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Pro kabaddi, kho-kho leagues chase IPL viewership. India rediscovering regional sports

This Article FIrst Appeared In The Print On Jan 27, 2023 Collecting scrap along with his father was a routine exercise for Ramji Kashyap until a year ago. He was keen on playing kho-kho but his parents advised him to look for a conventional job, to support the family of nine in Maharashtra’s Solapur district. His heart was stuck on the sport. Cut to September 2022, Kashyap was adjudged ‘player of the tournament’ in the inaugural season of Ultimate Kho Kho or UKK as it is known as—‘India’s first-ever professional kho kho League’. Kashyap is not the only player finding his feet in the game. And kho-kho is not the only sport to receive massive adulation among sports enthusiasts in a cricket-crazy nation. Nine years ago, Kabbadi paved the way for indigenous sport in India, and now kho-kho is carrying the baton ahead. The latest season of Pro Kabaddi League (PKL) raked in 222 million viewers, according to viewership data from the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) India — 17.5 per cent more than the 2021 season. Kho-kho, which ventured as a league only in 2022, also clocked in a massive audience of 184 million across various platforms. In comparison, Indian Premier League, country’s most successful professional league, garnered 370 million in 2022 season, according to BARC. Clearly, India is steadily rediscovering its traditional sporting roots.

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Stop Proving Yourself To Everyone Else

This Article First Appeared In The Daily Guardian On Jan 12, 2023

• We live in a world that tells us we need to constantly prove ourselves. We need to be the best at what we do; we need to have the perfect body, the perfect partner, the perfect life. And if we don’t have all of those things, we feel like failures. It’s time to break free from that way of thinking. It’s time to start living for yourself...

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Life in a Foreign University: From not getting admission in IIM to studying at ESCP Paris, this is Anchit Barnwal’s story

This Article First Appeared In Indian Express On Jan 23, 2023 I had decided to follow what most engineers do — work for a couple of years, gain experience, pursue MBA from a renowned business school and then settle for a fat salary job. However, my score for Common Admission Test 2019 was not enough to get me a call from the IIMs. I was disheartened, however, least did I know that I will study management in one of the oldest B school in the world. I am Anchit Kumar Barnwal and this is my story. I received a call from MDI Gurgaon for their PGDM in International Business. I had never planned to study abroad, however, as a part of the programme, there was one year of international immersion with ESCP Business School. I was in the Paris campus of ESCP. ESCP has six campuses across Europe — Paris, Berlin, Turin, Madrid, London and Warsaw.

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RRR maker SS Rajamouli is the first name among ‘Grand Masters’?

This Article First Appeared In Firstpost On Jan 27, 2023 Are we making the same mistake that we often do when the West recognizes and acknowledges one of our talents? We begin to value the talent more than we did earlier. It happened with Satyajit Ray and Mira Nair. Their maiden effort Pather Panchali and Salaam Bombay! were recognized by Western critics before their Indian counterparts reluctantly did the same. Applause Entertainment, known to do pathbreaking work since its inception, has now announced an ongoing docu-series entitled Grand Masters. The first to feature in the series is the newsy globetrotter SS Rajamouli who has definitely taken the song-and-dance tradition of Indian cinema to the West with RRR. The firangis love the anti-colonial bacchanalia. The let’s-show-the-colonists-the-middle-finger mood has caught on. Let’s Naatu Naatu!

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Modi’s defence of movies is key for Vishwaguru goal. Content is the new internationalism

This Article First Appeared In The Print On Jan 22, 2023 The most significant thing that PM Narendra Modi said last week came at the BJP National Executive in New Delhi when he cautioned party leaders to stop making unnecessarily controversial comments about movies. This is significant, coming just weeks after the Shah Rukh Khan-Deepika Padukone movie Pathaan has been pilloried by the party leaders and some ministers too. What may have swung the mood is RRR song Natu Natu winning the Golden Globe award in London. It’s an important course-correction to begin 2023 with, the year when India’s G20 leadership will showcase its Vishwaguru ambitions. And part of the Vishwaguru sprawl has always been culture – even when we were an economic weakling and a strategic non-player. Movies were an enduring part of India’s cultural diplomacy.

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Don’t ban ChatGPT in schools. Teach with it

This Article First Appeared In Indianexpress On Jan 20, 2023 Recently, I gave a talk to a group of K-12 teachers and public school administrators in New York. The topic was artificial intelligence, and how schools would need to adapt to prepare students for a future filled with all kinds of capable AI tools. But it turned out that my audience cared about only one AI tool: ChatGPT, the buzzy chatbot developed by OpenAI that is capable of writing cogent essays, solving science and math problems and producing working computer code. ChatGPT is new — it was released in late November — but it has already sent many educators into a panic. Students are using it to write their assignments, passing off AI-generated essays and problem sets as their own. Teachers and school administrators have been scrambling to catch students using the tool to cheat, and they are fretting about the havoc ChatGPT could wreak on their lesson plans. (Some publications have declared, perhaps a bit prematurely, that ChatGPT has killed homework altogether.)

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