A Round-up of the Kreaverse
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When we launched Krea this Week, it was to translate the sentiment of all of us meeting together, in one place, listening to each other, sharing our ideas and celebrating our achievements. It was an attempt to embody what the Krea Community would do as we meet each other in the bylanes of our workspace, indulge in spontaneous conversations, sudden spurts of ideas and a sense of companionship, and construct a a space, beyond the tangible realms. Over the weeks, we are glad we have been able to do, bits and pieces of this. As we head into the summer break, we will also pause and reflect briefly, on why we do what we do and how to constantly improve.
As curtains draw on April and we head into the month of May, the calendar is packed with events and activities slated for the upcoming weeks that we assure will feel as refreshing as the first rain showers on the parched summer earth. From Arts, Humanities, Sciences, to Management Studies, right before the Krea faculty and students head for a summer break, there are talks, sessions and activities planned to dive deeper into the imperative conversations that we have at Krea on an everyday basis. This week, we also read and wrote poetry and enjoyed it thoroughly.
As we curate this edition, the Outreach and Admissions team continue to reach out to aspirants across the globe, in what is the last lap before we close Admissions and usher in an enthusiastic and bright new cohort, ready to be enabled into future leaders. Sessions and seminars coordinated across disciplines continue to be packed with learnings and students continue to valiantly crusade through presentations, classes, assessments, clubs activities, sporting events, and so much more with vigour. Various functions within the University continue to introduce novel sessions for skill development and new ideas.
We have much planned with your support in the coming days, do keep watching this space as it unravels.
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From the Vice-Chancellor’s Office
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Key changes to the academic and administrative structures, which will take effect from 1 July 2023
The three divisional chairs at SIAS – Dr Sumitra Ranganathan, Dr John Mathew, and Dr Guha Dharmarajan – complete their term on 31 May 2023. Two new positions of Associate Deans will be in place from 1 July 2023: Associate Dean (Academic) and Associate Dean (Students). Dr Panchali Ray has been appointed Associate Dean (Academic) and Dr Kalyan Chakravarthy to the role of Associate Dean (Students). Dr Prithvi Chandra Shobhi, will continue in his current role, but focussing primarily on regulatory matters. In their respective roles, all three Associate Deans will support the Dean for SIAS who will maintain oversight for faculty within the division. Until such time the Dean’s appointment is finalised, Vice-Chancellor, Professor Nirmala Rao will serve as the interim Dean.
Amanjit Kaur Ahuja, Associate Director, ILS (Inclusive Learning Support), will assume the new role as Director of Student Services, with oversight for ILS and shared responsibility with CAO, Colonel Satya Saran, for OSL ( Office of Student Life).
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As the old saying goes, take a picture, it will last longer. This week we shine the spotlight on Shutterbugs, the Photography Club of IFMR GSB.
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Shutterbugs has been responsible for some of the most splendid clicks across Krea University’s social media handles and the members continue to capture the everyday mood of the campus in the form of imagery, allowing them to exist as a thing of beauty, memories that we can live through, irrespective of where we are. Established in 2015, Shutterbugs provides a supportive environment for the people within the IFMR GSB community who are interested in photography. In addition to capturing all the happenings at IFMR GSB, this club also organises intra-college photography competitions and photo walks so as to promote the art of photography in the community.
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A weekly series showcasing students and their stories
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This week, Avinash Naik, Cohort of 2024, SIAS discusses how the faculty at Krea helped make his academic journey during the pandemic a smooth ride, how he made the best use of opportunities available on campus to build his creative portfolio, and how Krea's action-oriented approach paved the way for his debut authorship. Watch this interview for more!
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All of us within the Krea community love our campus, don’t we? And for everyone else who hasn’t yet had the chance to explore the space, here is our campus tour video, a tour through the space we call home.
A chance to experience the best of creativity and innovation at Krea University, located in the thriving industrial hub of Sri City, India. In this video, we take the viewer on a virtual tour of our dynamic campus and our world-class facilities that have been thoughtfully designed to foster interdisciplinary learning and cutting-edge research. A glimpse of the incredible Kreaverse that awaits our future Kreators!
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This Earth Day, we raised a toast to the planet, and ruminated on the interconnectedness of Earth and its people. Along with Dr Bharath Sundaram, veteran ecologist, researcher, and conservationist who is also Sundram Fasteners Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at SIAS, we gazed into the future through the lens of Dr Sundaram's experiences in the field.
