Latest news with #EnglishHonours
Indian Express
4 days ago
- Indian Express
Chandigarh Police busts international drug syndicate, 3 foreign nationals among 5 held
Written by- Nivedita and Amanpreet Three foreign nationals were among five persons linked with an international and an inter-state drugs syndicate arrested in two separate cases, and 50.88 gm of heroin, 67 gm of amphetamine and 70 gm of cocaine were seized from their possession, the Chandigarh Police said on Saturday. Addressing a press conference here, SP (Crime) Jasbir Singh said a total of 187.88 grams of narcotics, which fall under the commercial quantity category, were seized, and two luxury vehicles, a BMW and a Honda Accord, were impounded from the accused. The SP said the operations were carried out by teams from the Crime police station, led by SHO Inspector Satwinder Singh and overseen by DSP (Crime) Dheeraj Kumar. Police said on July 22, ASI Nasib Singh and his team were on patrol duty when they stopped a foreign national with suspicious activity, identified as Imoru Damian, a Nigerian national currently residing at GTPL Complex, Khuni Majra, Kharar, and seized 62.60 grams of amphetamine from his possession. Police said during his police remand, Damian disclosed the names of his associates, leading to the arrest of another Nigerian national Okoye Nnamdi and South African national Toufe Yosuof. Okoye was arrested in Delhi with 35.80 grams of cocaine and 5.73 grams of amphetamine, police said, adding that his Honda Accord car was impounded. Toufe, currently residing in Kharar, was arrested with 34.85 grams of cocaine, police said. Police said all three foreign nationals had come to India on valid visas but overstayed. Damian and Nnamdi came on medical visas in 2021, while Yosuof arrived on a business visa in 2023, they said. Divulging details of their modus operandi, the SP said, 'To escape police, they did not contact each other directly. They communicated with their handler sitting abroad, who then acted as a middleman. Their area of operation covered Chandigarh and Mohali, and they used networks of Nigerian students residing in Kharar to facilitate drug sales to local youths.' In a separate case, ASI Bhupinder Singh and his team were on a patrol duty on July 19 when they flagged down a suspicious BMW car, but as the occupants refused to cooperate, policemen had to break the glass of the windows to apprehend them, police said. Police said two people were arrested from the vehicle — Shiva Thakur, 31, a resident of Sector 45B in Chandigarh and a rented accommodation at Phase 9 in Mohali, and Jaisal Bains, 29, a resident of Alipure Sodhian village in Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab — with 50.88 grams of heroin and their BMW car was impounded. Police said Shiva has a previous criminal history with three NDPS Act cases, and is out on bail from the high court. Police said Jaisal, a graduate in English Honours, has been a friend of Shiva since Class 11, and had allegedly been receiving drug payments through her scanner. The SP said, 'They were switching international numbers and using social media apps to avoid police surveillance. They were sourcing drugs from various parts of Punjab, including Gurdaspur.' 'The Chandigarh Police is now working on tracing their back channels and the broader network to prevent further drug circulation in the Tricity,' he added. (The authors are interns at The Indian Express, Chandigarh)
Time of India
7 days ago
- General
- Time of India
Want a BA English seat in St. Stephen's, Miranda or LSR? You'll need 850+ CUET score after DU round 1 cut-offs
The first round of Delhi University's undergraduate seat allocation for 2025 has confirmed what many had anticipated—BA (Hons) English remains one of the most competitive programmes across all streams. Released on July 19, the Round 1 data shows sky-high cut-offs, with St. Stephen's College topping the charts at 926.93, closely followed by Hindu, Miranda House, LSR, and Hansraj College. These figures are not raw CUET scores, but normalised scores out of 1000, adjusted for shift-level variations and paper difficulty, making even a one-point gap significant. With thousands of students accepting their seats in Round 1 and fee payments closing on July 23, the next major milestone is Round 2 of admissions, scheduled for July 28, 2025. As students scramble to reorder their preferences and track vacant seats, here's a closer look at some of the top DU colleges and their English Honours cut-offs for general category students after Round 1 of the 2025 admission cycle. St. Stephen's College – 926.93 St. Stephen's continues to be the most exclusive gateway to a BA (Hons) in English at Delhi University. It not only boasts