Saudi developer Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq may have created it for employees to 'leave a constructive message' which is still the app's tag line, but the 'anonymous' feature has caught the imagination of social media users who are commenting on and receiving comments from their Twitter, Snapchat or Facebook using friends, but without name of the sender revealed.
Odias on social media are also lapping up the opportunity to speak up anonymously and share their feelings about their friends, favourite celebrities and secret crushes.
While some instances of misuse of the app by sending hate messages or trolls are also coming up, hopefully fun loving Odias will continue to use the app for expressing their feelings or for harmless leg pulling of friends.
How to use Sarahah app?
Meanwhile, the receiver cannot respond to the messages, but surely the feature will be added soon.
A pal of gloom descended on Talpalipada village of the district when the dead bodies arrived here for burial.
The deceased have been identified as Michael Bag, his wife Minu Bag, daughter Sephali Bag and son Subham Bag. Salil Bag, his younger son had a narrow escape.
It may be mentioned here that a couple along with their daughter and two sons had gone to Gangtok for the summer vacation.
The family was returning from Lachung in North Sikkim when their vehicle fell from a hillock after its brake failed near Tashi View Point, following which four of them died on the spot on May 31.
The deceased include a couple and their daughter of Talapalipada villlage of Bolangir district. According to sources four Odia families had gone to Gangtok for the summer vacation in two vehicles.
One of the vehicles met with an accident, following which four persons died.
The team comprising nine male and six female members will set off its expedition to scale 5819 metre Rudugera mountain peak in the Himalayan region in Uttarakhand. The expedition will conclude on October 5.
To be a part of the team, hundreds of mountaineers from Odisha had participated in the three camps of which one camp was held on the western side of Darjeeling, the second camp at Panchlingeswar and third in Dayar area in Uttarakhand. These three camps were headed by Bachendri Pal, the first woman mountaineer of India to scale Mt Everest.
Talking to OTV, Swarnalata Dalei, a female mountaineer said her dream was to scale one of the highest mountain peaks in the world. “I am very happy that I have been selected for this expedition”, she added.
Pradeep Kumar Behera, another Odia mountaineer, said he had read about Bachendri Pal in the book when he was a student. “Now seeing her in person is a privilege for me. This expedition will help us to know more about the environment in the Himalayan region”, he noted.
Talking about the preparation, Arpita Mohapatra, escort member of the team, said all members in the team are properly trained. “They have the willpower and physical fitness. I am confident that the expedition will be highly successful,” she asserted.
Anant Kishore Jena, Director, Sports and Youth Services, said the objective of the expedition is to create leadership and fearlessness among the youths. “Taking note that the youths of the present generation lack self confidence and bravery, the state government has started such programmes to boost their confidence”, he pointed out.
The labourers, who were tortured since five months as the company in which they were working stopped their salary, were rescued with the help two NGOs.
Talking to media persons after their arrival at Biju Patnaik International Airport from Dubai via New Delhi this morning, the labourers thanked the media for their sincere cooperation.
“We had gone to Dubai on June 2, 2015 through Planet agency in Berhampur to work as plumbers in a company Wide Plus Decor and Technical Services LLC. Though our salary was 1400 per month, the company was paying us Rs 1200. But as the salary was not given every month, we had registered a case in a labour court in Dubai. After the directive of the court, the company later gave the arrear salary”, said a labourer.
He further said the owner of the company some months ago had forced them to sign on a cancel paper and asked to leave Odisha. “Later he blocked our 3-month salary. Since we had no alternative, we were forced to contact the media for help”, he added.
“We have no money with us since last five months. Though we have requested the police to help us, it has not taken any steps till date. We, therefore, request you to make necessary arrangements to take us to India at the earliest”, a desperate Amir Pradhan of Khurda district and one of the labourers, had requested the Ganjam district administration through a message in a social media.
The four other labourers who returned from Dubai are Ashok Biswal and Santosh Swain of Badhi Nuapalli village, Babula Patra of Gangpur village and K Subani of Chikiti block of Ganjam district.
