title: Christianity and abortion

text: Community of Christ states they recognize that there is inadequacy in any simplistic answer that defines all abortion as murder or as a simple medical procedure, and recognize a woman's right in deciding the continuation or termination of pregnancy.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: As the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) is a traditionally anti-abortion Pentecostal Christian denomination, both male and female leaders and clergy of COGIC have always ardently voiced and actively taken opposition to all types of abortions, "except only in the absolutely necessary case of saving the life of the mother."


title: Christianity and abortion

text: The Seventh-day Adventist Church adopt an anti-abortion stance, albeit with some exceptions. The Church released an official statement in October 2019 on the topic of the "Biblical View of Unborn Life". The content within the statement is underpinned by various scriptures from the Bible. In the statement, they specify six key reasons behind their stance:


title: Christianity and abortion

text: The Anglican Church in North America formed when congregations split from the Episcopal Church in the United States and Anglican Church of Canada and aims to represent conservative Anglicanism in North America. It is not a member of the Anglican Communion and is anti-abortion, proclaiming that "all members and clergy are called to promote and respect the sanctity of every human life from conception to natural death".


title: Christianity and abortion

text: In a 1995 survey, 64 percent of U.S. Catholics said they disapproved of the statement that "abortion is morally wrong in every case". On the other hand, a 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center found that, whatever views they held on whether abortion should be legal, 53 percent of white Catholics in the United States considered abortion morally wrong, as did 64 percent of Hispanic Catholics. Among Hispanic Catholics, this percentage did not vary significantly between those who went to Mass at least once a week and those who did not, but there was a considerable difference in the case of white Catholics, with 74 percent of those who went to Mass at least once a week declaring having an abortion to be immoral, as compared with 40 percent of those whose religious practice was less frequent. A 2008 survey found that 65 percent of American Catholics identified themselves as "pro-choice", but also found that 76 percent of these "pro-choice" Catholics believed that abortion should be significantly restricted. In the same year some 58 percent of American Catholic women felt that they did not have to follow the abortion teaching of their bishop. Only 22 percent of U.S. Catholics held that abortion should be illegal in all cases.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: A 1996 survey found that 72 percent of Australian Catholics say that the decision to have an abortion "should be left to individual women and their doctors."


title: Christianity and abortion

text: In Poland, where 85 percent of the population is Catholic, a Pew Research poll from 2017 found that 8 percent of Polish respondents believed abortion should be legal in all cases and 33 percent that it should be legal in most cases. On the other hand, 38 percent believed that it should be illegal in most cases and 13 percent that it should be illegal in all cases.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Catholics for Choice reports that Italy—97 percent Catholic—is 74 percent in favor of using Mifepristone, an abortifacient. A majority of Catholics in Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico say that abortion should be allowed in at least some circumstances.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: According to a 2002 survey conducted by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, fundamentalist Christians are more likely to be anti-abortion than all other respondents, including mainline Protestants. Twenty-eight percent of fundamentalists thought abortion should be illegal even if there was a strong chance of birth defects whereas only nine percent of mainline Protestants held the same opinion. Seventy percent of fundamentalists felt that the desire not to have more children was not a sufficient justification for having an abortion while mainline Protestants were almost evenly divided on this question. However, an overwhelming majority of both fundamentalists and mainline Protestants indicated that they would support abortion in cases where the pregnancy endangered the mother's life. A 2013 Pew Research survey found that, regardless of their views on the legality of abortion, 75 percent of white evangelical Protestants, 58 percent of black Protestants and 38 percent of mainline Protestants said it was morally wrong to have an abortion. Even the 38 percent figure for mainline Protestants was higher than the 25 percent figure for religiously unaffiliated adults. Among the religiously unaffiliated, 28 percent said that having an abortion was morally acceptable, a view held by only 15 percent of the population as a whole, while 23 percent said it was not a moral issue.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Modern Christian views on abortion may be related to the safety of modern legal abortions. Due to the morbidity and mortality associated with unsafe illegal abortions prior to Roe v. Wade, a group of 21 Protestant ministers and Jewish rabbis in New York City formed the Clergy Consultation Service on Abortion (CCS), which later incorporated chapters in thirty-eight states with some 3,000 clergy members. The CCS counseled women with unwanted pregnancies and even provided referral to licensed physicians willing to perform the procedure for a national total of at least 450,000 people for safe abortions prior to 1973. In addition, after abortion was legal in New York state, in 1970, the Clergy Consultation Service started Women's Services, an abortion clinic in New York City. CCS members also publicly testified for their state legislators to repeal abortion laws. Florida Reverend Charles Landreth explains, "Whenever we try to make conditions for each other more human, we are engaged in a religious pursuit. Christians and the Christian church simply cannot turn their backs on the problem of abortion and the dilemmas which it creates."