the highest Round 1 cut-off of 926.93 but also stands apart for its two-tier admission process. While 85% of the weightage comes from the CUET UG normalised score, the remaining 15% is based on a personal interview conducted by the college. A score in this range places a student in the top academic percentile nationally. The added interview round makes St. Stephen's admission not just academically exacting but also selectively holistic—emphasising both merit and personality. Hindu College – 885.76 At 885.76, Hindu College emerges as the most competitive CSAS-participating institution for English Honours. The admission is purely CUET-based, with no interviews involved. Hindu's English department is renowned for its academic rigour, student-led discourse, and political engagement. This year's cut-off underscores how even minor missteps in the English and General Test sections could cost aspirants a seat. For many, Hindu is a first-choice college that combines intellectual challenge with vibrant campus life. Miranda House – 863.02 Miranda House, a consistent topper in NIRF rankings, has set its English Honours cut-off at 863.02. This suggests that it continues to be ranked among the top three preferences by high-scoring applicants. Miranda is known for its strong humanities foundation, deeply engaged faculty, and an emphasis on critical theory and interdisciplinary dialogue. The college attracts students aiming for academic depth and social context in their literature education. Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR) – 856.58 With a cut-off of 856.58, LSR remains firmly in the top tier of English Honours destinations. While slightly below Miranda House, it offers a compelling mix of academics and career-oriented opportunities. LSR's English programme is supported by robust publishing clubs, a strong alumni network, and a curriculum that often intersects with policy, gender studies, and media studies—making it particularly attractive to students with broader liberal arts ambitions. Hansraj College – 851.11 Hansraj rounds off the top five, with a cut-off of 851.11—still significantly above the median. Though its admission bar is marginally lower than its peers, Hansraj has steadily carved out a strong identity in the English Honours space. Its department is known for research output, creative writing societies, and postgraduate success, making it a solid pick for students seeking both academic rigour and a balanced student experience. What these numbers mean for students The CUET UG scores are normalised out of 1000, which means that a student's performance is benchmarked not just against correct answers but also against: Variations in difficulty across shifts Subject combinations and paper patterns So a student scoring 851.11 (Hansraj's cut-off) has likely outperformed thousands of peers across multiple test parameters. With English Honours emerging as a prestige programme, the 850–950 CUET band has become the battleground for top admissions. Check the official Round 1 cut-off list here . TOI Education is on WhatsApp now. Follow us here . Ready to navigate global policies? Secure your overseas future. Get expert guidance now!
India Today
17-06-2025
- Science
- India Today
Shimla woman clears toughest exams without coaching, bags Rank 1 in IIT entrances
In an age where coaching classes are seen as essential for academic success, Damini Singh Brar from Himachal Pradesh has broken the mould, and how. Without signing up for a single coaching class, she has cleared some of India's most competitive exams, including the UGC-NET, NIMHANS, and not one but two IIT PhD 26-year-old from Sanjauli near Shimla is now all set to join IIT Delhi's PhD programme in Psychology, having topped both its written exam and interview round. Not only that, she also bagged All India Rank 1 in the PhD entrance for IIT also cleared the NIMHANS Bengaluru written exam for a PhD and got shortlisted for the interview. She passed UGC-NET Psychology in her first attempt in December LSR TO TISS TO IIT Damini started her academic journey at Lady Shri Ram College (LSR), Delhi University, studying English Honours. She then pursued Applied Psychology from TISS Mumbai, a top social sciences school journey was equally strong -- she was the Class 12 board topper in Shimla COACHING, JUST CONSISTENCYWhat makes Damini's story even more inspiring is her method. As per reports, she got no coaching, and no private tuitions. She prepared for the exams on her own, driven by passion and a structured study parents come from humble backgrounds -- her father is a sanitation inspector and her mother is a homemaker. Yet, with discipline and quiet resilience, Damini has reached India's most elite academic spaces.