But the point is not if Odisha still has a chance of getting its due, but what has the state government been doing for over two years to get its rightful claim acknowledged by the intellectual property authorities at Chennai who hand out the GI status? After all, rasagola snowballed into a major controversy only after the state government made the first move to get GI status for the famous Pahala rasagola in July 2015. All that the state government has to show by way of efforts to take it to its logical conclusion in the two years and more since then is the formation of three committees. Eminent literary critic and researcher Asit Mohanty, an acclaimed authority on the subject, submitted his 100-page report backed with irrefutable proof, of the existence of rasagola and its ritual offering to Lord Jagannath on Niladri Bije at least since the 15th century, if not earlier, in July last year. A little enquiry by this columnist revealed that the report initially commissioned by the Science & Technology department, which cites Balaram Das’ Dandi Ramayana and other literary works of the time to make its case, was later sent to the Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises (MSME) department which, in turn, assigned the job of preparing the presentation to the GI authorities to the Central Tool room & Training Centre (CTTC). And there the matter has rested for the last 16 months without anyone in the government being able to say how long it will take to make its case. As Odisha kept twiddling its thumb, West Bengal moved purposefully to seal the GI norm for its rosogulla. It was the old story of the hare and the tortoise all over again!
A group of spirited Odias meanwhile launched an online campaign to celebrate ‘Rasagola Day’ on Niadri Bije, the day when the deities return to their abode after their annual nine-day sojourn to their aunt’s place during the Rath Yatra in Puri. With Odia youth joining the bandwagon with gusto, the campaign did get considerable traction on social media. The event trended on Twitter for two consecutive years. Unfortunately though, GI status is given on the basis of hard, verifiable proof and not on the strength of a social media campaign. Odisha’s case has thus stood exactly where it was in July, 2015 while Bengal has worked diligently to get what it wanted.
There is little doubt that the Naveen Patnaik government has a lot of explaining to do about going into deep slumber after an initial burst of activity. With all the historical evidence to back Odisha’s case already painstakingly put together by Asit Mohanty, all it had to do was to move the GI office in Chennai with the relevant documents. If it was anything other than plain callousness that has delayed the submission of the state’s case, the state government is not forthcoming with any explanations.
Social media saw an outpouring of hurt pride all day with most Odias understandably venting out their anger on the government for its gross apathy that led to this ‘defeat’. A few cloaked their disappointment in satire with one Facebooker saying now that we have lost the ‘battle’ for rasogola, we should move fast to get the GI tag at least for our very own ‘gulgula’. For reasons that have their genesis in history, what hurt most Odias was the fact that the ‘defeat’ came at the hands of Bengalis.
But then wasn’t it the Bengalis who had once said that Odia was not a language at all? In a supreme irony, the same ‘non-language’ has now got the classical language status, one of only six Indian languages to get this coveted tag, while Bangla is nowhere in the picture. So, let us throw our despondency out of the window and put pressure on our government to move fast – and with precision – to get not just a GI tag for our very own rasagola, but to get recognition for everything else that rightfully belongs to us. After all, we have history on our side and no one – just no one – can change that.
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By now, everyone who knows him knows his ways. Maverick former Supreme Court judge Markandey Katju revels in offending people, communities, states and everything else that one can think of. So, aren’t we Odias falling into his trap and obliging him by giving him what he craves most - attention – by getting so worked up over what he says in his latest comment about Odias?
For the uninitiated, here is what he said in a typically disparaging post on Facebook about the Odia race:
“I was asked to write about the Oriyas (Odias). What is there to write about these poor chaps? Ever since they got a thrashing at the hands of Ashoka in the battle of Kalinga, they have been a dejected lot. Now all they have with them are a lot of pots (Patras), big pots (Mahapatras) and supposedly intelligent kings (Patnaiks).
And of course, they have Lord Jagannath to whom they pray every day for revenge on the abominable Biharis. Hari Om”
And he signs off with the disclaimer “Odias, this is just a joke, so don’t file a case against him” (as if that absolves him of his crime!)