title: Christianity and abortion

text: In 2011, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 70 percent of the women having abortions in the U.S. identified as Protestant or Catholic. The same report said that of all U.S. abortions, 37 percent were undertaken by women who identified as Protestant, and 28 percent were Catholic. The number of abortions performed on U.S. Catholic women is about the same per capita as the average in the general U.S. population; in the 2000s, Catholic women were 29 percent more likely to have an abortion than Protestant women. A 1996 study found that one out of five U.S. abortions was performed on a woman who was born-again or evangelical Christian. The same figure is reported in a 2008 survey, though in 2000, some 13 percent of abortion patients aged 18 and older identified as born-again or evangelical, but the item was reworded slightly with a broader definition for the 2008 survey. 15 percent of women having abortions reported attending religious services once a week or more, while 41 percent never attended religious services. The likelihood of a woman having an abortion is called the abortion index, with the value of 1.0 assigned to a probability equal to a population's average. Using this metric in America, U.S. Catholics were assessed by Guttmacher Institute in the 2000s, showing an index of 1.00–1.04. Similarly, Protestants were given an abortion index of 0.75–0.84, other religions 1.23–1.41, and non-religious women 1.38–1.59. An earlier study by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research determined U.S. Protestants to have an abortion index of 0.69, Catholics 1.01, Jews 1.08, and non-Judeo-Christian religions 0.78. Women following no organized religion were indexed at 4.02.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, Catholic countries tend to have high abortion rates. The estimated number of abortions per year in Brazil is roughly 1 million to 2 million. Peru, another Catholic country, each year sees abortions initiated by 5 percent of women in their childbearing years, whereas 3 percent of such women have abortions in the U.S.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: In Nigeria, a 1999 study of 1,516 women having abortions determined that 69 percent were Protestant, 25 percent were Muslim, and the remainder were Catholic and other religions. The estimated number of abortions per year in Nigeria is roughly 2 million.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Scholars generally agree that abortion was performed in the classical world, but there is disagreement about the frequency with which abortion was performed and which cultures influenced early Christian thought on abortion. Some writers point to the Hippocratic Oath (which specifically prohibits abortion) as evidence that condemnation of abortion was not a novelty introduced by the early Christians. Some writers state that there is evidence that some early Christians believed, as the Greeks did, in delayed ensoulment, or that a fetus does not have a soul until quickening, and therefore early abortion was not murder; Luker says there was disagreement on whether early abortion was wrong. Other writers say that early Christians considered abortion a sin even before ensoulment. According to some, the magnitude of the sin was, for the early Christians, on a level with general sexual immorality or other lapses; according to others, they saw it as "an evil no less severe and social than oppression of the poor and needy".


title: Christianity and abortion

text: The society in which Christianity expanded was one in which abortion, infanticide and exposition were commonly used to limit the number of children (especially girls) that a family had to support. These methods were often used also when a pregnancy or birth resulted from sexual licentiousness, including marital infidelity, prostitution and incest, and Bakke holds that these contexts cannot be separated from abortion in early Christianity.


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Between the first and fourth centuries AD, the "Didache", "Barnabas" and the "Apocalypse of Peter" strongly condemned and outlawed abortion. The first-century "Didache" equates "the killing of an unborn child and the murder of a living child". To defend that Christians are not "cannibals", in his "Plea for Christians" () to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Church Father Athenagoras of Athens writes: "What reason would we have to commit murder when we say that women who induce abortions are murderers, and will have to give account of it to God?" Tertullian, another Church Father, provides an identical defense in his "Apology" to Emperor Septimus Severus (197): "In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing."


