The Importance of Being Ladakhi: Affect and Artifice in Kargil

Ladakh often tends to be associated predominantly with its Tibetan Buddhist inhabitants in the wider public imagination both in India and abroad. It comes as a surprise to many that half the population of this region is Muslim, majority belonging to the Twelver Shi‘i sect and live in Kargil district. This article will discuss the importance of being Ladakhi for Kargili Shias through an ethnographic account of a journey I shared with a group of cultural activists from Leh to Kargil. A view of the landscape, natural and cultural, through their eyes provided a different, more eclectic portrayal of the region that ran counter to several historical depictions in the accounts of colonial explorers and travellers. I argue that the invocation and projection of Kargil’s Ladakhiness by these cultural activists has an element of artifice built into it. Yet this packaging of regional ‘culture’ signals an emergent cultural consciousness that spills beyond the politics of identity to an emotionally and intellectually charged process of self-definition that is underway. Riddled with debates as to what constitutes ‘regional culture’, the journey also lends insight into some aspects of contemporary cultural politics within Kargil

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationA mapping class group element can be understood by an inductive process - by passing to its action on the curve complexes of the subsurfaces in the complement of the curves it fixes. By the result of Masur and Minsky, the curve complex of any surface of finite type is hyperbolic. A fully irreducible outer automorphism ($\operatorname{Out}(\mathbb{F})$ analog of a pseudo-Anosov) acts with positive translation length on the free factor complex, which is also a hyperbolic space. But a reducible outer automorphism $\Phi$ fixes the invariant free factor $A$ in the free factor complex and thus, the action is not very informative. In analogy to subsurfaces, we then look at the action of $\Phi$ on the free factor complex relative to $A$, which is a hyperbolic complex that captures the information in the complement of $A$. In this dissertation, we prove that a fully irreducible outer automorphism relative to a free factor system $\mathcal{FFA}$ acts with positive translation length on the free factor complex relative to $\mathcal{FFA}$. In order to prove this, we prove the following key results: 1. Define relative currents and prove that $\Phi$ acts with uniform north-south dynamics on a certain subspace of the space of projectivized relative currents. 2. $\Phi$ acts with uniform north-south dynamics on the closure of relative outer space. 3. Define an intersection form between the space of projective relative currents and the closure of relative outer space

Podcasts as emerging tool for medical education: a critical perspective

Background: Podcasts have started knocking the educational doors after setting their feet strong in entertainment grounds. There has always been a trend to welcome and introduce new ideas and innovative ways in medical education for the benefit of students. No doubts, they are an emerging tool for education. The study aims to know and evaluate critically the students’ perspective about the novel aural technology and its relevance to be included in the curriculum.Methods: A sample size of 110 undergraduate medical students enrolled in two private post graduate coaching centres in metropolitan regions of Delhi was taken to conduct the study. A semi structured pen and paper questionnaire was created and made to be filled by the participants.Results: Aware students actively participated in the survey and shared their preferences and opinions, but many lacked knowledge and interest in the newly introduced and conveyed audio technology. This was a direct result of their surroundings, friends and family circle. Generally, there was a welcome response towards podcasts being in trend and to be included as a supplementary teaching tool along with present ongoing modes of education.Conclusions: Students’ opinion taken over from time to time is of great value to introduce modern educational reforms. Podcasts are a very effective add-on tool if introduced in medical education. There still exists a wide room for research and evidence-based use of this technology and much work needs to be done to actually add a new brick in the current structure of medical education

Limit sets of unfolding paths in Outer space

We construct an unfolding path in Outer space which does not converge in the boundary, and instead it accumulates on the entire 1-simplex of projectivized length measures on a non-geometric arational $\mathbb{R}$-tree T. We also show that T admits exactly two dual ergodic projective currents.Comment: 30 page

Support graph preconditioners for sparse linear systems

Elliptic partial differential equations that are used to model physical phenomena give rise to large sparse linear systems. Such systems can be symmetric positive definite and can be solved by the preconditioned conjugate gradients method. In this thesis, we develop support graph preconditioners for symmetric positive definite matrices that arise from the finite element discretization of elliptic partial differential equations. An object oriented code is developed for the construction, integration and application of these preconditioners. Experimental results show that the advantages of support graph preconditioners are retained in the proposed extension to the finite element matrices