Govt to change security features of notes every 3-4 years

The government plans to change security features of higher denomination banknotes of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 every 3-4 years in accordance with global standards in order to check counterfeiting. The move comes in the wake of recovery of a large amount of fake Indian currency notes in last four months after demonetisation. The issue was discussed threadbare at a high-level meeting recently attended by senior officials of the ministries of finance and home, including Union home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi.

Advocating the move, home ministry officials said most of the developed countries change security features of their currency notes every 3-4 years and therefore, it is absolutely necessary for India to follow this policy. The change in design of Indian currency notes of higher denominations was long due. Until its demonetisation, there had been no major change in the Rs 1,000 note since its introduction in 2000. Changes in the old Rs 500 note, which was launched in 1987, were carried out more than a decade ago.

The newly introduced notes had no additional security features and were similar to those in the old Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes, officials said.

A close look by the investigators on some of the recently seized fake notes found that at least 11 of the 17 security features in the new Rs 2,000 notes had been replicated. These included the transparent area, watermark, Ashoka Pillar emblem, the letters ‘Rs 2000’ on the left, the guarantee clause with the Reserve Bank of India Governor’s signature and the denomination number in Devanagari on the front, officials said.  Besides, the motif of ‘Chandrayaan’, the ‘Swachh Bharat’ logo and the year of printing had been copied on the reverse side. Although the print and paper quality of the seized counterfeits was poor, they resembled genuine notes. (The Hindustan Times)

Printing error causing anxiety amongst H1B visa holders

Even as the cap for this year’s quota of 65,000 H1B visas was reached in a matter of four days starting 3 April , a printing error on visas issued or renewed this year is causing anxiousness in the Indian tech industry workers.

A US printing press under the visa processing centres has mistakenly printed ‘1B1’ instead of ‘H1B’ on approved petitions of many visa holders, which is making their travel plans go awry. The error is making difficult emergency travel out of the US for many H1B holders bound for their home country as they fear a problem in returning to the US after leaving its shores.

The US used to charge USD 1,225 as premium processing fee for those H1B petitions which got randomly selected in the 65,000 lottery. The premium processing used to guarantee a 15-day review of the visa application. The Trump administration suspended for six months the premium processing programme starting April 3, this year. About 60% of the employers used to apply for H1B visas under this category, as it could give them a definitive result on their hiring plans for IT projects. The suspension also means that fate of H1B holders and their families is likely to hang in balance for up to 6-8 months, when a normal petition is likely to get approved due to a huge backlog.

There are an estimated 1,20,000 H1B holders present in the US currently and a majority of them are employed by the IT industry.  (Moneycontrol.com)

‘Print ad effective because words linger in mind’

Swiss food giant Nestle spent much of last year spreading awareness about the importance of educating girls through various media, including digital and on-ground activities. Its message this year: Provoke action through print. Nestle’s tie-up with the Times Group for the 'Power of Print' contest is the second phase of its strategy to help millions of Indian girls reach the classroom, as research by World Bank has shown women's education impacts economies.

The ‘Power of Print’ contest invites creative agencies to prepare a print campaign on #EducateTheGirlChild. The winning campaign will run across Times Group publications on a multi-crore budget by Nestle and its creators will get to visit the mecca of advertising, Cannes.

“Print advertising is effective because words linger in your mind long after you put down a newspaper or a book,” said KV Sridhar, founder & chief creative officer of Hyper Collective and a member of the jury for ‘Power of Print’.

Another jury member, Bobby Pawar, MD & chief creative officer of Publicis Worldwide-South Asia, said he gets irritated on being told that people don’t read anymore. “It’s a fact that attention spans have become shorter but that doesn’t mean that if you have something brilliant, people won’t read,” said Pawar. He gave the example of Burger King’s “McWhopper” newspaper ad that set off a viral explosion. In the ad that appeared in major US newspapers, Burger King invited rival McDonald’s to create a cross-brand burger for Peace Day. “Or for instance, look at VW’s ‘talking newspaper ad’, which was talked about for months,” he said. “Print ads of the future can be interactive, they can be used to kick-start social media campaigns, you can embed tech — it all depends on working hard to create something awesome and get out of 'use-print-only-as-a-retail-medium’ mentality.” (The Times of India)

Exhibition features historic prints from early 19th century

In popular folklore, Krishna’s mother, Devaki, gave birth to him in a dark jail cell. Yet, an 1880 painting depicts the birth of Krishna as similar to that of Jesus Christ — there is a halo over Krishna, as Devaki holds him up in her arms. The print bears the mark of Chore Bagan Art Studio, Calcutta. The studio produced scores of Hindu mythological images with hybrid aesthetics in the late 19th century. The advent of modernity is seen in another print where Krishna is sitting with Radha, enjoying music from a gramophone.