We at Krea, are adapting, evolving and recalibrating thoughts, actions and ideas each day, and firmly believe that we need to protect, preserve and invest in our planet, today and everyday.
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A Glimpse into IFMR GSB’s Promising Placements of 2022-23
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We say this with pride, 100% of IFMR GSB cohort 2021-23 has been placed across top BFSI, Consulting and IT firms. MBAs have landed an average pay of Rs 13.5 lakhs, the highest being Rs 22.9 lakhs.
In the ongoing placements season at IFMR GSB, all 184 students from the cohort of 2021-23 have been hired by leading global and Indian consulting, finance and technology companies. Some of the prominent recruiters include JPMC, Deloitte, Wells Fargo, EY, HSBC India, Morgan Stanley, NOMURA, TVS NEXT, Societe Generale, and Axis Bank, to name a few. The cohort of 2022-24 is also kicking off promising summer internships, with students having bagged niche roles with the highest stipend at 1 lakh per month.
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In a virtual event, Prof Amit Das will take MBA aspirants through the ethos of the B-school, what sets our pedagogy apart, how strategically the course content is curated to give students a competitive edge, the multi-faceted mentors who will guide you along the way and a bit about CMAT. Aspirants will also have a chance to interact with their seniors, who will take them through their experience of the promising placement opportunities and robust summer internships. The session will also give a glimpse into the vibrant student life, the diverse clubs and committees and their future second home, the campus. All this followed by a Q&A session.
If you would know of an aspiring candidate, please do invite them to the event.
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8-Count: A Celebration of Dance
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Right on heels of the mesmerising event that passed, Mudra, the Dance Club at School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences invites everyone to celebrate the International Dance Day, together.
Please do come to the OAT on 29 April, in celebration of the universal language of dance, its cultural significance, and its unifying power.
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Comovement in Economic Fluctuations
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Prof Anindya S Chakrabarti, Associate Professor of Economics, IIM, Ahmedabad would be visiting Krea University in person to give a talk on 3 May as part of the ECONVERSATIONS seminar series. The talk will explore the origin of comovement in economic fluctuations across regions through an administrative dataset on plant-level sales in India.
The in person talk will be held in room 2F at 2.30 PM.
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Of Lighting, Stages and Live Arts
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Global Arts at Krea University is organising a two-day Immersion Workshop, Lighting for the Live Arts, curated by Dr Swarnamalya Ganesh, Assistant Professor of Practice, SIAS. This workshop will offer an introduction to lighting and its objectives as a stage tool, tech sessions at a black box, interaction with industry professionals, hands-on learning of lighting design for Live Arts, and exploration of global and local subgenres in the emerging post-internet culture.
The workshop will be hosted at Medai - The Stage, at Chennai.
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A Celebration of Indian Arts
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Mudra in collaboration with the SIAS Music Club, put up Krea’s first Indian Classical Production: Milaap on 21 April.
Presenting a unique blend of classical dance accompanied by the power of live music, the dancers led the audience on a journey of pure artistic delight. With over twenty dancers and seven musicians taking part, this event was a celebration of the rich and mesmerising art forms of classical music and dance from India.
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The Spark of Entrepreneurship
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As part of Startup Storm at SIAS, an independent event hosted by SIAS students with support from the OSL, CAO and CSO, the participants immersed themselves in an intensive 24-hour bootcamp discovering their why, ideating on products and building teams, all concluding in a splendid Shark Tank-style finale. The judges and speakers judges at the very first edition of Startup Storm included Venkataramani S, Co-Founder & Chief Business Officer, Karkinos Healthcare, Raghav Verma, Co-Founder, Chaayos, Chandrashekar Kupperi, Founder, ANOVA, M&A and Fundraise Advisory, Kayalvizhi Karthikeyan, Project Manager, PayPal and Meha Sinha, AVP- Business Development, Karkinos Healthcare. Mentors Gokul Kumar, Product Manager at Madhi Foundation and Rahul Soni, Co-Founder and CTO, Bridge Healthcare Pvt Ltd advised the students on their ideas and pitches.
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April is the month of the poetry and few of Krea students and faculty have been writing a poem-a-day every day this month with other poets on the Daily Riyaaz. All poets and admirers of poetry alike, do head to https://dailyriyaaz.blogspot.com/. This is the 13th continuous year of Daily Riyaaz.
