Foster Hindu parents bring up Farzana in Islamic tradition

[email protected] (J. S. Ifthekhar, The Hindu)
April 29, 2013

Hindu_parentsWhen they marry off their daughter Farzana on Sunday, Madhava Reddy and Lakshmi Reddy will have set a new benchmark for secularism. The couple raised Farzana, who lost her parents, from the age of four as their own child and according to Islamic traditions

Take heart. All is not lost yet. There are still people around who stand by values, pluralism and tolerance. While most cry hoarse about religious co-existence, here is a family that lives by it. Madhava Reddy and his wife Lakshmi Reddy are perhaps the best hope for humanity.

When they marry off their daughter Farzana on Sunday, they will have set a new benchmark for secularism. If you do a double-take, you must be an outsider. For the people of Gouraipally, a sleepy village 7 km from Yadgirigutta in Nalgonda district, it is nothing unusual.

They have seen Reddy and his wife raising Farzana right from the age of four as their own child. The girl, who lost her parents at an early age, could not have asked for better foster parents. When none of her relatives came forward to adopt her, Madhava Reddy took her in his care.

The Reddy couple, who have two sons, took an instant liking for Farzana.

They not merely showered love and affection on her but brought her up according to Islamic traditions. Apart from giving her modern education, they ensured that Farzana was not deprived of Islamic teachings.

“We never forced our religion on her but allowed the girl to perform 'namaz', read the Quran and observe fast during Ramzan,” says Madhava Reddy, who retired from the Electricity Board.

No wonder, as 22-year-old Farzana prepares for a new phase of life on Sunday, she is sad to part with her parents.

“I will miss mummy and daddy a lot,” she says in a choked voice.

A bright student, Farzana passed 10th Class and Intermediate in first division. Later, she did nursing course in Hyderabad and got a job at Yashoda Hospital, Malakpet.

Qazi Akhter of Yadgirigutta is expected to perform Farzana's 'nikah' with a Nalgonda boy, Mohd. Rasheed, on Sunday. Ghiasuddin Babukhan, chairman, Hyderabad Zakat and Charitable Trust, who supported Farzana's education, is lending a helping hand in her marriage, too.

Reddy's two sons, who are working in the U.S., are fond of Farzana and keep in touch with her. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself is the golden principle of the family. Sure, an ounce of practice is worth tonnes of preaching.

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Agencies
February 25,2020

Tokyo, Feb 25: Japan's Chitetsu Watanabe, recognized at 112 years as the oldest man in the world, has passed away 11 days after he received the Guinness World Record certificate, his family said on Tuesday.

Watanabe died on Sunday night, Efe news reported.

He received the official certificate on February 12 at a nursing home in Joetsu in Niigata prefecture, where he resided.

Soon after being certified as the oldest man, he began to experience a lack of appetite and respiratory problems, the wife of his eldest son told public broadcaster NHK.

Born on March 5, 1907 in a family of farmers, Watanabe moved at the age of 20 to Taiwan, where he worked at a sugar refinery for 18 years before returning to Japan after the end of World War II.

A fan of calligraphy, custard and ice cream, Watanabe told the Guinness team that the key to his long life was laughter.

He was recognized as the oldest male in the world following the deaths in 2019 of German Gustav Gerneth (in October), aged 114 years, and Japan's Masazo Nonaka (in January), at the age of 113, three months older than the German.

It remains to be seen who will be recognized after the death of Watanabe, the only male on the list drawn up by the Gerontology Research Group of the 30 oldest people in the world.

Japan has among the highest life expectancy in the world and the number of centenarians in the country has crossed 71,000, according to the latest government figures.

Since 2000, the number of centenarians censored has quintupled, raising concern for the economic outlook and future workforce of the country - where the birthrate is on a downward trend.

Out of these, 88 per cent are women.

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Agencies
July 9,2020

Twitter has hinted that it is planning a paid subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future.

The news that the micro-blogging platform is building a subscription platform with a team codenamed "Gryphon" resulted in Twitter stock rising over 8% on Wednesday.

Twitter revealed its plan via a job listing that seeks a full-stack senior software engineer in New York to join "Gryphon".

Interestingly, Twitter "edited" the job listing once the news broke, removing the part about "Gryphon" and any mention of their internal team or their subscription feature. The listing said the company is looking for an Android engineer to "work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users".

Later, Twitter users noticed that the company restored the earlier job listing that mentioned the upcoming subscription platform and "Gryphon".

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN on Wednesday that it's only a job posting, not a product announcement.

This is not the first time Twitter has thought of a paid product. 

In 2017, it sent out a survey to users and a preview of what a premium offering of its TweetDeck app might look like, including breaking news alerts and more analytics, according to The Verge.

"We're conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make TweetDeck even more valuable for professionals," a Twitter spokesperson had said at that time.

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Agencies
January 4,2020

Washington D.C: One of the greatest spectacles of modern art is still thriving in the Australian outback as confirmed by satellite imagery of NASA. The Marree Man is a massive geoglyph depicting an aboriginal hunter, that spans over 2.6 miles in the Southern Australian region.

Discovered by a pilot in 1998, its origin still remains a mystery even to this date.

The Marree Man was given a new lease of life in 2016 when a group of people from the neighboring town of Marree plowed its lines to avert its fading due to erosion.

After NASA shared the image of the art-work that was taken in June, the efforts of the good samaritans turned out to be a total success, reported CNN Travel.

The restoration team believes that the refurbished Marree Man would last longer than its original version.

According to NASA, "They [the team] created wind grooves, designed to trap water and encourage the growth of vegetation. They hope that eventually, the man will turn green."

In a previous article, CNN reported that an entrepreneur by the name of Dick Smith took upon himself to unravel the geoglyph's mystery in 2016. His team combed through all the available evidence but couldn't find anything conclusive.

In 2018 he even offered a 5,000 Australian dollar reward for anyone who knows the identity of its creator.

Nobody turned up with an answer but it was speculated that unknown artist lives in Alice Springs or even might be an American.

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