Top Current Affairs of the day: 27 May 2022

"Tomb of Sand," An Indian Novel Wins International Booker Prize

For "Tomb of Sand," Indian writer Geetanjali Shree and American translator Daisy Rockwell won the International Booker Prize.

Highlights:

• For "Tomb of Sand," Indian writer Geetanjali Shree and American translator Daisy Rockwell won the International Booker Prize.

  //

  // //

• It's the first novel written in any Indian language to win the prestigious award, which honors fiction from all over the world translated into English. The prize money of 50,000 pounds ($63,000) will be split between Shree, who resides in New Delhi, and Rockwell, who lives in Vermont.

• Tilted Axis Press, a tiny publisher in the United Kingdom, has released "Tomb of Sand." It was formed by Deborah Smith, a translator who received the International Booker Prize in 2016 for her translation of Han Kang's "The Vegetarian," to publish novels from Asia.

About The Book:

The novel follows an octogenarian widow who defies tradition and confronts the ghosts of her past during the chaotic 1947 partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. During an event in London, Shree's novel won the prize over five other candidates, including Polish Nobel Laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Argentina's Claudia Pieiro, and South Korean author Bora Chung.

Trade Transactions With Sri Lanka To Be Settled In Indian rupees Approved By RBI.

Outside of the Asian Clearing Union mechanism, the Reserve Bank of India has allowed trade transactions with Sri Lanka to be conducted in Indian Rupees (INR).

Highlights:

• Due to the difficulty that exporters have in getting income from Sri Lanka, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has allowed trade transactions with the island country to be conducted in Indian Rupees (INR) outside of the Asian Clearing Union (ACU) mechanism. 

• The Indian government backed a $1 billion term loan from the State Bank of India to Sri Lanka to help fund the purchase of essential goods and services like food, medicine, petroleum, and industrial raw materials.

• Under the terms of the agreement, financing of eligible goods and services exported from India, as defined by the agreement, would be permitted, but only provided they met certain conditions.

• SBI has agreed to fund their acquisition as long as they are acceptable for export under the Indian Foreign Trade Policy.

• According to the RBI, these directives take effect immediately.

• The credit facility under the agreement can be used for up to 12 months after it is signed.

Supercomputer Param Porul Inaugurated At NIT Tiruchirappalli

Under the National Supercomputing Mission, a supercomputer called Param Porul was unveiled at NIT Tiruchirappalli (NSM). 

Highlights:

• Under the National Supercomputing Mission, a supercomputer called Param Porul was unveiled at NIT Tiruchirappalli (NSM).

• The National Science and Technology Museum (NSM) collaborates with the Dept. of Science and Technology (DST) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

• The Param Porul supercomputing facility was created as part of phase two of the national supercomputing initiative to support computational research.

• The Param Porul uses direct contact liquid cooling technology to achieve excellent power usage efficiency while lowering operational costs. For the advantage of researchers, multiple programs from diverse scientific disciplines have been loaded on the system, including Weather and Climate, Bioinformatics, Computational Chemistry, Molecular Dynamics, Material Sciences, Computational Fluid Dynamics, and others.

• To meet the computing needs of various scientific and engineering applications, the system is equipped with a mix of CPU nodes, GPU nodes, high memory nodes, high throughput storage, and high-performance Infiniband connectivity.