Figurations of the Spiritual Squalid in Allen Ginsberg's Indian Journals: Transformation of India in Post-War Beat and American Imagination

This article explores the impact that India had on Beat imagination with specific emphasis on Ginsberg's under-studied Indian Journals, written during his travels in India in 1962-63, and published in 1970. The earlier American literary view of India was dominated by the notion of the spiritual East, and was evoked in the high prose of Emerson and Whitman. In the new context and historical time of post-war counterculture, India came to constitute a different kind of repertoire: 1) the trope of physical travel (unlike the earlier literary forebears who had never actually visited India) and its sense of encounter with the un-transcendable physical 'dirt' of India; 2) India as a new realm of the sexual (in contrast with the more traditional dominant trend of India as 'ascetic spiritual') and the intertwining of the sexual and spiritual; and 3) Experimenting with drugs to explore the spaces between pilgrimage and tourism wherein India as a whole and in itself offers alternate states of bodily being. Moving away from conventional postcolonial notions of 'representation' in modes that might still be seen as quasi-Orientalist, I read the Ginsberg's text as creating a new kind of literary and aesthetic density, mixing genres of travelogue, diary, poetry, confession, doodle, photography. Further, in contrast to the entirely uni-directional notions of Orientalist representation, I argue that this encounter re-defined Beat notions of space, sexuality, and alternate consciousness

Retelling Nature: Realism and the Postcolonial-Environmental Imaginary in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide

Placing itself at the interface of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies, this article seeks to explore how the realist narrative of the “environmental imaginary” acts as a conduit for multiple overlapping accounts of colonialism in Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide. The novel explores the lived praxis of decolonization, wherein a shared experience of the landscape offers its characters the agency to contour the gap between human and non-human, indigenous and scientific knowledge, Hindu-majoritarian citizenship and displaced refugees (from Bangladesh). The literary post-colonial novel thus offers us a meditation (and mediation) of the most challenging environmental and political questions of our times, renewing both the novel-form, as well as allowing a dramatic imaging, as well as critique, of environmental discourse (both state and subaltern). This article examines the narrative techniques of realism, historical fiction, myth, intertextuality, and linguistic texture that best express the heterogeneity of the post-colonial moment in The Hungry Tide

Writing a Life Between Gender Lines Conversations with A. Revathi about her autobiography The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story

A. Revathi was born physiologically male but felt and behaved like a girl - this is how she tells her story, as will be clear from the interview below. Nearly her whole childhood, spent in a village in Salem district of Tamil Nadu, was plagued by this deep and nagging unease of being trapped in the wrong body and by 'a growing sense of irrepressible femaleness'. But when she behaved like one of her girl-playmates, it only meant repeated humiliation and violence by her family and community. This affected her academic performance, and she had to drop out of school after failing the tenth grade. In a quest to be true to herself, Revathi, still in her teens, ran away from home and travelled to Delhi to join a house of hijras. Hijras are male-to-female transsexuals who undergo a surgical removal of the genitals (often performed surreptitiously and in unsanitary conditions) and comprise a distinct community across India with elaborate customs and regulations of their own. Hijras are given ritualistic importance by mainstream Indian society (for instance, their blessings are considered to bring good fortune) but at the same time they are easy targets for sexual crimes, discriminated against in public spaces, and have few options for livelihood apart from performing at social events, begging or prostitution. Revathi, now in her mid-forties, discusses all this with remarkable candour and courage in her autobiography The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story, translated into English from Tamil by V. Geetha and published by Penguin India Books in 2010. This autobiography is among the very first of its kind in India, uninhibited with regard to divisive gender lines, sexual hypocrisy of 'traditional' societies, and the dismal lack of public discourse on the rights of sexual minorities

Learning to detect an oddball target with observations from an exponential family

The problem of detecting an odd arm from a set of K arms of a multi-armed bandit, with fixed confidence, is studied in a sequential decision-making scenario. Each arm's signal follows a distribution from a vector exponential family. All arms have the same parameters except the odd arm. The actual parameters of the odd and non-odd arms are unknown to the decision maker. Further, the decision maker incurs a cost for switching from one arm to another. This is a sequential decision making problem where the decision maker gets only a limited view of the true state of nature at each stage, but can control his view by choosing the arm to observe at each stage. Of interest are policies that satisfy a given constraint on the probability of false detection. An information-theoretic lower bound on the total cost (expected time for a reliable decision plus total switching cost) is first identified, and a variation on a sequential policy based on the generalised likelihood ratio statistic is then studied. Thanks to the vector exponential family assumption, the signal processing in this policy at each stage turns out to be very simple, in that the associated conjugate prior enables easy updates of the posterior distribution of the model parameters. The policy, with a suitable threshold, is shown to satisfy the given constraint on the probability of false detection. Further, the proposed policy is asymptotically optimal in terms of the total cost among all policies that satisfy the constraint on the probability of false detection

