• 1st Parsi on Indian cricket team since 1975.

ABOUT:

• Arzan Nagwaswalla,a 23-year-old left-arm seamer from Gujarat, has been picked as a reserve player in the Indian Test squad named for the World Test Championship final against New Zealand in Southampton.
• Arzan Rohinton Nagwaswalla, hailing from a Parsi community in a village of Nargol, Nagwaswalla near the Maharashtra border, is the first Parsi cricketer to break into the national team since 1975and the only active Parsi cricketer.
• Farokh Engineerplayed his final Test for India in 1975, while Diana Edulji’s last game in the women’s team came in July 1993.

• Ujjwala Singhania takes over as 38th National President FICCI FLO.

ABOUT:

• Ujjwala Singhaniahas been appointed as the National President of FICCI Ladies Organization (FLO), the oldest women-led & women-centric business chamber of Southeast Asia.
• As the 38thNational President of FLO Singhania will focus on empowering women by facilitating an enabling environment that promotes entrepreneurship, industry participation and economic development of women.
• Under her leadership, FLO will carry out many interventions towards fostering larger contributions of women in India’s Industrial and economic growth story.

• The Prime Minister of India paid tribute toJagadguru Basaveshwara on the occasion of Basava Jayanthi.
• In November 2015, the Prime Minister of India inaugurated thestatue of Basaveshwara along the bank of the river Thames at Lambeth in London.

 About:

• He was an Indian 12^th-century Philosopher, Statesman and a social reformer.
• He was Lingayat saintin the Shiva-focussed Bhakti movement, and Hindu Shaivite social reformer during the reign of the Kalyani Chalukya/Kalachuri dynasty.
• The Lingayats are a Hindu sect with a wide following in southern India that worships Shiva as the only deity.
• He is also known as Bhakti Bhandari (literally, the treasurer of devotion), or Basaveswara (Lord Basava).

Contribution:

• Basavanna spread social awareness through his poetry known as
• Several important Lingayat works are credited to Basavanna, including Vachana such as the Shat-sthala-vachana, Kala-jnana-vachana, Mantra-gopya, Ghatna Chakra-vachana and Raja-yoga-vachana.
• Basavanna, like Gautama Buddha,taught people how to live happily in a rational social order which later came to be known as the Sharana movement.
• The Sharana movement attracted people from all castes, and like most strands of the Bhakti movement, produced a corpus of literature, the vachanas, that unveiled the spiritual universe of the Veerashaiva saints.
• Basava fought against the inhuman practice of the caste system, which discriminated against people based on their birth.
• The Anubhava Mantapaestablished by Basava laid down the foundation of social democracy.
• Basava believed that man becomes great not by his birth but byhis conduct in the society.
• He taught the dignity of manual labour by insisting on work as worship.

• Recently, Israeli armed forces attacked Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Haram esh-Sharif in Jerusalem, ahead of a march by Zionist nationalists commemorating Israel’s capture of the eastern half of the city in 1967.
• The threatened eviction of dozens of Palestinian families in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrahescalated the crisis further.

Al-Aqsa Mosque:

• It is one of the holiest structures in the Islamic faith. It sits inside a 35-acre site known by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary, and by Jews as the Temple Mount.
• The site is part of the Old City of Jerusalem, sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims.
• It is believed to have been completed early in the 8^th centuryand faces the Dome of the Rock, the golden-domed Islamic shrine that is a widely recognized symbol of Jerusalem.
• TheUnited Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, has classified the Old City of Jerusalem and its walls as a World Heritage Site.

Sheikh Jarrah Issue:

• Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced out of their homes when the State of Israel was created in historical Palestine in 1948.

• Twenty-eight of those Palestinian families moved to Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem to settle there.
  • In 1956, when East Jerusalem was ruled by Jordan, the Jordanian Ministry of Construction and Development and the UNRelief and Works Agency facilitated the construction of houses for these families in Sheikh Jarrah. But Israel would capture East Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967.
• By the early 1970s, Jewish agencies started demanding the families leave the land.
  • Earlier this year (2021),the Central Court in East Jerusalem upheld a decision to evict four Palestinian families from their homes in Sheikh Jarrah in favour of Jewish settlers.
  • The issue remains unresolved and potentially inflammable.

• Six young girls from Assam have developed a biodegradable and compostable yoga mat called ‘Moorhen Yoga Mat’.
• Note: The Mat was developed with the support of the North East Centre for Technology Application and Reach(NECTAR). NECTAR is an autonomous body under the Department of Science & Technology(DST).

About Moorhen Yoga Mat:

• The ‘Moorhen Yoga mat’ is named after Kam Sorai or Purple moorhen (a resident bird of Deepor Beel Wildlife sanctuary).
• The mat has been developed from Water Hyacinth. The mat is 100% biodegradable and 100% compostable mat.
• The mat comes in a cotton canvas cloth bag. So that no zip or metal closures are used.

