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Bengaluru/Bangalore, the capital city of the Indian state of Karnataka, has played a vital role in the advancement of communication and technology across the globe. Following the progressivist logic of neoliberal urbanism, the city evolved from the quiet, placid ‘Pensioners’ Paradise’ into the bustling ‘Silicon Valley of India’ at an accelerated pace. Bangalore’s sudden growth into a global cyberpolis has motivated its recent entry into the realm of crime fiction in English. The current paper draws on this connection and proposes to offer a spatial critique of the crime novels in Anita Nair’s Inspector Gowda series, Cut like Wound (2012) and Chain of Custody (2016), set in Bangalore. To map the transitions in the spatial structures and social relations of this rapidly changing city, it uses interdisciplinary approaches of geocriticism and the postmodern social theories of space. Also, by analysing the representations of residential segregation in Nair’s novels, the paper intends to foreground how social inequalities, gentrification, and ghettoization have contributed to the raging scenario of crime and violence in Bangalore.

Following the American discovery of the high concentration of skilled IT professionals in Bengaluru, the Karnataka Government announced its IT policies in the late 1990s which changed the city from a placid ‘pensioners’ paradise’ to the bustling ‘Silicon Valley of India’. With almost an explosion of disruptive changes, the topography and the demography of the city both saw a dramatic transformation. The ‘Mr Majestic Trilogy’ (2012–2017) by Zac O’Yeah is a crime-detection series set in post-millennial Bengaluru. The current paper argues that it is possible to read this crime novel series as a social critique of the changing (social) spaces and interactions in the city, albeit these are represented with humour and light-heartedness in his novels. The paper seeks to read the novels as representing the specificities of the urban experience in this global South Asian city, and as bringing to the fore the dialectics of space and spatiality, especially as it embraces a neoliberal wave of globalisation. It looks at the narratives’ engagement with various aspects of urban experience, including crime and migration, and also investigates the network of relationships that the novels explore in their depiction of the urban/hinterlands duality. For its purposes, the paper borrows insights from theorists of space and urbanity.

In this work, we present the application of a inexpensive water-soluble New Fuchsin (NF) dye as a photosensitizer for dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC). A comprehensive study including computational, spectroscopy and cyclic voltammetry measurements established the efficacy of NF as a photosensitizer. Density functional theory (DFT) modelling of NF is performed to estimate the energy levels and experimentally verified using the cyclic voltammetry measurements. For the spectroscopy characterization time-resolved absorption and fluorescence studies are employed on NF in ethanol solution and as thin film deposited on glass and mesoporous TiO2. Femtosecond transient absorption measurements revealed ultrafast electron injection within

In this paper, we present results from the detailed investigations on the synthesis, optical, emission, electrochemical, and ultrafast nonlinear optical (NLO) properties along with the excited stat...

The application of solid-state (SS) nanopore devices to single-molecule nucleic acid sequencing has been challenging. Thus, the early successes in applying SS nanopore devices to the more difficult class of biopolymer, glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), have been surprising, motivating us to examine the potential use of an SS nanopore to analyze synthetic heparan sulfate GAG chains of controlled composition and sequence prepared through a promising, recently developed chemoenzymatic route. A minimal representation of the nanopore data, using only signal magnitude and duration, revealed, by eye and image recognition algorithms, clear differences between the signals generated by four synthetic GAGs. By subsequent machine learning, it was possible to determine disaccharide and even monosaccharide composition of these four synthetic GAGs using as few as 500 events, corresponding to a zeptomole of sample. These data suggest that ultrasensitive GAG analysis may be possible using SS nanopore detection and well-characterized molecular training sets.

A mystery story which focuses on a crime and the investigation of that crime is commonly understood as a crime fiction narrative. Its ability to excite the readers, challenge their rational abilities and involve them in the gradual unravelling of the mystery is what makes crime fiction a huge success. With innumerable critical works, scholarly study and continued relevance, crime fiction has entered the canon of literature. A genre that closely reflects the socio-political, historical and cultural aspects of the society, it has gradually acquired a significant role both in critiquing the social order and at the same time for documenting history through its gradual evolution and development. This paper attempts to map the evolution of crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the contemporary times. In doing so, the paper aims to study how social changes impact literary traditions. This study also aims to establish the relevance of crime fiction as a literary genre as it evolves into multiple sub-genres, structures itself into specific rules and regulations and metamorphosises into extra-literary forms.

