Sheikh Chilli is a Sufi saint whose tomb is in Thanesar, Haryana.
He was Mughal Prince Dara Shikoh’s spiritual advisor.
Thanesar was a well known centre of the Sufi Chishti silsila.
The tomb is situated in the Old Trunk Road.
In the middle of the complex there is a shallow tank.
Galleries are found around the tank and they were used as madarasa which is a place to study.
Dara Shukoh could have built the madarsa to promote the Qadriya order of Suifism.
The madarsa dates back to the mid-17th century when Dara Shukoh was powerful in the Mughal court.
Chhau Dance
Recently the distinctive Chhau mask of Purulia, West Bengal was awarded the Geographic Indication tag.
The traditional rural craft of making masks is an integral component of the semi-martial art dance form of Chhau.
Chhau dance is a tradition from eastern India that enacts episodes from epics including the Mahabharata and Ramayana, local folklore and abstract themes.
Its three distinct styles hail from the regions of Seraikella (Jharrkhand) , Purulia (West Bengal) and Mayurbhanj (Odisha), the first two using masks.
Chhau dance is intimately connected to regional festivals, notably the spring festival Chaitra Parva.
The dance is performed at night in an open space to traditional and folk melodies, played on the reed pipes ''mohuri'' and ''shehnai.''
In 2010 the Chhau dance was inscribed in the UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
SCO Media Summit
The first media summit for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) was held in Beijing, China.
The event will enhance media cooperation and people-to-people exchanges between SCO member states.
With a theme of "carrying on the 'Shanghai Spirit' and ushering a new era for media cooperation," the summit attracted over 260 attendees who exchanged ideas on building new platforms of media cooperation and closer people-to-people ties.
The member states are really keen to take forward their cooperation at the regional level in areas such as trade, culture, health and education.
The media plays a crucial role in promoting closer friendship and cooperation.
Bodhisena
The oldest documented Indian resident in Japan, and arguably the most influential, was Bodhisena.
He was a monk from Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
His outsized impact on Japanese culture persists even some 1,300 years after he docked on the archipelago’s shores.
Bodhisena came to believe that Manjushri (the bodhisattva of wisdom) lived on the Chinese mountain of Wutai, and therefore travelled there to pay obeisance.
He was also called Bodaisenna.
In China, he met the Japanese ambassador to the Tang court, who persuaded him to carry on to Japan on the invitation of the then Emperor, Shomu (701-756 AD), a devout Buddhist.
The Indian monk taught Sanskrit and helped establish the Kegon school of Buddhism, a variant of the Chinese Huayan school.
He died in 760 AD and is buried in Ryusenji-temple on the slopes of Mt. Omine.
The Kegon continues to flourish with its headquarters at Nara’s Todai-ji temple, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Buttetsu, a disciple of Bodhisena from Champa taught a style of dance that featured themes taken from Indian mythology, set to a musical rhythm, common in South Asia, but unknown at the time in Japan.
These dances became known as rinyugaku and were absorbed into the local artistic oeuvre.
Jallian Wala Bagh Tragedy
The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar on April 13, 1919 was a tragedy in the Indian colonial history.
The massacre was executed under the orders of Brigadier Reginald Dyer who was then the General Officer Commanding of the 45th Infantry Brigade at Jullundur (now Jalandhar).
The British government appointed the Hunter Commission to inquire into the happenings.
Actually, Jallianwala Bagh is a public garden in Amritsar, Punjab.
During this time there was wide unrest in the country against Rowlatt Act.
The civilians had assembled to condemn the arrest and deportation of two national leaders, Satya Pal and Saifuddin Kitchlew.
The ineffective inquiry and the initial accolades for Dyer by the House of Lords fuelled widespread anger, was one of the causes of the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920–22.
Task Force on Shell Companies
The Task Force on Shell Companies takes pro-active and coordinated steps to check the menace of shell companies.
The ‘Task Force’ was set up in February, 2017 by the Prime Minister’s Office under the joint Chairmanship of the Revenue Secretary and Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs.
It has a mandate to check in a systematic way, through a coordinated multi-agency approach, the menace of companies indulging in illegal activities including facilitation of tax evasion and commonly referred to as ‘Shell Companies’.
Department of Financial Services, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Central Board of Exercise Customs, Central Bureau of Investigation, Enforcement Directorate, Serious Fraud Investigation Organization, Financial Intelligence Unit-IND, RBI, SEBI, DG-Central Economic Investigation Bureau are its Members.
The major achievements of the Task Force include the compilation of a database of shell companies by SFIO.