Indian Express
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
What writers think of Virginia Woolf's ‘Mrs Dalloway', a century later
Do men read women? Or, more precisely, do books written by women about the lives of ordinary women count as 'literature'? In the century since the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, about the life of an upper-crust London woman going about her day, much has changed in how literature now mainstreams what was once niche, suggesting that the domestic, the ordinary, is anything but trivial. This shift in perspective is powerfully echoed in Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, The Hours, where Woolf's legacy ripples through the lives of women across generations, revealing how deeply her questions still resonate. Woolf herself wondered whether a novel could be built from the ebb and flow of a single day, from flowers bought, parties planned, thoughts half-spoken. That it could — and did — is why Mrs Dalloway remains a classic. Its enduring relevance lies in how it dignifies the internal lives of women, revealing depth in what society once dismissed as minutiae. A century later, writers, poets and academics speak of the quiet, radical power of Mrs Dalloway — and how it touched their lives: 'To teach Mrs Dalloway, as I did to third-year English Honours students, is to delve into the very bones and sinews of the book. What makes it so brilliant, for all its seeming simplicity, is what we looked at in the classroom, and the more you looked at it, the more depths were revealed. To knit together London, the war, the trenches, issues of sanity and madness, youthful homo-erotic love, the ecstasy and pain of living, all filtered through the mind of one woman, required a skill that one can only marvel at. Thank you, Virginia Woolf, for being a trailblazer for so many women writers after you.' -Manju Kapur, writer 'Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, like James Joyce's Ulysses, is set in one day. But within that time frame, Woolf plays around with time using flashbacks and memories. The novel fuses history and autobiography, haunted as it is by war, trauma, insanity, unrequited love, suppressed sexuality and death. In that dark world, emerging from the shadow of 'complete annihilation'', Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party – the kind of party that Woolf and her friends of the Bloomsbury Group must have hosted. In A Room of One's Own, she wrote about the need to retrieve the lives of women who had lived 'infinitely obscure lives'' but her own life and her friends' lives were far away from that world – 'they lived in squares and loved in triangles'. There is, in this novel, above everything else, Woolf's style – loitering, insidious and sensuous. It is one of the earliest examples of stream of consciousness writing in the English language in the 20th century and carried the influence of Marcel Proust, whose writings Woolf had read with great attention. Woolf, in her time, was unique. The last line of Mrs Dalloway could very well apply to her, 'For there she was''. -Rudrangshu Mukherjee, chancellor and professor of History, Ashoka University ''Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself '. I remember the opening line from the time my younger self first read the book – published a hundred years ago now. Considered Virginia Woolf's finest novel, it follows a day in the life of Mrs Dalloway, a London society matron, as she prepares for a party. The narrative is intercepted with other stories, interrogating themes of memory, remembrance, the aftermath of war, and a changing social order. The uniquely crafted novel gave a feminine lilt to form, style and the texture of language. Woolf's voice continues to remain immediate and spontaneous and to resonate with successive generations of readers.'' -Namita Gokhale, writer 'The novel first hit me like a storm. It was around 2006. It was Bachelor's third year, if I remember correctly, and an excellent teacher, Brinda Bose, taught us the text. She was a bit of an institution in Delhi University those days, and the way the novel came alive in her teaching was exceptional. That any prose could do such wave-like motions, I did not know. That writing could bide and expand, and hurry and shorten time, I did not know. That one's thoughts could be the subject of endless unravelling, I did not know. Woolf's prose, then, in Mrs Dalloway became a point of no return. Thereon, any writing one did, was an open-ended experiment, rather than a foreclosed set of possibilities. The novel taught me that prose could go to any place of your imagining.' -Akhil Katyal, poet 'For a hundred years now, people have wondered why Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Over the last 30 years, since I first read Woolf's novel, the emphasis in the opening sentence has kept shifting for me: from 'herself', when I was a university student, to 'buy' a few years later, and then to 'flowers' for a long time. In the changing history of these emphases was not only a record of my own proclivities, but a history of humanistic attention, aesthetic and political – on and of the woman, the 'herself'; an evolving lineage of consumption, that everything could be bought ('buy'); to 'flowers', the most ignored noun in the sentence and, by extension, the planet. Much older now, I see the invisible verb in that sentence that, I