Food studies, a new addition to the family of humanities, has experienced a rapid rise in the last twenty years and a number of scholars have devoted their time and energy in studying food culture as well as the patterns of eating (Albala, 2013). Food writing has slowly spread its branches into all literary genres including into crime fiction. In more recent crime mysteries, the main plot is supplemented by authentic recipes and descriptions of food and cooking and “gumshoes not only track killers” but also “grill sherry-flavoured tuna” or “bake” chocolate cookies (Carvajal, 1997). The sub-genre of crime fiction that brings together food and crime, has been termed as ‘culinary mystery’ and with the more recent academic interest in food in literature, it has received the critical attention it deserves. The present paper will analyze the role of food in the Reema Ray mysteries of Madhumita Bhattacharyya, The Masala Murder (2012) and Dead in a Mumbai Minute (2014) and the Lalli mysteries of Kalpana Swaminathan, The Secret Gardener (2013) and Page 3 Murders (2006). While for Lalli and her niece Sita, food becomes a luxury, an indulgenceafter a hard day’s grim investigative work; for Reema, baking is her sleuthing tool and stands for her intelligence and autonomy. This paper will thus argue how these novels, with female sleuths who use food/cooking as tools of detection, pose a challenge to the patriarchal roles assigned to women as caregivers and providers of nutrition, and attempt to show how “food mysteries are ultimately about female independence and sustaining the self” (Kalikoff, 2006, p. 75). In doing this, it will alsofocus on how women bridge the gap between the public and private spheres.

A novel zinc phthalocyanine derivative [2(3), 9(10), 16(17), 23(24) tetrakis-4-((4-(1,4,5-triphenyl-1H-imidazol-2-yl)phenyl)ethynyl)phthalocyanine zinc(II) (PBIPC)] was synthesized by incorporating a triphenyl imidazole moiety at its peripheral positions. The detailed mechanisms of absorption, emission, electrochemical, nonlinear optical (NLO) and photophysical (excited state dynamics) properties of PBIPC were explored. The absorption and emission properties of the compound were studied in different solvents. The incorporation of a triphenyl imidazole moiety at the peripheral position of the zinc phthalocyanine slightly broadened the Soret band. The emission studies revealed fluorescence quantum yields to be in the range of 0.11–0.22. The time-resolved fluorescence data established the radiative lifetimes to be in the nanosecond range. The oxidation and reduction processes were found to be ring centered, which were studied using the cyclic voltammetry (CV) technique. The energy optimized structures and HOMO–LUMO levels were calculated using DFT, TD-DFT analysis and were employed by means of hybrid functional theory (B3LYP) at 6-31G (d,p) basis set in the Gaussian 09 package. Two-photon absorption was observed in the NLO studies performed in the visible wavelength range of 600–800 nm while the nonlinear absorption was dominated by three- and four-photon absorption processes in the NIR wavelength range (1.0–1.5 μm). The molecule exhibited self-focusing behavior for all the wavelengths. Finally, the excited state dynamics of the title molecule PBIPC were investigated using femtosecond transient absorption spectroscopy and the results obtained were understood on the basis of a simple three kinetic model, for excitation wavelengths of 400 nm (Soret band) and 650 nm (Q-band). Both the spectra demonstrated a broad positive transient absorption (TA) data which overlapped with the ground state bleach (GSB), which in turn displayed a red shift over a delay of ∼2 ns. The lifetimes revealed a possibility of intersystem crossing (τ > 1 ns) owing to the triplet state transition.

Electrospinning is a simple method for producing nanoscale or microscale fibers from a wide variety of materials. Intrinsically conductive polymers (ICPs), such as polyaniline (PANI), show higher conductivities with the use of secondary dopants like m-cresol. However, due to the low volatility of most secondary dopants, it has not been possible to electrospin secondary doped ICP fibers. In this work, the concept of secondary doping has been applied for the first time to electrospun fibers. Using a novel design for rotating drum electrospinning, fibers were efficiently and reliably produced from a mixture of low- and high-volatility solvents. The conductivity of electrospun PANI-poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) fibers prepared was 1.73 S/cm, two orders of magnitude higher than the average value reported in the literature. These conductive fibers were tested as electrodes for supercapacitors and were shown to have a specific capacitance as high as 3121 F/g at 0.1 A/g, the highest value reported, thus far, for PANI-PEO electrospun fibers.

Broadband (700–950 nm) third order nonlinear optical (NLO) properties of porphyrin (ZnTPP) and phthalocyanine (TPA-ZnPc) molecules in solution form have been studied using the Z-scan technique with femtosecond, MHz pulses. Two-photon, three-photon absorption coefficients along with the third-order NLO susceptibility (χ3) and their optical limiting thresholds are estimated from the theoretical fits to experimental data. Closed aperture Z-scan data provided the information on the sign and magnitude of nonlinear refractive indices (n2) at different wavelengths. Our results clearly suggest that these molecules possess the potential for applications such as optical limiting and biological imaging at high repetition rates.