The European features and distortion to the traditional imagery notwithstanding, the prints by Chore Bagan, and those by artists like Raja Ravi Varma and his printing press, Ravi Varma Lithographic Press, marked a turning point in India’s relationship with religion. It also normalised the supernatural.

“The mass-produced printed visuals that depicted religious and mythological imagery brought about a major change in the very nature of worship in India. It democratised religious images and expanded their accessibility,” says Dr Jyotindra Jain, director and managing trustee of the Centre for Indian Visual Culture, New Delhi.

To showcase this notable shift, Jain is curating an exhibition titled ‘Indian Popular Visual Culture: The Conquest of the World as Picture’. It features posters, print ads and film posters from the 19th century, and explores the mass-produced visual material of the colonial era to gauge its impact on contemporary social values. The exhibition also highlights the consequences of mass accessibility of religion. Case in point, the juxtaposition of religious prints with messages of independence and patriotism in colonial India. “Images depicting Rama as an ideal king, and portraits of Shivaji with his guru Ramdas were popularly used during the freedom struggle. The printed images of goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati by Raja Ravi Varma in the last quarter of the 19th century, in a way, served as models for the later images of Bharat Mata [Mother India],” says Jain.

Indian Popular Visual Culture: The Conquest of the World as Picture is on display from 8 to 30 April 2017 at Dr Bhau Daji Lad City Museum, Byculla. (The Hindustan Times)

10 everyday phrases that come from printing

Authors Rebecca and JP Romney have come out with a book called Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History, which lists the following everyday words which originated at printing presses.

1. Out of sorts: It comes from printers running out of type. A sort is an individually cast piece of type. For most of the history of print, purchasing type was expensive, and to save on costs, many printers would only keep enough on hand to get the job done. But sometimes this meant running out of type in the middle of a job, making you out of sorts.

2. Mind your Ps and Qs: Setting type means placing each individual letter in backward, so that when the inked type is pressed into paper, the mirror image reads the right way forward. This required a certain amount of focus from compositors, especially when it came to letters that look like mirror images of each other. In older type cases, each letter was kept in a segregated section to be picked out by the compositor setting the type. The lowercase ps and qs are right next to each other, just begging to be mixed up. That’s why it’s ‘mind your ps and qs,’ not ‘mind your bs and ds,’ which are not neighbours in the type case.

3. and 4. Uppercase and lowercase: The type case clearly ruled the compositors’ lives. But more than that, it changed the way we think about the alphabet. Look back at that image of the type case from Moxon’s book published in 1683. The case is tilted up slightly. All the capital letters are on the top, or the uppercase. The ones in the lower part of the case are, you guessed it, all lowercase.

5. Hot off the press: It came from the “hot” type cast on the Linotype machine. Invented by the German-born American immigrant Ottmar Mergenthaler, this machine allowed compositors to type on a keyboard what they wanted to print. As they went along, the machine would cast the type right there out of molten metal (mostly lead). Considering how time-consuming and expensive it was to have a lot of “cold” (previously cast) type around to set by hand, this was a major innovation. The machine got its name from the delighted reaction of the owner of the New York Tribune: “You have done it; you have produced a line o’ type.”

6. Stereotype: In yet another example of font tyranny, the process of stereotyping sought to address the chronic scarcity of type supplies by making molds of already set type, then casting whole metal plates of the page for reprinting later. That way you could take apart the type (called “distributing”) and immediately use it for other projects.

7. Cliché: Here is another printing innovation that snuck into our everyday speech with a simple step from the literal to the figurative. Cliché is the French word for stereotyping. But instead of casting whole plates from metal, the French would cast frequently used phrases in one block, ready to be set among the individual letters to save time. These were phrases used so much they became cliché. The French verb clicher means “to click,” which imitated the sound made when striking metal to create stereotype plates.

8. Typecasting: When an actor is chosen for a role because she fits a certain profile, she has been typecast. In one of the common processes for shaping metal such as type, you create a mold into which molten metal is poured. It then cools and hardens into the shape defined by the mold. This process is called casting, and the word typecast is believed to be a nod to it. The same metal shaping method is also where “to fit a mold” comes from.

9. Make an impression: While this figure of speech is a metaphor for doing something that makes you memorable, it’s all tied up in a word for “printing.” The Latin word imprimere means “to press into or upon.” In British English, rare book dealers tend to refer to a print run as an “impression” (whereas American dealers call it a “printing”). It also survives on a slightly different track in our word imprint.

10. Ditto: This word, used as a shorthand to repeat something that’s already been said, ultimately comes from the Italian word detto, the past participle of “to say.” But the word gained steam in the early 20th century with a duplicating machine produced by Ditto, Inc.  (MentalFloss.com)