Downloaded from: http://www.upscportal.

com

Award and Prizes: April 2011

Nisha Rajagopal, first recipient of The Hindu Saregama M.S. Subbulakshmi Award
Carnatic vocalist Nisha P. Rajagopal has been chosen as the first recipient of The Hindu Saregama M.S. Subbulakshmi Award.' Presented by RmKV, the award, which was instituted on September 16, 2010, seeks to honour and recognise the merit of a young Carnatic vocalist aged between 25 and 35 pursuing music full-time. It has been a long journey for Nisha. Her family moved all the way from Toronto, Canada, to New Delhi, just so she could learn and engage with music at a deeper level. An engineer by training, she even had a brief stint in the corporate world before she realised that music was indeed her true calling.

Indian wins Indu Sharma Katha Samman

Indian novelist Vikas Kumar Jha has been chosen for the 2011 International Indu Sharma Katha Samman, for his novel McCluskieganj ' . A post-graduate in Sociology, 47-yearold Jha is the editor of Hindi magazine Rang Prasang. The International Indu Sharma Katha Samman was instituted in the memory of poetess and short story writer Indu Sharma who died of cancer in 1995.

Indian-American doctor's book on cancer bags the Pulitzer

Indian-American physician Siddhartha Mukherjee's acclaimed book on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, has won the prestigious 2011 Pulitzer Prize in the general non-fiction category. According to the Pulitzer citation, the book by the New York-based cancer physician and researcher is an elegant inquiry, at once clinical and personal, into the long history of an insidious disease that, despite treatment breakthroughs, still bedevils medical science. The Pulitzer for general non-fiction is awarded to a distinguished and appropriately documented book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in any other category. It carries a $10,000 award.

http://upscportal.com/civilservices/current-affairs

Downloaded from: http://www.upscportal.com

India-born Dr. Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer physician at the Columbia University Medical Centre. A Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford, Harvard Medical School. The result is an astonishingly lucid and eloquent chronicle of a disease that humans have lived with and perished from for more than 5,000 years.

2011 Pulitzers spread out

The New York Times won Pulitzer Prizes for its economics commentary and its reporting on Russia, while The Los Angeles Times received the coveted public service Pulitzer and the award for feature photography. The prizes, which are administered by Columbia University, went to a variety of newspapers and were not concentrated in the hands of one or two publications, as has been the case in recent years. And for the first time, a prize was awarded to reporting that did not appear in print: ProPublica's online series The Wall Street Money Machine, which won for national reporting. The awards this year included other notable firsts. The Wall Street Journal won its only Pulitzer since Rupert Murdoch bought the paper in 2007. It was for Joseph Rago's editorial writing on the debate over health care legislation. The Journal received the awards for international reporting and public service in 2007. Pulitzers were awarded in 13 journalism categories and seven arts categories. The prize for fiction went to Jennifer Egan for A Visit From the Goon Squad. Bruce Norris won the award for drama for his play Clybourne Park. The history prize went to Eric Foner for The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. Ron Chernow won in the biography category for Washington: A Life. Madame White Snake, by Zhou Long, won for music. Kay Ryan took the prize for poetry for The Best of It: New and Selected Poems. The award for general nonfiction was awarded to Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. In the public service category for journalism, The Los Angeles Times won for its coverage of city officials in Bell, California, who enriched themselves with enormous pay packages. The articles made the city of Bell infamous and tapped into the antigovernment ferment that hit its height last summer. In the feature writing category, Amy Ellis Nutt of The Star-Ledger in Newark won for what the board said was her deeply probing story on the mysterious sinking of a scallop fishing vessel, the Lady Mary. Six men drowned.

Indian mathematician wins Knuth Prize

Indian mathematician and theoretical computer scientist Ravi Kannan has been awarded the 2011 Knuth Prize, a prestigious international recognition for research in computer science.

http://upscportal.com/civilservices/current-affairs

Downloaded from: http://www.upscportal.com

Professor Kannan, who leads the algorithms research group at Microsoft Research Labs India, is the first Indian to receive the award. He is also the first adjunct faculty of the Computer Science and Automation department at the Indian Institute of Science. The Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory has awarded the prize to Professor Kannan for developing influential algorithmic techniques aimed at solving long-standing computational problems. A release from ACM the world's largest educational and scientific computing society acknowledged Professor Kannan's contributions to the challenges of computation with massive data that characterise today's information-driven environment. It says, One of his research papers, published in 1990, has been called one of the most remarkable algorithmic achievements ever. It addresses the issue of easy formulas for volumes of simple three-dimensional objects like spheres and cubes.

Dadasaheb Phalke Award for K. Balachander

Director K. Balachander, one of the influential filmmakers and trendsetters in Indian cinema, will receive the Dadasaheb Phalke Award for the year 2010, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry announced. The announcement of the award to Iyakkunar Sigaram' as he is known in Kollywood has brought tremendous happiness to the fraternity of artists and technicians. However, some felt that it could have come much earlier.

IAS PRE 2011

Current Affairs Books
ORDER ONLINE

http://upscportal.com/civilservices/order-online/current-affairs-books
Search More Books@: http://upscportal.com/civilservices/order-books

http://upscportal.com/civilservices/current-affairs