If it was meant, as Katju claims in the disclaimer, as a joke, it was a poor and utterly tasteless joke indeed. After all, he didn’t have to rope in Lord Jagannath, the presiding deity of the state, if it was just a joke. That he felt the need to classify it as a joke even while pleading with Odias not to file a case against him proves that it was meant to be anything but a joke. But let us give him the benefit of doubt on that score.
Predictably, outrage has been pouring in thick and fast ever since he posted his abominable ‘joke’ with scores of offended Odias taking him to task (though a few Odia baiters appear to have quite relished his comments). Most Odias have disparaged him in the vilest possible terms while some have called him names. But then wasn’t this exactly what he had made the post for in the first place?
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Whatever else they may be accused of, Odias are certainly not a people without a sense of humour. In fact, no one makes as much fun of Odias as Odias themselves. So, why can’t we just laugh it off as the ranting of a habitual rabble-rouser who has craved attention like a petulant child ever since he laid down the exalted office as a judge of the apex court?
There are two kinds of Odias. The first, clearly in a majority, think he is the best thing that has happened to Odisha since independence. That he is the ‘outsider’ who has made Odisha his home and has done what none of the ‘insiders’ who preceded him could; he is honest to the core and has nothing but the interest of the ‘4.5 crore Odias’ in his mind, heart and soul. In short, he is beyond reproach and can do no wrong. [A senior journalist friend, perhaps a little too excited at the stunning victory that the BJD has just recorded, even suggested in a signed article that the results of the Lok Sabha elections would have been entirely different and Modi would have bitten the dust had Naveen Patnaik been projected as the Prime Ministerial face of the combined Opposition!]
The other, minority view sees him as a cynical, ruthless and vengeful politician who has made winning elections into a fine art through political skullduggery and use of money and official machinery. It paints him as a person who has institutionalized corruption at every level, presided over the lumpenisation of politics, jettisoned everything that his late father Biju Patnaik stood for even as he continued to rule in his name and has nothing but utter disdain for everything Odia.
The truth, as always, perhaps lies between these two mutually exclusive views. Let us, for a moment, assume that all the charges that his detractors have been making about how he won this particular election – that he simply spent his way back into power, converting Odisha into a state of ‘beggars’ beholden to the government for everything in his cynical search for votes; made the entire official machinery, including the police, into an extension of the party; entered into selective deal making with the two major opposition parties; had the almost the entire media eating out of his hands and so on – were true. But all of it still doesn’t explain the scale of the victory, especially in the Assembly elections, his major concern. That his party actually managed to increase its vote share over 2014, even if marginally, is a stupendous achievement by any standards for a government that was seeking a mandate for a fifth consecutive term. It helped the party keep unblemished its unique record of adding to its vote share in every election since 2000 and made mincemeat of the anti-incumbency that the Opposition and Naveen’s detractors were banking on. Just like the desperate efforts of some shell-shocked intellectuals to discredit the massive mandate that Modi has just received as ‘murder of democracy’, any attempt to attribute Naveen’s victory against all odds will be dismissed as an expression of frustration. It would be mean not to doff your hat to the man of the moment, who has just pulled off an incredible victory against heavy odds.
But that does not make Naveen the saint that many of his supporters hail him as. And it’s not meant to be an indictment. After all, what business do saints have in politics? Indian politics in the present era is a cynical, ruthless and cut-throat game where only those who are willing to play by the rules and excel in them can survive and prosper. Elections, as everyone knows by now, are not fought or won on thin air. Money does play a role, as do muscle power, misuse of officialdom and the media. And Naveen can’t be faulted for having put all of these to good use in winning elections. [It must be said though that he has had the advantage of being in a better position than his rivals to use these important resources because he has never been in Opposition. But he can’t be blamed for that]
While his election winning ways can be condoned, what his emphatic win cannot whitewash is the record of his government as one of the most corrupt – if not the most corrupt – ever. The Great Mining Scam, easily the biggest corruption scandal in the history of the state, began and continued for nearly a decade under his direct watch. The chit fund scam is another scam where the active connivance of the government and ruling party politicians is public knowledge. You can forestall all inquiry through political deal-making. But the facts speak for themselves - even if they don’t matter for the vast majority of people, as the election results show. In fact, that these are not issues for the electorate, despite the fact at least a million families were ruined by the chit fund scam alone, is a tribute to the perception management skills of Naveen Patnaik!
