BIOGRAPHY OF E. SREEDHARAN

E. SREEDHARAN - THE METRO MAN

E. Sreedharan is an Indian engineer known as the “Metro Man” for his pivotal role in building the Konkan Railway and Delhi metro. He was born in Palakkad district of Kerala on 12 June 1932. His family hailed from Karukaputhoor.He received his early education from Basel Evangelical Mission Higher Secondary School after which he went to the Victoria College in Palghat. He chose to study engineering and completed his Civil Engineering from the Government college, Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh.

After completing his education he was appointed as a lecturer in Civil engineering at the Government Polytechnic, Kozhikode. He worked there only for a short while before joining the Bombay Port Trust as an apprentice. In 1953, he appeared for the Engineering Services Examination (ESE) conducted by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) and cleared it. He joined the Indian Engineering Service (IES) and was posted as a Probationary Assistant Engineer in the Southern Railway in December 1954. He faced the first big challenge of his career in December 1964 when a cyclone damaged the Pamban Bridge in Tamil Nadu. The Railways allotted a period of six months for the repair works while Sreedharan’s boss wanted the work done within three. Sreedharan, who was made in-charge of the restoration, executed the work in just 46 days.

In 1970, Sreedharan was assigned the responsibility of implementing, planning and designing the Kolkata metro, the first ever metro in India. He was deputy chief engineer at that time. With his hard work and determination he led the successful completion of the job and set the pace for the further development in infrastructure engineering in India. He was associated with the project till 1975.In October 1979 he joined the Cochin Shipyard Limited, the largest shipbuilding and maintenance facility in India. But at the time of his joining, the agency was not performing well. However, under Sreedharan’s direction, the agency flourished and launched its first ship MV Rani Padmini in 1981.

He became the general manager, Western Railway in July 1987. A couple of year later he was elevated to the post of Member Engineering, Railway Board and ex-officio Secretary to the Government of India. He retired in June 1990 but the government informed him that his services would still be needed and thus he was appointed the CMD of Konkan Railway on contract. The Konkan Railway project, which had 93 tunnels with a total tunnel length of 82 km and involved tunneling through soft soil, was very different from the typical Indian railway projects. The total project covered 760 km and had over 150 bridges. Under his leadership, the work was completed in seven years.He was later made the managing director of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation ( DMRC). Again he proved to be an extraordinary leader and all the scheduled sections were completed within their respective budgets, and by their target time.

The phenomenal success of the Delhi Metro made him a national celebrity and the government honored him with many awards for his relentless hard work and dedication. He retired from service in December 2011.The Government of India honored him with the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India, in 2001.The Government of France bestowed upon him The Order of Légion d'Honneur, the highest decoration in France, in 2005.In 2008 he received the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award in the Republic of India, in recognition of his work with the Delhi Metro. He is married to Radha and regards his wife as a great pillar of support. The couple has four children, all of them are now well accomplished in their own chosen fields.

Biography of Northrop Fyre

NORTHROP FYRE

 (1912–1991)

INTRODUCTION

Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century.

FAMILY

Herman Northrop Frye was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec on July 14, 1912. Frye was raised in Moncton, New Brunswick as the third child of Herman Edward Frye and of Catherine Maud Howard. He had an elder brother and a sister named Howard and Vera respectively. The scientist Alma Howard was his first cousin.

EDUCATION

Frye studied for his undergraduate degree at Victoria College, University of Toronto where he edited the college literary journal, Acta Victoriana. He then studied theology at Emmanuel College (part of Victoria College). After a brief stint as student minister in Saskatchewan, he was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Canada. He then received a scholarship to do postgraduate work at Merton College, Oxford. He returned to Canada in 1939 and taught at Victoria College, University of Toronto. Frye became chairman of the English department there in 1952 and served as principal (1959–67) and chancellor (1978–91) of the college. He gave lectures and taught throughout the United States and Great Britain and around the world.

CONTRIBUTIONS

Frye rose to international prominence as a result of his first book, Fearful Symmetry, published in 1947. Until then, the prophetic poetry of William Blake had long been poorly understood, and considered by some to be delusional ramblings. Frye found in it a system of metaphor derived from Paradise Lost and the Bible. His study of Blake's poetry was a major contribution to the subject. Moreover, Frye outlined an innovative manner of studying literature that was too deeply influence the study of literature in general. He was a major influence on Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, and others.