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Early synods did not term abortion "murder" or punish it as such, and imposed specified penalties only on abortions that were combined with some form of sexual crime and on the making of abortion drugs: the early 4th-century Synod of Elvira imposed denial of communion even at the point of death on those who committed the "double crime" of adultery and subsequent abortion, and the Synod of Ancyra imposed ten years of exclusion from communion on manufacturers of abortion drugs and on women aborting what they conceived by fornication (previously, such women and the makers of drugs for abortion were excluded until on the point of death).


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Basil the Great (330-379) imposed the same ten-year exclusion on any woman who purposely destroyed her unborn child, even if unformed. Canon II of Basil's "Ninety-two Canons" states that one is:


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Other early canons which treat abortion as equal to murder are for example: Canon XXI of "The Twenty-five Canons of the Holy regional Council held in Ancyra" (315), Canon XXI of "The Thirty-five Canons of John the Faster" and Canon XCI of "The One Hundred and Two Canons of the Holy and Ecumenical Sixth Council" (691).


title: Christianity and abortion

text: While the Church has always condemned abortion, changing beliefs about the moment the embryo gains a human soul have led to changes in canon law in the classification of the sin of abortion. In particular, several historians have written that prior to the 19th century most Catholic authors did not regard as an abortion what we call "early abortion"—abortion before "quickening" or "ensoulment."


title: Christianity and abortion

text: From the 4th to 16th century AD, Christian philosophers, while maintaining the condemnation of abortion as wrong, had varying stances on whether abortion was murder. Under the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine, there was a relaxation of attitudes toward abortion and exposure of children. Bakke writes, "Since an increasing number of Christian parents were poor and found it difficult to look after their children, the theologians were forced to take into account this situation and reflect anew on the question. This made it possible to take a more tolerant attitude toward poor people who exposed their children."