Benefits of the Mat: 

• The Mat can improve the aquatic ecosystem of the wetland through the removal of water hyacinth
• It can provide sustainable production of utility products with community engagement
• The mat can generate livelihood for indigenous communities to become completely ‘Atma Nirbhar’.

• The World Bank has released a report titled “Migration and Development Brief, 2020”.

About Migration and Development Brief Report:

• Prepared by: The report is prepared by the Migration and Remittances Unit, Development Economics (DEC)- the premier research and data arm of the World Bank.
• Aim: The report aims to provide an update on key developments. Especially in the area of migration and remittance flows and related policies over the past six months.
  • The report also provides medium-term projections of remittance flows to developing countries.
• The report is produced twice a year.

Key Findings of the Migration and Development Brief:

 Findings Related to India:

• India has received the highest amount of remittances in 2020. This was followed by China, Mexico, the Philippines, Egypt, Pakistan, France and Bangladesh.
• India’s Remittances: India has received over USD83 billion in remittances in 2020. This was despite the pandemic that devastated the world economy.
  • In 2019, India had received USD83.3 billion in remittances.
• India’s remittances fellby just 0.2% in 2020. This was due to a 17% fall in remittances from the United Arab Emirates. However, this was offset by the resilient flows from the United States and other host countries.
• Remittances outflow from Indiain 2020 was USD7 billion. In 2019, it was around USD7.5 billion.

• The National Bamboo Mission recently launched the Management Information System to strengthen the domestic Agarbatti industry.

About the MIS Module

• It will collect data about Agarbatti production, availability of raw materials, location of stick making units, production capacity, functioning of units, etc.
• The system will act as an intermediary between the production units and the Agarbatti industry (as a whole). This will help to fill the information gaps.

National Bamboo Mission

• The National Bamboo Mission was launched in 2018-19.
• It is currently implemented in twenty one states.
• To boost the domestic Agarbatti units, the import duty on round sticks were increased to 25%. Also, the raw batti imports were moved from free to restricted category.

• The Voyager 1 probe recently picked up humming sound. The scientists have named this as “Plasma Wave Emission”. This humming sound has been interpreted as interstellar gas activity. Moving forward, the Voyager 1 will help scientists to understand the interactions between solar winds and the interstellar medium. The hum was of narrow frequency bandwidth.

About the discovery

• The discovery of humming sound was made by the Plasma Wave System Instrument of Voyager 1. This sound was heard after Voyager 1 exited the heliosphere and entered the interstellar space.
• The first humming sound was heard after three months the Voyager 1 exited heliosphere. The second sound was heard after six months the Voyager 1 exited the heliosphere. However, the second sound was louder. With this, the scientists conclude that the interstellar medium is getting thicker at faster rate.

Voyager 1

• The Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to enter the heliosphere of the sun in 2012.
• The Voyager 1 was launched in 1977.
• It was launched to study the outer solar system and planets such as Saturn and Jupiter on its way.
• Voyager 2 is called the twin of Voyager 1.
• After operating for 44 years, it is still communicating with the Deep Space Network of NASA. The Deep Space Network of NASA is a worldwide space communication network located in the US, Spain and Australia.

Tauktae Cyclone is the first cyclone in 2021 in India. The Kerala Government has issued “Red Alert”.

This name has been given by Myanmar and it means ‘gecko’.

ABOUT CYCLONE:

• The warm and moist air in the ocean rises up. As more and more air rises up, it leaves less air. This creates an area of low pressure. The pressure around this area is high. The air from the surrounding areas pushes into the low-pressure area. Now this air gets warmed up and rises. The cycle continues.
• As the warm air rises up it cools and condenses into clouds. The whole system of wind and clouds spins and grows. This is aided by the ocean heat and evaporating water.
• As the system rotates faster and faster, an eye is formed at the centre. The eye is clear and calm.
• When the system rotates at 63 kilometre per hour, it is called “Tropical Storm”. When the wind speed reaches 119 kilometre per hour it is called tropical cyclone or hurricane.

• Whitley Awards are called “Green Oscar”. In 2021, the Whitley Award was won by Nuklu Phom of Nagaland. He is the only Indian to receive the award.

Whitley Awards:

• Whitley Awards are presented annually by the Whitley Fund for Nature. It is presented to recognise grass root level conservation leaders.
• It involves process of reference, application and interview.
• The Whitley Fund for Nature was established by Edward Whitley in 1994. It has so far given 16 million pounds to support the work of two hundred environmental heroes.

Nuklu Phom:

• Nuklu Phom is creating “Biodiversity Peace Corridors”. The main objective is to extend the “Yaongyimchen Community Biodiversity Area”.
• Apart from conservation of wildlife and environmental protection he also extends his works to health, education and micro finance.
• Lemasachenlok Society was founded by him. It has worked towards sensitising the locals about the Amur Falcons. It has set up three reserves that helped to increase the number of roosting Falcons.
• Nuklu Phom is populary known as the “Amur Falcon Man of Nagaland”.