Anatomy of Criticism  (1957), a book that sought to provide a structural framework for the study of literature through an analysis of its various modes, symbols, myths, images, and genres. The Anatomy, heralded for a generation as a twentieth-century Poetics, had a large following in the 1960s and 1970s, and twenty years after its publication it was the most frequently cited book in the arts and humanities by a writer born in the twentieth century. Seventeen translations of the Anatomy into thirteen languages (as of 2003) attest to its international standing. His work, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature is  a monumental and systematic study of the myths, language, metaphor and symbols of the Hebrew-Christian Bible, published in 1982. Mr. Frye had also written extensively on the works of William Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot. He argued in a 1963 book, The Well-Tempered Critic, that literary criticism was a primary means "to produce out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in." In later works Frye supplemented the examination of archetype and genre with practical criticism. His concept of literature was that of a self-contained total history, rather than a linear progression through time, and he saw the Bible, more than any other source, as the body of myth that shaped Western literature.

ACHIEVEMENTS

Frye engaged in cultural and social criticism and was the recipient of some 39 honorary degrees. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1951 and awarded the Royal Society's Lorne Pierce Medal in 1958 and its Pierre Chauveau Medal in 1970. He won the Canada Council Molson Prize in 1971, and the Royal Bank Award in 1978. In 1987 he received the Governor General's Literary Award and the Toronto Arts Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2000, he was honoured by the government of Canada with his image on a postage stamp. An international literary festival The Frye Festival, named in Frye's honour, takes place every April in Moncton, New Brunswick. The Northrop Frye Centre, part of Victoria College at the University of Toronto and Northrop Frye School in Moncton were named in his honour. Frye was named a National Historic Person in 2018.
Frye married Helen Kemp, an educator, editor and artist, in 1937. She died in Australia while accompanying Frye on a lecture tour. Two years after her death in 1986, he married Elizabeth Brown.

SELECTED WORKS

Fearful Symmetry, Anatomy of Criticism, The Educated Imagination, Fables of Identity, The Modern Century, A Study of English Romanticism, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society, Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays, Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays.

BIOGRAPHY OF T.S.ELIOT

                                                     T.S. ELIOT

                                                         (1888-1965) 

INTRODUCTION

T.S. Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet, literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher.

FAMILY

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri as a member of the third generation of a New England family that had come to St. Louis in 1834. Eliot's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, Unitarian minister and founder of schools, a university, and charities. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a prosperous businessman and served the schools and charities his father had helped found. Eliot’s mother, Charlotte Champ was a teacher and a poet. After having six children, she focused her energy on writing.

EDUCATION 

Eliot lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and then the Milton Academy in Massachusetts. In 1906 he went to Harvard University, majored in literature, earning a B.A. and an M.A. After graduating, Eliot served as a philosophy assistant at Harvard for a year, and then left for France and the Sorbonne to study philosophy. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but went to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and worked as a schoolmaster, a bank clerk, and eventually a literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director.

CONTRIBUTIONS

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and except for the poem the title alludes to, the book contained little upon which Eliot’s reputation is now based. In 1919, Eliot published Poems and The Wasteland in 1922. It is considered the most influential poetic work of the 20th century.He edited the journal Criterion throughout the span of its publication (1922-1939). Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism and was published in 1930. In 1932 he published Selected Essays 1917-1932, a collection of his literary criticism through the 1920s. Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

 CRITIC

Eliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921 he contributed approximately one hundred reviews and articles to various periodicals. Beginning in the late 1920s, Eliot’s literary criticism was supplemented by religious and social criticism. In 1919 two of his most influential pieces appeared. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems." Some of his early critical essays were The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) After Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot served as literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist magazine, from 1917 to 1919. He was also writing anonymous reviews and essays for the London Times. 

His critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works. His essay "Hamlet and His Problems" introduced the term "objective correlative", that suggests there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' different interpretations of a work. Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical writing, in essays such as "Poetry and Drama", "Hamlet and his Problems", and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama", focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse.

For his vast influence in poetry, criticism and drama T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.He was a recipient of Hanseatic Goethe Prize (1955) Dante Medal (1959) and Thirteen Honorary Doctorates (from various universities).He had received Tony Award for Best Play in 1950, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score  in 1983.