title: Christianity and abortion

text: Saint Augustine believed that an early abortion is not murder because, according to the Aristotelian concept of delayed ensoulment, the soul of a fetus at an early stage is not present, a belief that passed into canon law. Nonetheless, he harshly condemned the procedure: "Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born."(De Nube et Concupiscentia 1.17 (15)) St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope Innocent III, and Pope Gregory XIV also believed that a fetus does not have a soul until "quickening," or when the fetus begins to kick and move, and therefore early abortion was not murder, though later abortion was. Aquinas held that abortion was still wrong, even when not murder, regardless of when the soul entered the body. Pope Stephen V and Pope Sixtus V opposed abortion at any stage of pregnancy.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Ectrodactyly, split hand, or cleft hand (derived from Greek "ektroma" 'abortion' and "daktylos" 'finger') involves the deficiency or absence of one or more central digits of the hand or foot and is also known as split hand/split foot malformation (SHFM). The hands and feet of people with ectrodactyly (ectrodactyls) are often described as "claw-like" and may include only the thumb and one finger (usually either the little finger, ring finger, or a syndactyly of the two) with similar abnormalities of the feet.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: It is a substantial rare form of a congenital disorder in which the development of the hand is disturbed. It is a type I failure of formation – longitudinal arrest. The central ray of the hand is affected and usually appears without proximal deficiencies of nerves, vessels, tendons, muscles and bones in contrast to the radial and ulnar deficiencies. The cleft hand appears as a V-shaped cleft situated in the centre of the hand. The digits at the borders of the cleft might be syndactilyzed, and one or more digits can be absent. In most types, the thumb, ring finger and little finger are the less affected parts of the hand. The incidence of cleft hand varies from 1 in 90,000 to 1 in 10,000 births depending on the used classification. Cleft hand can appear unilateral or bilateral, and can appear isolated or associated with a syndrome.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Split hand/foot malformation (SHFM) is characterized by underdeveloped or absent central digital rays, clefts of hands and feet, and variable syndactyly of the remaining digits. SHFM is a heterogeneous condition caused by abnormalities at one of multiple loci, including SHFM1 (SHFM1 at 7q21-q22), SHFM2 (Xq26), SHFM3 (FBXW4/DACTYLIN at 10q24), SHFM4 (TP63 at 3q27), and SHFM5 (DLX1 and DLX 2 at 2q31). SHFM3 is unique in that it is caused by submicroscopic tandem chromosome duplications of FBXW4/DACTYLIN. SHFM3 is considered 'isolated' ectrodactyly and does not show a mutation of the tp63 gene.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Ectrodactyly can be caused by various changes to 7q. When 7q is altered by a deletion or a translocation, ectrodactyly can sometimes be associated with hearing loss. Ectrodactyly, or Split hand/split foot malformation (SHFM) type 1 is the only form of split hand/ malformation associated with sensorineural hearing loss.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: A large number of human gene defects can cause ectrodactyly. The most common mode of inheritance is autosomal dominant with reduced penetrance, while autosomal recessive and X-linked forms occur more rarely. Ectrodactyly can also be caused by a duplication on 10q24. Detailed studies of a number of mouse models for ectrodactyly have also revealed that a failure to maintain median apical ectodermal ridge (AER) signalling can be the main pathogenic mechanism in triggering this abnormality.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: A number of factors make the identification of the genetic defects underlying human ectrodactyly a complicated process: the limited number of families linked to each split hand/foot malformation (SHFM) locus, the large number of morphogens involved in limb development, the complex interactions between these morphogens, the involvement of modifier genes, and the presumed involvement of multiple gene or long-range regulatory elements in some cases of ectrodactyly. In the clinical setting these genetic characteristics can become problematic and making predictions of carrier status and severity of the disease impossible to predict.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Ectrodactyly is frequently seen with other congenital anomalies. Syndromes in which ectrodactyly is associated with other abnormalities can occur when two or more genes are affected by a chromosomal rearrangement. Disorders associated with ectrodactyly include Ectrodactyly-Ectodermal Dysplasia-Clefting (EEC) syndrome, which is closely correlated to the ADULT syndrome and Limb-mammary (LMS) syndrome, Ectrodactyly-Cleft Palate (ECP) syndrome, Ectrodactyly-Ectodermal Dysplasia-Macular Dystrophy syndrome, Ectrodactyly-Fibular Aplasia/Hypoplasia (EFA) syndrome, and Ectrodactyly-Polydactyly. More than 50 syndromes and associations involving ectrodactyly are distinguished in the London Dysmorphology Database.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The pathophysiology of cleft hand is thought to be a result of a wedge-shaped defect of the apical ectoderm of the limb bud (AER: apical ectodermal ridge). Polydactyly, syndactyly and cleft hand can occur within the same hand, therefore some investigators suggest that these entities occur from the same mechanism.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The cause of cleft hand lies, for what is known, partly in genetics. The inheritance of cleft hand is autosomal dominant and has a variable penetrance of 70%.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Cleft hand can be a spontaneous mutation during pregnancy (de novo mutation). The exact chromosomal defect in isolated cleft hand is not yet defined. However, the genetic causes of cleft hand related to syndromes have more clarity.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The identified mutation for SHSF syndrome (split-hand/split-foot syndrome) a duplication on 10q24, and not a mutation of the tp63 gene as in families affected by EEC syndrome (ectrodactyly–ectodermal dysplasia–cleft syndrome). The p63 gene plays a critical role in the development of the apical ectodermal ridge (AER), this was found in mutant mice with dactylaplasia.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Some studies have postulated that polydactyly, syndactyly and cleft hand have the same teratogenic mechanism. In vivo tests showed that limb anomalies were found alone or in combination with cleft hand when they were given Myleran.