Chiral ligand exchange membranes were synthesized for potential use in racemic filtration applicable to the pharmaceutical industry. Regenerated cellulose membranes with 1 kDa molecular weight cutoff (MWCO) were grafted with chiral L -proline-copper complexes through an intermediate epoxy-silane surface functionalization reaction performed for various times (0, 1.5, 3, 6, 12 and 24 h). The resulting membranes were evaluated in single component diffusion experiments with D or L -Phenylalanine (Phe), which showed much higher permeability for D -Phe compared with L -Phe. The membranes were then evaluated under pressure-driven, single enantiomer filtration and all grafted membranes exhibited predicted enantiomeric excess, with the 6 h epoxy-silane modified membrane yielding 100% enantiomeric excess (EE) over the largest throughput. An equimolar racemic mixture of D,L-Phe was subsequently used to challenge the optimum 6 h epoxy-silane modified membrane, and a two-tiered breakthrough curve was obtained. As predicted by the single enantiomer filtration results, the membrane was shown to completely fractionate the enantiomers at Peclet numbers of ~ 400. The high Peclet number during filtration combined with complete enantiomer fractionation is very intriguing as a competitive technology to chiral chromatography. Simply exposing the membrane surface to the epoxy-silane, L -proline, and copper solution presents a facile and scalable method for membrane surface modification.

The article deals with my work of reading the ‘difficult lives’ of female domestic workers in the city of Kolkata, India. The institution of domestic servitude in the city of Kolkata has al...

Six novel push-pull trans-A2B free base corroles (1–6) were synthesized and characterized by various spectroscopic techniques. The charge-transfer ability of these trans-A2B-corroles was reflected from the broadness of the UV–visible absorption spectral bands. Corroles 1 and 2 exhibited absorption at lower wavelengths, higher quantum yield and longer singlet state lifetime as compared to 3–6. The ultrafast nonlinear optical (NLO) properties of these corroles were evaluated in visible range (at 800 nm) using the femtosecond Z-scan technique. The investigated corroles possess negative type of nonlinearity and self-defocusing behavior with the magnitude of nonlinear refractive index (n2) in the range of 0.36–2.84 × 10−11 cm2/W, while the two-photon absorption (β) coefficients were in the range of 6.5–68 cm/GW with |χ(3)| in the range of 10−9 e.s.u. The resultant dipole moments of these corroles were calculated theoretically and found to be 1.47–7.26 D depending on the nature of push-pull groups on the meso-phenyl substituents. 1–6 demonstrated excellent NLO activity due to their ‘push-pull’ design. Among the investigated corroles, 1 and 2 possess strong two-photon absorption coefficient and large values of χ(3) suggesting that the nonlinearity of corrole molecules highly depends on the electronic nature and number of meso-substituents. Corroles 1 and 2 possessing two acceptor and one donor moieties depicted superior NLO behavior as compared to corroles (3–6) with one acceptor and two donors due to strong electron withdrawing nature of pentafluorophenyl groups as well as higher singlet excited state lifetime and quantum yield.

This article brings together critical perspectives on a broad range of issues that emerge from a reading of the National Policy on Education 2016. The issues vary from accountability to transdisciplinarity and from the marginalization of transgender people to value education. Such a complex task of critiquing this policy document cannot be accomplished by an individual alone. This task must be borne by a team of scholars with training in diverse fields. Working in a team however generates divergences as well as convergences. Yet no attempt has been made to iron out the creases emanating from differences in opinions, nor persist with the search for an underlying singularity, nor enforce a consensus. Such is the uncertain nature of the task of reforming higher education.

Ultrafast excited-state molecular relaxation process in a triphenylmethane derivative dye New Fuchsin (NF) for dye-sensitized solar cell application in solution and thin film is studied using femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy at pump excitation wavelength 550 nm.