There are certain traits that both his admirers and detractors recognize in Naveen but have entirely different views on: the streak of ruthlessness in him, for example. Many people are uneasy with his penchant for below-the-belt attacks against his real or imagined rivals – the most cited case in point, Bijoy Mohapatra). But his supporters hail him precisely for this ruthless streak. They see him as the Knight in Shining Armour who vanquishes his rivals in one fell sweep and are perfectly okay with his methods. For them, all is fair not just in love and war, but also in politics.
Many people, including this columnist, have a serious issue with Naveen’s refusal to speak Odia even after being CM for two decades. They cite it as proof that he cares two hoots for the language or the people who speak it. It is, they say, as if he is taunting the Odia race, saying; “I will not learn Odia. And you Odia fools will still keep voting for me.” But the vast majority of Odias obviously do not think that way or have an issue with it. They are convinced that he is more Odia than most Odia-speaking Odias! How he managed to persuade the people to believe so will always remain a mystery. But if the vast majority of Odias, who have just spoken loud and clear, are happy, who are we to complain?
I have been among the fortunate few who have watched Naveen Patnaik since the day he day set foot in Odisha with the body his father on a hot April afternoon. Over the next 22 years and more, I have seen him metamorphose from a shy, reluctant, reclusive and well-meaning politician into a cynical, ruthless, all-conquering leader. But I must confess I am still trying to figure out the phenomenon that Naveen Patnaik is. Maybe we are all too close to the unfolding events and too involved in the process to make a clear, objective and dispassionate assessment of his contribution to the state and his place in the history of the state.
All that can wait. For the moment, it’s time to take a bow to the man who has never lost an election since he stepped into politics; to listen to the sweet melody of his Fifth Symphony!
(DISCLAIMER: This is an opinion piece. The views expressed are author’s own and have nothing to do with OTV’s charter or views. OTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.)
Commending the work undertaken by the government in bringing back Indians hit by Covid crisis during stay in foreign countries, Pradhan has asked both the ministries to help in repatriation of a large number of Odias intending to return to their native State from GCC countries, United Kingdom, and Sri Lanka.
Pradhan has said that he had received representations from Odia persons living abroad requesting for their repatriation directly to Bhubaneswar.
"The Odia community representatives living in GCC countries, United Kingdom, and Sri Lanka have made specific requests to travel back from their respective capital cities to Bhubaneswar directly," Pradhan wrote in a letter to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri.
Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan urges External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar & Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri to make arrangements for point to point direct flights to help Odias stranded in other countries return to #Odisha#COVID19 #COVID19India pic.twitter.com/8d3wJueeAF
— OTV (@otvnews) June 3, 2020
Since they are in good numbers in these countries, point to point direct flights may be arranged from the cities like Dubai, Doha, Dammam, Muscat, Bahrain, Colombo and London to Bhubaneswar, which would also make commercial sense for the airlines," Pradhan stated in the letter.
It may be noted that even though the Centre has already resumed domestic flights in the country almost two months after the enforcement of Covid lockdown, but regular international flights is yet to be commenced.
The government had informed a week ago that after thorough review of the Corona situation, it might restart flight services in selected international routes from the month of July.
As per government, Indian carriers have operated a total of 4,062 flights till June 1. As many as 428 flights were flown out on May 25, 445 on May 26, 460 on May 27, 494 on May 28, 513 on May 29, 529 on May 30, 501 on May 31 and 692 on June 1.
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