Chithravathi Magazine

How the passion, vision, commitment and the willingness to change help teachers to mentor the students? Anitha Mabel Manohar, Director, National Institute of Fashion Technology, Chennai shares the mantra  Teachers are candles. When Ms Anitha Mabel Manohar, Director, National Institute of Fashion Technology, Chennai began her interaction with the teachers of the Velammal Fraternity, on the occasion of Teachers’ Day on September 5, it was not the opening of a run-of-the-mill motivational speech. She had much more to share, to guide the teachers into a new world. Teaching has no age, but it is a huge challenge to be a teacher, she said, referring to the willpower of a nonagenarian woman who was passionate about teaching even at that age. It was the same passion, vision and commitment that took Ms Manohar to the heights of her career. Ms Manohar had her PhD from Avinashilingam University for Women before joining the NIFT. She was successful in turning around the institution and transfo...

Raqs members say that they see their work as opening out the possibility of a conversation that embodies a deep ambivalence towards modernity Raqs Media Collective team Raqs Media Collective is an art collective established in 1992 by a group of three Delbi-based art practitioners - Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. They founded this collective after graduating from the AJK Mass Communication and Research Centre at the Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi, and today their presence is noticeable in multiple roles in the international art scene.“The Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs,” they write about their art practice that cannot be limited to any particular area. They decided to set up this collective while working together on their first film, Half the Night Left, and the Universe to Comprehend, remember the team members. That 16mm ...

What is intelligence? It could be defined as the process of learning, comparing a situation with a previous experience, making a decision and acting upon it. We are able to take more complicated decisions when we learn from our experience. So, it can be said that intelligence is the ability to learn, understand, and make judgments or have opinions that are based on reason. Just imagine a machine capable of thinking and learning the way you do. There germinates the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is a major branch of science today. Talos of Crete Such imaginations on artificial intelligence had been there in most of the human civilizations. The human beings thought of having objects with superhuman powers, and look and act like human beings. In Greek mythology, there is a character, Talos of Crete, a giant bronze man who guarded Europa in the island of Crete by throwing stones at the ships of unwanted visitors. The myth is that the giant automaton circled the island’s sho...

The Creative Corner at Velammal Knowledge Park showcases the creativity of the students and the history of a great educational institution A wall that relives the creative oeuvre of Raja Ravi Varma. ‘Woman in Red’, ‘Radha in the Moonlight’, ‘Lady with Fruit Platter’… and even the artist himself in his royal costume. However, what makes the difference is that these are all the photographs of young students in those costumes, as they transformed into the Ravi Varma characters themselves. The artistic wall at the ‘Creative Corner’ of Velammal Knowledge Park (VKP), at Ponneri in Chennai reflects a new direction in the creative experiments for the students to bring them closer to the world of Indian art. The idea of such a creative intervention sprouted when the schools in India were forced to embrace online platform following the Covid-19 lockdown, according to the brains behind the project. In one such programme organised by Chitravathi Centre for Creativity (CCC), the expert team compris...