Secularism and Its Discontents: The Moor’s Last Sigh and Riot

The recurrent theme of dropping frontiers in a world which has become increasingly heterogeneous but intolerant is the leitmotif of Sashi Tharoor’s Riot and Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh. The figure of the Moor and his hybrid genealogy is central to Rushdie’s vision, as he reconstructs a syncretic, tolerant Moorish Spain and juxtaposes it with Bombay, his haven of pluralism. He celebrates Nehru’s vision of a new Indian nation which, in keeping with the traditions of western modernity, promised to be above religion, clan, and narrow parochial considerations. With the vanishing of such ideals and hopes, as boundaries and religious communalism are getting intensified these diasporic cosmopolitan writers make a case for a boundless world. Their response is a human subjectivity which transcends color, class, narrow parochialism, tribalism and fundamentalism. Secularism is the very base of their humane approach. This essay, therefore, analyzes the theme of secularism and its discontents, particularly in the context of the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in India, as it runs through Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh and Tharoor’s Riot by exploring the various layers of allegories related to pluralism and the critique of fundamentalism in them. Toward this end, it will focus on the recent debates on Indian secularism by scholars to interrogate the relevance of the European model of secularism which argues for the separation of state and religion

Optimisation of operations of wet vacuuming the carpets in Spotless services

The research topic, Optimisation of operations of wet vacuuming the carpets in Spotless cleaning services, was chosen by analysing problems in the operations of the organisation. Mixed methods involving survey and an interview, were used in the research. The survey was taken with thirty workers from the organisation, and the supervisor was interviewed. From the results, the findings are: • The machine is hard to pull and handle during the work • Time allotted to employees is insufficient to complete the work • Time allotment is a challenge for the supervisor • Safety & PPE measures needs to be increased Solutions for the problem faced by the organisation are: follow-up / refresher training programmes need to conducted: an upgrade to easy-to-use machines that will help the workers to do the work within the given time. If the organisation follows the recommendations it will help the company to optimise wet vacuuming service operations

Some Theorems for Feed Forward Neural Networks

In this paper we introduce a new method which employs the concept of "Orientation Vectors" to train a feed forward neural network and suitable for problems where large dimensions are involved and the clusters are characteristically sparse. The new method is not NP hard as the problem size increases. We `derive' the method by starting from Kolmogrov's method and then relax some of the stringent conditions. We show for most classification problems three layers are sufficient and the network size depends on the number of clusters. We prove as the number of clusters increase from N to N+dN the number of processing elements in the first layer only increases by d(logN), and are proportional to the number of classes, and the method is not NP hard. Many examples are solved to demonstrate that the method of Orientation Vectors requires much less computational effort than Radial Basis Function methods and other techniques wherein distance computations are required, in fact the present method increases logarithmically with problem size compared to the Radial Basis Function method and the other methods which depend on distance computations e.g statistical methods where probabilistic distances are calculated. A practical method of applying the concept of Occum's razor to choose between two architectures which solve the same classification problem has been described. The ramifications of the above findings on the field of Deep Learning have also been briefly investigated and we have found that it directly leads to the existence of certain types of NN architectures which can be used as a "mapping engine", which has the property of "invertibility", thus improving the prospect of their deployment for solving problems involving Deep Learning and hierarchical classification. The latter possibility has a lot of future scope in the areas of machine learning and cloud computing.Comment: 15 pages 13 figure

Factors Responsible for Paddy Growers’ Diversification

In Tamil Nadu, a constituent state of India, the cultivable area under paddy had reduced over the period of time due to various factors. This study aims to enumerate the factors responsible for paddy growers’ diversification in the study area. Altogether 60 respondents were asked for the factors responsible for diversification. The major push factor responsible for diversification was inadequate labour availability & irrigation and availability of farm inputs was the major pull factor