Two novel phenanthro [9,10-d]imidazole substituted metal phthalocyanines, ImCuPc and ImZnPc, have been synthesized and their potential as photosensitizers has been investigated through optical, electrochemical, and ultrafast nonlinear optical (NLO) studies, including their excited state dynamics. The absorption as well as emission spectra of both the title compounds exhibited negligible Stokes shift in different solvents. The molecules depicted a broad Soret band due to the incorporation of phenanthro[9,10-d]imidazole moiety while the Q-bands were characteristic to their metal phthalocyanine group. DFT studies elucidated the HOMO-LUMO (4.99–2.90 eV) levels of these molecules with their energy optimized structures generated using DFT, TD-DFT analysis. The fs-TAS spectra of both the molecules exhibited contribution from singlet-singlet excited state absorption followed by transition to triplet states via intersystem crossing, ISC. The lifetimes calculated from obtained kinetics at specific wavelengths using global fitting demonstrated slow singlet to triplet state intersystem crossing in ImCuPc (decay rate of 1.6 × 108 s−1) and ImZnPc (decay rate of 1.4 × 108s−1). The ns-TAS studies established long lived triplet states in both the molecules with ImCuPc depicting a slightly higher triplet lifetime of ~1.4 μs over ImZnPc with a triplet lifetime of ~1.2 μs The triplet quantum yields (φT) were calculated to be 0.51 for ImCuPc while it was 0.27 for ImZnPc suggesting ImCuPc to be a better photosensitizer (PS) over ImZnPc. We believe the intramolecular D-π-A interaction is stronger in ImCuPc resulting in higher triplet yield. Third-order NLO studies performed at a non-resonant excitation of 800 nm (~50 fs, 1 kHz pulses) demonstrated ImZnPc had a larger two-photon absorption cross-section (994 GM), possibly due to heavy atom effect, while ImCuPc was found to possess superior n2 (3.7 × 10−15 cm2/W). The slightly superior nonlinear optical (NLO) performance of ImCuPc over ImZnPc could also possibly be due to lower energy gap and Copper's open 3d shells as opposed to full 3d shell in Zinc which overlaps with Pc 2p shells making it more active.

In recent years, electrospun polymer fibers have gained attention for various antibacterial applications. In this work, the effect of positively charged polymer fiber mats as antibacterial gauze is studied using electrospun poly(caprolactone) and polyaniline nanofibers. Chloroxylenol, an established anti-microbial agent is used for the first time as a secondary dopant to polyaniline during the electrospinning process to make the surface of the polyaniline fiber positively charged. Both Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus and Gram-negative Escherichia coli are used to investigate the antibacterial activity of the positively charged and uncharged polymer surfaces. The results surprisingly show that the polyaniline surface can inhibit the growth of both bacteria even when chloroxylenol is used below its minimum inhibitory concentration. This study provides new insights allowing the better understanding of dopant-based, intrinsically conducting polymer surfaces for use as antibacterial fiber mats.

We have investigated the photo-physical properties and broadband third-order nonlinear optical properties of a novel Zinc phthalocyanine, PBI-Pc, employing femtosecond transient absorption and the Z-scan technique, respectively, using 1 kHz femtosecond pulses.

This article reads the city of Mumbai as a locus of terrorist disasters and impending/imminent terrorist threats. It primarily draws upon readings of three Hindi films released in 2008— Mumbai Meri Jaan, A Wednesday and Aamir—to decode the narratives of anxiety, fear, retribution and unrest constructed around real or imagined or expected terrorist threats to the cityscape. The article will argue that these films construct such narratives on several levels: a narrative that posits the various elements of the physical urban landscape with possibilities of danger or vulnerability to terror strikes, thus creating a ‘disaster-scape’ accentuated by its constant surveillance by the state as well as vigilante figures; a narrative of shared anxiety and paranoia that characters from all the three films share; a narrative that justifies vigilante action in the face of continued inaction on the part of the law and order system; and a narrative that demands symbolic atonement from the perceived ‘aggressor’. These narratives, in the final analysis, collapse into an overarching narrative of shared anxiety and paranoia that crystallises an imagined cityscape, an ‘essential’ Mumbai, which camouflages the innumerable differences and conflicts that the urban landscape is witness to.

We study the averaged action of the Randall-Sundrum model with a time dependent metric ansatz. It can be reformulated in terms of a Brans-Dicke action with time dependent Newton's constant. We show that the physics of early universe, particularly inflation, is governed by the Brans-Dicke theory. The Brans-Dicke scalar, however, quickly settles to its equilibrium value and decouples from the post-inflationary cosmology. The deceleration parameter is negative to start with but changes sign before the Brans-Dicke scalar settles to its equilibrium value. Consequently, the brane metric smoothly exits inflation. We have also studied the slow-roll inflation in our model and investigated the spectra of the density perturbation generated by the radion field and find them consistent with the current observations., Comment: Revised version, Accepted in Class. Quant. Gravity