Characterization of pseudobasophilia on Sysmex-XT 1800i automated hematology analyser

Background: Pseudobasophilia is a common automation related phenomenon which requires manual peripheral smear study in an era of complete automation. This study has attempted to evaluate the reasons for pseudobasophilia and in-turn suggest measures to eliminate the errors.Methods: A sample size of 207 cases showing pseudobasophilia on automation were studied by manual peripheral examination to categorize the possible cause for its occurrence. Descriptive and inferential statistical analysis was carried out. Results on continuous measurements are presented on Mean SD and results on categorical measurements are presented in Number (%). Significance is assessed at 5% level of significance. Student t test has been used to find the significance of study parameters on continuous scale within each group.Results: Atypical/ reactive lymphocytes were present in 86.5% cases contributing to pseudobasophilia phenomenon on automation, which also showed falsely increased absolute basophil count with more percentage of lymphocytes showing reactive changes. Temperature and storage effects did not contribute to their occurrence in this study. Another finding was an associated pseudomonocytosis with pseudobasophilia on automation which was statistically significant (p<0.001).Conclusions: Pseudobasophilia, and pseudomonocytosis are automation related phenomenon. Atypical/ reactive lymphocytes, which are cytoplasmic strip resistant, contribute to their occurrence. Hence, newer modalities like multicolour flow cytometry coupled with antibody tagging, multiangle polarised scatter separation and volume conductivity scatter may reduce the chances of pseudobasophilia, thereby reducing the overall turnaround time

Sequential Multi-hypothesis Testing in Multi-armed Bandit Problems:An Approach for Asymptotic Optimality

We consider a multi-hypothesis testing problem involving a K-armed bandit. Each arm's signal follows a distribution from a vector exponential family. The actual parameters of the arms are unknown to the decision maker. The decision maker incurs a delay cost for delay until a decision and a switching cost whenever he switches from one arm to another. His goal is to minimise the overall cost until a decision is reached on the true hypothesis. Of interest are policies that satisfy a given constraint on the probability of false detection. This is a sequential decision making problem where the decision maker gets only a limited view of the true state of nature at each stage, but can control his view by choosing the arm to observe at each stage. An information-theoretic lower bound on the total cost (expected time for a reliable decision plus total switching cost) is first identified, and a variation on a sequential policy based on the generalised likelihood ratio statistic is then studied. Due to the vector exponential family assumption, the signal processing at each stage is simple; the associated conjugate prior distribution on the unknown model parameters enables easy updates of the posterior distribution. The proposed policy, with a suitable threshold for stopping, is shown to satisfy the given constraint on the probability of false detection. Under a continuous selection assumption, the policy is also shown to be asymptotically optimal in terms of the total cost among all policies that satisfy the constraint on the probability of false detection

Growth dynamics and forecasting of minor millets in India: A time series analysis

The forecasting behaviour of millet plays a critical role in production planning at the Indian farm level. This study made an effort to forecast the area and production of small millets in India with time series analysis. The performance of the forecasting models was appraised and collated by the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Partial Autocorrelation Function (PACF) and Auto Correlation Function (ACF) criteria. For this analysis, the yearly data of the area and production of small millet from 1950 to 2021 were calculated. Among all Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models, ARIMA (0,1,0) was found to be the best fitted for forecasting the area and production of minor millets in India since, principally, this model relies on historical ideals of the sequences in addition to earlier error relations for forecasting minor millets and it does not adopt information of any fundamental model or associations as in some other approaches. The predicted values of minor millet area showed decreased trend from 422.4 thousand hectares in the year 2022 to 409.2 thousand hectares in the year 2026. Likewise, the production under small millets declined from 393.5 thousand tons to 159.5 thousand tons for the corresponding period. Hence, production of these crops can be enhanced by suitable use of inputs and timely application of inputs, high yielding varieties, government interventions like policy support, subsidising through the Public Distribution System and awareness by the way of propaganda and demonstration

A ferritin-based COVID-19 nanoparticle vaccine that elicits robust, durable, broad-spectrum neutralizing antisera in non-human primates

While the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines has been a scientific triumph, the need remains for a globally available vaccine that provides longer-lasting immunity against present and future SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs). Here, we describe DCFHP, a ferritin-based, protein-nanoparticle vaccine candidate that, when formulated with aluminum hydroxide as the sole adjuvant (DCFHP-alum), elicits potent and durable neutralizing antisera in non-human primates against known VOCs, including Omicron BQ.1, as well as against SARS-CoV-1. Following a booster ~one year after the initial immunization, DCFHP-alum elicits a robust anamnestic response. To enable global accessibility, we generated a cell line that can enable production of thousands of vaccine doses per liter of cell culture and show that DCFHP-alum maintains potency for at least 14 days at temperatures exceeding standard room temperature. DCFHP-alum has potential as a once-yearly (or less frequent) booster vaccine, and as a primary vaccine for pediatric use including in infants