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This article probes the silence surrounding the gendered violence experienced by abducted women, it also discusses, the author Amrita Pritam's role through her creative genius to re-narrativize the violated women's relationship to their loved ones, and their own identities in order to make sense of the inscriptions that the violence has left on their bodies and through this, arbitrate their survival. The Skeleton, redefines parameters of honour and chastity for the abducted woman who has been looked as 'a symbol of honour' since ages by patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Education is always a search for quality and excellence. It opens the horizon of the human mind full of prospects and possibilities, visions, and fulfillments. Today, the system as whole of higher education in India has grown. However, we fail to maintain quality along with growth. The quality of education depends upon the quality of teacher education. The age-old contents, methods, and teaching materials have made teacher education unattractive and delinked from its present objectives. Teacher education programmes should exhibit a positive approach in building up the knowledge base in fostering innovative, interactive transactions strategies, and in broadening continuous and comprehensive evaluation. All these add to build the profile of teachers' confidence in the competitive world. They would exhibit a perfect blend of professionalism and value with enshrined personality, aiming for professional growth, and employability in a global prospective. Therefore, a sound programme of professional education of school and college teacher is essential for the qualitative improvement of education. Investment in teacher education can bring rich dividends, because the financial resources required are small when measured against the resulting improvement in the education of the millions of the boys and girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

a-Santalol, an active component of sandalwood oil, has been studied in detail in recent years for its skin cancer preventive efficacy in murine models of skin carcinogenesis; however, the mechanism of its efficacy is not defined. Two major biological events responsible for the clonal expansion of transformed/initiated cells into tumors are uncontrolled growth and loss of apoptotic death. Accordingly, in the present study, employing human epidermoid carcinoma A431 cells, we assessed whether a-santalol causes cell growth inhibition and/or cell death by apoptosis. Treatment of cells with a-santalol at concentrations of 2575 M resulted in a concentration- and a time-dependent decrease in cell number, which was largely due to cell death. Fluorescence-activated cell sorting analysis of Annexin V/propidium iodide (PI) stained cells revealed that a-santalol induces a strong apoptosis as early as 3 h post-treatment, which increases further in a concentration- and a time-dependent manner up to 12 h. Mechanistic studies showed an involvement of caspase-3 activation and poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase cleavage through activation of upstream caspase-8 and -9. Further, the treatment of cells with a-santalol also led to disruption of the mitochondrial membrane potential and cytochrome c release into the cytosol, thereby implicating the involvement of the mitochondrial pathway. Pre-treatment of cells with caspase-8 or -9 inhibitor, pan caspase inhibitor or cycloheximide totally blocked a-santalol-caused caspase-3 activity and cleavage, but only partially reversed apoptotic cell death. This suggests involvement of both caspase-dependent and -independent pathways, at least under caspase inhibiting conditions, in a-santalol-caused apoptosis. Together, this study for the first time identifies the apoptotic effect of a-santalol, and defines the mechanism of apoptotic cascade activated by this agent in A431 cells, which might be contributing to its overall cancer preventive efficacy in mouse skin cancer models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the literary writing of Indian-American authors Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni and Manjinder Kaur Wratch.

The article analyzes experiences of sexual assault victims and survivors from the moratorium of patriarchy's 'shame culture' and argues that anguish of violated women needs to be made accessible through literature and popular culture.

In this article, the author discusses various works of author Amrita Pritam such as autobiography "The Revenue Stamp" and also discusses considering of sexual vivaciousness as a problem and sexual passiveness a virtue for traditional Indian women, which is evident in Pritam's writing.

Several studies have documented the anticancer and chemopreventive efficacy of grape seed extract (GSE) against various malignancies including prostate cancer (PCA). GSE is a complex mixture of polyphenols including gallic acid (GA), catechin (Cat), epicatechin (Epi) and procyanidins–oligomers of Cat and Epi, some of which are esterified with GA. Initial studies to identify the GSE components cytotoxic to human prostate carcinoma (DU145) cells demonstrated that GA and several crude chromatographic fractions containing procyanidin dimers and trimers were biologically active. The focus of the present work was to purify 14 procyanidins from the fractions and to identify those with highest activity toward growth inhibition, cell death and apoptosis in DU145 cells. The most active procyanidin was identified by mass spectrometry and enzymatic hydrolysis as the 3,3′-di-O-gallate ester of procyanidin dimer B2 (Epi–Epi). B2-digallate exhibited dose-dependent effects on DU145 cells over the range 25–100 μM, whereas GA exhibited comparable activity at lower doses but was highly lethal at 100 μM. Structure–activity studies demonstrated that all three hydroxyl groups of GA are necessary for activity, but a free carboxylic acid group is not required even though esterification reduced the activity of GA. These data, and the fact that non-esterified B2 exhibited little or no activity, suggest that the galloyl groups of B2-digallate are primarily responsible for its effects on DU145 cells. Taken together, these data identify procyanidin B2-3,3′-di-O-gallate as a novel biologically active agent in GSE that should be studied in greater detail to determine its effects against PCA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]