Starting from the non-BPS D$(p+1)$-brane action we derive an effective action in $(p+1)$ space dimensions by studying the fluctuations of various bosonic fields around the time-like tachyonic kink solution (obtained by Wick rotation of the space-like tachyonic kink solution) of the non-BPS brane. In real time this describes the dynamics of a space-like or Euclidean brane in $(p+1)$-dimensions containing a Dirac-Born-Infeld part and a Wess-Zumino part. The WZ part is purely imaginary and so the action is complex if it represents the source of the time-dependent background of type II string theory i.e. the S-brane. On the other hand, the WZ part as well as the action is real if it represents the source in type II$^\ast$ string theory i.e. the E-brane. The DBI part is the same as obtained before using different method. This is then further illustrated by considering brane probe in space-like brane background., 14 pages, LaTeX, no figures, minor corrections and acknowledgement added, version to appear in Phys. Lett. B

We obtain the Penrose limit of six dimensional Non-Commutative Open String (NCOS$_6$) theory and show that in the neighborhood of a particular null geodesic it leads to an exactly solvable string theory (unlike their counterparts in four or in other dimensions). We describe the phase structure of this theory and discuss the Penrose limit in different phases including Open D-string (OD1) theory. We compute the string spectrum and discuss their relations with the states of various theories at different phases. We also consider the case of general null geodesic for which the Penrose limit leads to string theory in the time dependent pp-wave background and comment on the renormalization group flow in the dual theory., latex, 22 pages, minor corrections, references added, published version

We consider a minimally coupled massless scalar propagating in the background of NS5-branes in the presence of a 2-form RR electric field. The supergravity solution also called the (NS5,D1) bound state in the appropriate decoupling limit is the holographic dual of Open D-string (OD1) theory. Using this information, we compute the two-point function of the operators in OD1 theory which couples to the massless string states such as the dilaton. We will indicate how to obtain the absorption cross-section of a scalar on NS5-branes (i.e. Little String Theory (LST)) obtained earlier, from our results in the low-energy limit., 14 pages, LaTeX, v2: Report No. added, to appear in PLB

We investigate the issue of electromagnetic duality on the light front. We work with Zwanziger's theory of electric and magnetic sources which is appropriate for treating duality. When quantized on the light-front in the light front gauge, this theory yields two independent phase space degrees of freedom, namely the two transverse field components, the right number to describe the gauge field sector of normal light-front QED and also the appropriate commutator between them. The electromagnetic duality transformation formulated in terms of them is similar in form to the Susskind transformation proposed for the free theory, provided one identifies them as the dynamical field components of the photon on the light-front in the presence of magnetic sources. The Hamiltonian density written in terms of these components is invariant under the duality transformation., Comment: 13 pages, revtex, Title and presentation slightly changed, main results unchanged

By directly solving the equations of motion we obtain the time dependent solutions of supergravities with dilaton and a $q$-form field-strength in arbitrary dimensions. The metrics are assumed to have the symmetries ISO($p+1$) $\times$ SO($d-p-2,1$) and can be regarded as those of the magnetically charged Euclidean or space-like branes. When we impose the extremality condition, we find that the magnetic charges of the branes become imaginary and the corresponding real solutions then represent the E$p$-branes of type II$^\ast$ theories (for the field-strengths belonging to the RR sector). On the other hand, when the extremality condition is relaxed we find real solutions in type II theories which resemble the solutions found by Kruczenski-Myers-Peet. In $d=10$ they match exactly. We point out the relations between the solutions found in this paper and those of Chen-Gal'tsov-Gutperle in arbitrary dimensions. Although there is no extremal limit for these solutions, we find another class of solutions, which resemble the solutions in the extremal case with imaginary magnetic charges and the corresponding real solutions can be regarded as the non-BPS E$p$-brane solutions of type II$^\ast$ theories (for the field-strengths in RR sector)., Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX, no figures, v2: comparisons of KMP SNS-brane solutions are given, references added, v3: JHEP version

We obtain the Penrose limit of NCYM theories in dimensions $3 \leq d \leq 6$ which originate from (D$(p-2)$, D$p$) supergravity bound state configurations for $2 \leq p \leq 5$ in the so-called NCYM limit. In most cases the Penrose limit does not lead to solvable string theories except for six-dimensional NCYM theory. We obtain the masses of various bosonic coordinates and observe that they are light-cone time dependent and their squares can be negative as has also been observed in other cases in the literature. When the non-commutative effect is turned off we recover the results of Penrose limit of ordinary D$p$-branes in the usual YM limit. We point out that for $d = 6$ NCYM theory, there exists another null geodesic in the neighborhood of which the Penrose limit leads to a solvable string theory. We briefly discuss the quantization of this theory and show that this pp-wave background is half supersymmetric., Comment: latex, 22 pages, physical meaning of the choice of the parameter $l=1$ is given, comments on the negative mass^2 added and the background is shown to be half supersymmetric, references added, published version