When we were selected by the Paschimbanga Samagra Siksha Mission for a three-day summer camp on telescope making and sky watching, little did we realise that it would change our life forever.
There were altogether eight schools from our district with 12 students and one teacher from each school. Experts at the observatory of the Indian Centre for Space Physics,
located in a quiet, picturesque village named Sitapur, taught us how to build a five-inch reflector telescope step by step.
We not only enjoyed the night sky using the 24-inch observatory telescope named Vashista, but also had a chance to try out the telescope we made. Moreover, the solar filter allowed us to view the sun and see sunspots. After the camp was over, we took this telescope to our school for others to enjoy the sky.
Sujal Nayak, Arghya Banerjee, Sayan Bera
Class IX, Kharagpur Atulmoni Polytechnic High School, West Midnapore
Summer fun
Since 1993, the Indian Mime Theatre (IMT) has been organising a children’s theatre workshop at the National Mime Institute in Salt Lake, Calcutta, every summer. This year, the workshop was a residential one. Through the eight days, we were exposed to various art forms. Apart from that, we also learnt to take on responsibilities and make friends. Legendary mime artist Niranjan Goswami taught us movements and expressions. We were introduced to Raibeshe, a martial dance form by Kallol Dey. Our bodies ran out of fuel as we performed the energetic steps. Suroj Biswas showed us the world of aerial art — acting or performing stunts while suspended in air by a cloth. Under the guidance of Dipjyoti Mondal, we transformed ourselves into different toys and presented a colourful mime show.
Pradip Patra showed us how waste can be assembled into astonishing artworks while Prabir Sinha showed us the art of shadow puppetry. Subhadeep Guha took us to the land of music where we created short musical pieces. We also learnt self defence, yoga, clay modelling, dance, sign language, baking and staged a play written by Manoj Mitra.
My heart is still filled with the memories of the camp and the warmth of great camaraderie.
Shounak Banerjee
Class IX, W.W.A. Cossipore English School, Calcutta
Intern challenge
APIs or application programming interfaces are widely used in sectors such as finance, healthcare and e-commerce. But security often takes a backseat to functionality and speed. During my year-long internship at Zettawise Consulting Pvt. Ltd, I was entrusted with leading the development of an API security solution for the Cyber Security Grand Challenge 2.0, organised by the Data Security Council of India and the Union ministry of electronics and information technology. We designed a solution to perform real-time traffic analysis to detect and block threats such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting and header manipulation before they reach backend systems. One of the standout features is Shadow API detection — which identifies unauthorised endpoints that expand the attack surface without an organisation’s awareness.
Parul Sharma,
Third year cyber security, Techno India College of Technology, Calcutta