believe, gives us a history of modernism – walking, how it gives narrative energy and moodiness to the novel. A woman walking – in the city, in a novel, the sentences road and alley-like, not mimetically, but an experiment in rhythm.' -Sumana Roy, writer and poet 'For an artist, love is rarely enabling except in its non-fulfilment. So is sanity. Virginia Woolf wrestled with both all her life. One hundred years since its publication, Mrs Dalloway's fame has come to surpass its plotless plot and the sheer artistry of its techniques. This is a book which juxtaposes, both with caution and liberty, sanity and insanity (or, as she menacingly puts it, the 'odd whirr of wings in the head'), love and non-love, truth and untruth, life and death, an attempt which, puzzlingly or not I cant be certain, ends in the suicide of the 'mad' Septimus Smith and the survival of the 'sane' Clarissa Dalloway. If AN Whitehead's definition of the classic as 'patience in interpretation' is true, then Mrs Dalloway, just like its superior cousin, To the Lighthouse, will keep on yielding interpretations.' -Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari, writer 'I read A Room of One's Own in my first year of college. I was stunned by the prose – I had never encountered anything like it. I must have been equally entranced by the book's structure, its slow and sensuous unfolding of an argument that was so sharp and steely – a dazzling contrast only an inventor of a form could pull off – but I know that, at the time, I did not have the vocabulary to frame it this way, or to see its craft as a feminist reclamation of language itself. I didn't know that by including the personal in the telling, by showing us the maturing of the idea against the environment in which it gestated, Woolf was doing something radical. Not having this vocabulary, however, was not a bad thing. I remember, instead, being aware of a peculiar sensation under my tongue, a salty sweetness, as I read the book, a kind of muted crackling in the viscera, followed by a gentle give, all of which possibly meant the book was reconfiguring me from within. I hope the 18-year-olds in my classroom whom I introduce the text to are able to feel themselves rewritten through it too. The text is the only teacher they need.' -Devapriya Roy, writer
News18
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
‘Not Always A Last Resort': DU Student Debunks Arts Stream Stereotypes
Last Updated: A Delhi University English Honours student caught the internet's attention after she tried to break the stereotypes about art streams. A Delhi University art student received nasty comments and was subjected to stereotypes after she highlighted her struggles in securing an internship. Currently pursuing a Bachelor's in English honours from Delhi's Hansraj College, Bisma Fareed grabbed eyeballs with a viral post, whose comment section was flooded with digs and stereotypical questions. She has now rebuffed all of that and more in another post. 'Thank you for making me feel like a deserving loser," Fareed wrote in her popular LinkedIn post, disclosing the type of comments she received on an earlier post where she declared, 'I'm a topper and I am unable to get an internship" and attracted demotivational comments from those who suggested she should've opted for commerce or science stream. 'Recently, my post went viral, received zillions of motivating messages and a few, just a few hundred of stereotypical questions! 'Why did you take up Arts, if you are a topper?' 'Itna talented thi to B.A kyu ki thi, koi bada course karna tha na?' 'btw if you don't mind B.A. walon ko kon job deta hai?'" Fareed wrote. 'So, first and foremost, I would like to thank these 'Bade course wale, science Wale, wale' people for entrenching the already existing stereotypes of the society! Thank you for making every 'Arts' wala student inferior. Kyuki society mai to sirf aapka contribution hai! Baaki sab to dumb hai!]" The English honours student then raised a serious question on DU's educational structure: 'If humanities or B.A. courses don't have any value, why are these streams and courses offered by the education system?" The woman wondered if the art courses would cease to exist if they didn't carry any value, as suggested by her critics. She then noted her belief behind opting for the art stream and said not everyone loves to do number crunching, analysis or coding. 'Arts is not always a 'last resort'; it's a choice," Fareed wrote, calling it a genuine option, not a fallback. 'Not everyone is interested in numbers, anatomy, or coding; some people prefer free thinking and creative expression. Arts students develop critical thinking, empathy, and problem-solving skills that are valuable in many industries." 'Creativity and innovation often come from the Arts, which can lead to groundbreaking ideas and solutions. The world needs diverse perspectives, and Arts students bring unique viewpoints to the table." Fareed sent out a message to fellow art students, encouraging them to opt for the art stream without hesitation or societal pressure. 'So, to all the Arts students out there, don't let anyone make you feel inferior," she wrote. Watch CNN-News18 here. News18's viral page features trending stories, videos, and memes, covering quirky incidents, social media buzz from india and around the world, Also Download the News18 App to stay updated! First Published:
