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| Payal Tarafdar (centre) at the Miss Luit contest |
Assamese beauties vie for top honours
With two Assamese beauties vying for top honours in two of the most prestigious beauty contests in the country, we can look forward to some exciting moments later this year.
Payal Tarafdar, who has modelled for brands like Monte Carlo, will be vying for the Gladrags Super Model contest title in Mumbai later this year.
A Miss Luit first runner-up in 2004, Tarafdar graduated from Bishop Cotton College in Bangalore. She is attending a workshop for the grand finale under the guidance of Maureen Wadia, who heads Gladrags magazine and is one of the forces behind the Miss India pageant.
Another Miss Luit title winner, Sangeeta Bora of Jorhat, will vie for the top honours of the Pantaloon Femina Miss India title in Mumbai along with 25 other contestants from across the country.
Bora shifted to New Delhi after winning the Miss Luit crown in 2006. Ever since she began working for international brand Madame, there has been no looking back for Bora.
More than a century after Hem Chandra Barua, one of the most prominent Assamese writers of the 19th century, compiled the first dictionary exclusively for children, the Children’s Literary Trust has come up with another compilation to help the young generation learn and understand the language.
The credit goes to Bani Kanta Sarma — the former head of the department of Modern Indian Languages, Gauhati University — who took great pains to compile the dictionary which will be available in the market by the first week of April.
The dictionary will have more than 30,000 words, complete with illustrations and sentence construction for easy understanding of the Assamese language at a time when most children prefer to learn Hindi or English. The dictionary will also have the Assamese meaning of present day buzzwords like cyber, Internet, website and others.
Arunachal Pradesh has 26 major tribes and nearly 150 sub-tribes, each speaking its own distinct language but without any script of their own.
The pioneering works of a linguist may soon see a common script adopted by the state government.
Koyu’s script, named Tani lipi, has already passed the test of experts at the School of Linguistics in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and the Central Institute for Indian Languages in Mysore.
The government has started the process of adopting the script, which is likely to be introduced very soon, an official said.
Koyu said the script would prevent the extinction of different tribal languages which are written in Roman script.
