tribes Tripuris and Reangs.

In the festival, a bamboo pole is worshipped

with flowers and garlands by the tribals which
symbolize the Lord Garia.
 Garia Puja Festival

The ingredients used in the Puja are fowl chick, cotton

thread, rice, eggs, etc.
An important part of the Puja is sacrificing a fowl and
offering the blood to the deity. After the sacrifice, the Garia
dance is performed.
 Recently 75th anniversary of the Battle of Kohima was
observed by the Nagaland Government

• The Platinum Jubilee of the Battle of Kangla Tongbi War was

Why In
commemorated on 07 Apr 2019 by Army Ordnance Corps at
News
Kangla Tongbi War Memorial near Imphal.

Name: The Battle of Kanglatongbi also

known as Battle of Lion Box is considered
one of the fiercest battles of World War
II.
Opponents: The battle was fought
between the Axis (Japanese) Force and
Allied Force on the night of 6/7 April
1944.
 Battle of Kangla Tongbi

• Battle detail: During the Second World War (1942-1945) when the
Japanese forces were trying to open their line of communication to
Kohima, a detachment of the 221 Advance Ordnance Depot
(AOD) put a stiff resistance stalling the advance of Japanese forces
till reinforcement arrived and turned the tide against the
Japanese.
 Bharati Script

Context
• An IIT Madras team of researchers has developed a unified script for
nine Indian languages, named Bharati script.
 Bharati Script

• The Roman script is used as a common script for many European

languages (English, French, German, Italian etc.), which facilitates
communication across nations that speak and write those languages.
Likewise, if a common script is adopted across India, it can greatly
facilitate communication across the country.
• Taking a cue from European languages, an IIT Madras team have been
working since the last decade over developing such a script.

• The scripts that have been integrated include Devnagari, Bengali,

Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil
 Bharati Script

• The team has now gone a step ahead-

• It has developed a method for reading documents in Bharati script
using a multi-lingual optical character recognition (OCR) scheme.
• It involves first separating (or segmenting) the document into text
and non-text.
• The text is then segmented into paragraphs, sentences words and
letters. Each letter has to be recognised as a character in some
recognisable format such as ASCII or Unicode.
• It has also created a finger-spelling method that can be used to
generate a sign language for hearing-impaired persons.
• In collaboration with TCS Mumbai, the researchers have found a
way for persons with hearing disability to generate signatures using
this finger-spelling technique.
 Bharati Script

• The objective of the project is

• to facilitate the spread of Bharati by creating awareness of it among
the public, particularly the next generation
• to facilitate ease of use of Bharati by developing software tools and
applications.
 Charminar

Context
• Recently, the South-west Minaret
of the Charminar suffered major
damage.
 Charminar

• Charminar (also referred as Arc de Triomphe of the East) is a

monument and a mosque, which was completed in 1591 CE.
• It is believed that Mohammed Quli Qutb Shahi, the fifth sultan of the
Qutub Shahi dynasty had built the monument to commemorate the end
of a deadly plague menace that had gripped the city then.

• It is located near the bank of the river Musi.

• It is an example for Indo-Islamic architecture combined with few

Persian elements.