 After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. He died in London on January 4, 1965.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Collected Poems (1962)   The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)   Four Quartets (1943) Burnt Norton (1941)     The Dry Salvages (1941)    Ash Wednesday (1930)    Poems, 1909–1925 (1925)     Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)     Poems (1919)    The Waste Land (1922)    Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)   East Coker (1940)        

                     

Prose

Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)    Poetry and Drama (1951)    The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)     Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)   Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)     Elizabethan Essays (1934)    The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)    John Dryden (1932)    The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)    Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)    The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)      After Strange Gods (1933)    Dante (1929)    For Lancelot Andrews (1928)   Andrew Marvell (1922)   The Sacred Wood (1920)   Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)

Drama

The Elder Statesman     The Confidential Clerk (1953)    The Rock (1934)      
The Cocktail Party (1950)      The Family Reunion (1939)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)     Sweeney Agonistes (1932)

SUCCESS STORIES OF INDIANS FROM THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY

BINNY BANSAL AND SACHIN BANSAL – MEN BEHIND FLIPKART

 

Binny Bansal is an Indian technology entrepreneur and the co-founder of Flipkart, India’s favourite shopping website. He was born in 1981 in Chandigarh. He currently resides in Bangalore. His father is a retired chief manager at a bank and his mother is in the government sector. He has no siblings and is married to a homemaker. 

He got a graduation in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi where he met his friend Sachin Bansal. After being rejected by Google twice, Binny had worked with Sarnoff Corporation for a year and a half. Later he worked for Amazon and resigned after nine months along with Sachin Bansal to start their own venture.

 In October 2007, they started Flipkart as an online bookselling website with an initial capital of 400,000 rupees. They launched the website from an apartment in Koramangala, in Bangalore, India. For 10 days, the site did not see even a single sale until a customer from Andhra Pradesh placed the first order for the book, ‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World’ by John Wood.  In the early days, Sachin and Binny used to deliver books on their own scooters. They used to give away pamphlets of their company outside bookstores to target their actual customers. Later,they expanded the website into other product categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, and lifestyle products. Gradually Flipkart slowly grew in prominence.

 In 2016, Bansal became the CEO of Flipkart, where he worked on strategic development, direction and business management. In 2018, Walmart acquired a 77% stake in Flipkart group. After the acquisition, Bansal assumed the role of chairman and continued as Group CEO. His 5.5% stake in Flipkart was valued at $1 billion after the acquisition. He resigned from Flipkart in November 2018 on allegations of personal misconduct. He started to invest into new projects like image processing startup Terraview in 2019.

In September 2015 along with Sachin Bansal, he was named the 86th richest person in India with a net worth of $1.3 billion by Forbes India Rich List. India Today ranked them 26th in India's 50 Most powerful people of 2017 list. 

SUCCESS STORIES OF INDIANS FROM THE FIELD OF TECHNOLOGY

SACHIN BANSAL AND BINNY BANSAL – MEN BEHIND FLIPKART

Sachin Bansal is the co-founder of Flipkart that changed India’s shopping style. He is an Indian technology entrepreneur and a passionate gamer.

He was born on 5th August 1981 in Chandigarh. His father was a businessman and mother was a homemaker. He had completed his schooling from Saint Anne’s Convent School. He pursued 49^th rank in All India JEE rankings and got into Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

After graduation, Bansal worked at Techspan for a few months and later in 2006 he joined Amazon Web Services as a Senior Software Engineer. Later, his friend Binny Bansal also started working in Amazon. In 2007, both of them decided to quit their job to start his own venture.

 In October 2007, they started Flipkart as an online bookselling website with an initial capital of 400,000 rupees . They launched the website from an apartment in Koramangala, in Bangalore, India. For 10 days, the site did not see even a single sale until a customer from Andhra Pradesh placed the first order for the book, ‘Leaving Microsoft to Change the World’ by John Wood.  In the early days, Sachin and Binny used to deliver books on their own scooters. They used to give away pamphlets of their company outside bookstores to target their actual customers. Later,they expanded the website into other product categories such as consumer electronics, fashion, and lifestyle products. Gradually Flipkart slowly grew in prominence.

From inception until 2016, Bansal held the position of Chief Executive Officer and from 2016 until 2018, he held the position of Executive Chairman. In 2018, he exited Flipkart along with the Walmart deal that acquired  77 percent stakes of the company at $16 billion. The non-compete clause restricted Bansal from starting any business that directly or indirectly competed with Flipkart for 18 months and in making any investments in businesses competing with Flipkart for 36 months from his departure.

Bansal wanted focus on his pending personal projects, gaming and brushing up his coding skills. Later , he founded BAC Acquisitions Private Limited, a venture that focused on building and acquiring technology-driven businesses . In 2019, he had investments in Ola, Grey Orange, Ather Energy, SigTuple, Inshorts, Unacademy , CRIDS and TeamIndus.