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Building a Dream University
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Sathyanarayanan Ramachandran, Sundram Fasteners Associate Professor, Marketing, IFMR GSB was a panelist on BW Businessworld’s 6th Annual Higher Education Conference, held in Chennai on 19 April, 2023 and shared his ideas about building a dream university from a multi-stakeholder perspective. This year's Annual Higher Education celebrated the theme Classroom to Career: Bringing Higher Education and industry closer together, with an aim to talk of innovation and entrepreneurship as key building blocks of competitive and dynamic economies.
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Critical Thinking and the Act of Writing
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Krea-CWP (Centre for Writing and Pedagogy) held workshops for school students in Hyderabad on 20 and 21 April. Both events were in-person workshops on critical thinking for school students from classes 10, 11, and 12 at Birla Open Minds, Hyderabad and for class 12 IB board students at Johnson Grammar School, Hyderabad. The workshop titled, Trusting Doubt: Reading & Thinking Critically, led by Neha Mishra, Faculty Associate at Krea-CWP explored what constitutes analysis and evaluation, if critical thinking is the ability to analyse and evaluate processes and phenomena that we encounter in the world.
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Honouring the Man who Knew Infinity
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A talk commemorating the death anniversary of the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, titled R R R, was hosted by Prof Govindarajan, Visiting Professor of Physics at SIAS. The talk was about Ramanujan, Regularisation and Renormalisation. Ramanujan understood the meaning of infinity in his own mysterious way and the talk focused on some issues from his work and their connections to modern Quantum Physics.
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Through the Lens of a Psychologist
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Dr Tuğçe Kurtiş, Prescott College, USA, delivered a virtual talk on ‘Thinking Like a (Cultural) Psychologist: Context in Mind, Mind in Context’, as part of the Speaker Series: Thinking Like a Psychologist for students and faculty of Krea University.
The presentation approached the theme of thinking like a psychologist from the perspective of cultural psychology.
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Bolt takes the Krea Sports Arena by Storm
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Bolt, the Sports Fest hosted by SIAS Sports Club is in full swing. The week that passed witnessed a number of indoor and outdoor sporting events being played, the adrenaline high and the cheering louder. Here are a few of the clicks from the Kho-Kho and Throwball sporting events.
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Confronting Inequalities and Prejudices in Workspace
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Sayantan Datta, Faculty Associate, Krea-CWP is one of the twelve recipients of the, g3: genDeralities and work fellowship from the ReFrame Institute of Art and Expression, supported partially by the Goethe Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. It supports creative and deliberative work that confronts inequalities and prejudice in workspaces. Selected fellows explore nuances of the inherently gendered nature of labour, the visible and invisible work that women, queer and trans* people engage in, and the roles they are expected to fulfill or are prohibited from. Datta has received this fellowship along with their collaborator, Ajeya, to publish the second issue of the zine Science Frictions.
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Of Homes, Migration and Policy Making
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Dr Arani Basu, Assistant Professor of Sociology, SIAS, delivered a talk titled, Mobility, Uncertainty and the Construction of Home: A Study of Skilled Indian Migrants in Germany at Sachverständigenrat für Integration und Migration (SVR), Berlin, Germany on 18 April. The talk focused on the transnational practices and migration pathways of the Indian immigrants in Germany, within the larger context of the construction of home, future of migration and policy making.
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Bookshelf (Object Lessons)
by Lydia Pyne
Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence. With a shrewd eye toward this particular moment in the history of books, Pyne takes the reader on a tour of the bookshelf that leads critically to this juncture: amid rumours of the death of book culture, why is the life of the bookshelf in full bloom?
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Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
This week Dr Brijesh Kumar Mishra, Associate Professor of Chemistry, SIAS, recommends the book, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by the science writer Richard Dawkins.
A collection of forty-two essays, lectures and lessons, this book is an invitation to place reason, logic and empirical evidence at the centre stage when we look at nature and society. The subjects covered in this compilation range from evolution to time, suffering and the probability of alien life. The writing is dotted with humour and personal reflections, characteristic of Dawkins’ celebrated style, and is a continuous reminder of the importance of cultivating a scientific way of thinking.
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How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind - The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality
In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people―Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others―and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a Cold War rationality.
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Students from the Kreaverse capture a slice of Krea on camera
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Thank you, Sharan Anirudh, IFMR GSB cohort of 2022-24, for capturing the vibrant moods of the campus and translating them into memories.
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Admin office: 196, T.T.K. Road, Alwarpet, Chennai - 600018
Campus: 5655, Central Express Way, Sri City, Andhra Pradesh - 517464
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