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: There are several classifications for cleft hand, but the most used classification is described by Manske and Halikis see table 3. This classification is based on the first web space. The first web space is the space between the thumb and the index finger.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The treatment of cleft hand is usually invasive and can differ each time because of the heterogeneity of the condition. The function of a cleft hand is mostly not restricted, yet improving the function is one of the goals when the thumb or first webspace is absent.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The social and stigmatising aspects of a cleft hand require more attention. The hand is a part of the body which is usually shown during communication. When this hand is obviously different and deformed, stigmatisation or rejection can occur. Sometimes, in families with cleft hand with good function, operations for cosmetic aspects are considered marginal and the families choose not to have surgery.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The timing of surgical interventions is debatable. Parents have to decide about their child in a very vulnerable time of their parenthood. Indications for early treatment are progressive deformities, such as syndactyly between index and thumb or transverse bones between the digital rays. Other surgical interventions are less urgent and can wait for 1 or 2 years.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: When surgery is indicated, the choice of treatment is based on the classification. Table 4 shows the treatment of cleft hand divided into the classification of Manske and Halikis.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Techniques described by Ueba, Miura and Komada and the procedure of Snow-Littler are guidelines; since clinical and anatomical presentation within the types differ, the actual treatment is based on the individual abnormality.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The goal of this procedure is to create a wide first web space and to minimise the cleft in the hand. The index digit will be transferred to the ulnar side of the cleft. Simultaneously a correction of index malrotation and deviation is performed. To minimise the cleft, it is necessary to fix together the metacarpals which used to border the cleft. Through repositioning flaps, the wound can be closed.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Ueba described a less complicated surgery. Transverse flaps are used to resurface the palm, the dorsal side of the transposed digit and the ulnar part of the first web space. A tendon graft is used to connect the common extensor tendons of the border digits of the cleft to prevent digital separation during extension. The closure is simpler, but has cosmetic disadvantage because of the switch between palmar and dorsal skin.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The release of the first webspace has the same principle as the Snow-Littler procedure. The difference is the closure of the first webspace; this is done by simple closure or closure with Z-plasties.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Literature shows that cleft hand is described centuries ago. The first reference to what might be considered a cleft hand was by Ambroise Paré in 1575. Hartsink (1770) wrote the first report of true cleft hand. In 1896, the first operation of the cleft hand was performed by Doctor Charles N. Dowed of New York City. However, the first certain description of what we know as a cleft hand as we know it today was described at the end of the 19th century.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Historically, a U-type cleft hand was also known as atypical cleft hand. The classification in which typical and atypical cleft hand are described was mostly used for clinical aspects and is shown in table 1. Nowadays, this "atypical cleft hand" is referred to as symbrachydactyly and is not a subtype of cleft hand.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Ectrodactyly is not only a genetic characteristic in humans, but can also occur in frogs and toads, mice, salamanders, cows, chickens, rabbits, marmosets, cats and dogs, and even West Indian manatees. The following examples are studies showing the natural occurrence of ectrodactyly in animals, without the disease being reproduced and tested in a laboratory. In all three examples we see how rare the actual occurrence of ectrodactyly is.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: The Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta performed a study to estimate deformity levels in wood frogs in areas of relatively low disturbance. After roughly 22,733 individuals were examined during field studies, it was found that only 49 wood frogs had the ectrodactyly deformity.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: In a study performed by the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, approximately 2000 salamanders (687 adults and 1259 larvae) were captured from a large wetland complex and evaluated for malformations. Among the 687 adults, 54 (7.9%) were malformed. Of these 54 adults, 46 (85%) had missing (ectrodactyly), extra (polyphalangy) or dwarfed digits (brachydactyly). Among the 1259 larvae, 102 were malformed, with 94 (92%) of the malformations involving ectrodactyly, polyphalangy, and brachydactyly. Results showed few differences in the frequency of malformations among life-history changes, suggesting that malformed larvae do not have substantially higher mortality than their adult conspecifics.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: Davis and Barry 1977 tested allele frequencies in domestic cats. Among the 265 cats observed, there were 101 males and 164 females. Only one cat was recorded to have the ectrodactyly abnormality, illustrating this rare disease.


title: Ectrodactyly

text: According to M.P. Ferreira, a case of ectrodactyly was found in a two-month-old male mixed Terrier dog. In another study, Carrig and co-workers also reported a series of 14 dogs with this abnormality proving that although ectrodactyly is an uncommon occurrence for dogs, it is not entirely unheard of.


title: Durand Cup

text: The Durand Football Tournament, commonly known as Durand Cup, is an annual domestic football competition in India which was first held in 1888 in Shimla. Hosted by the Durand Football Tournament Society (DFTS) and All India Football Federation (AIFF), the tournament is the oldest existing club football tournament in Asia and the fifth oldest national football competition in the world. The most successful teams are currently East Bengal Club and Mohun Bagan AC, accounting for 32 cup victories over the years, with 16 wins each.


title: Durand Cup

text: Since the inception of Federation Cup, succeeded by Super Cup, it became merely an exhibition tournament with invitational participations, but from 2022–23 it serves as the Indian football season opener, with all the Indian Super League and usually top 5 I-League clubs participating.


title: Durand Cup

text: The tournament is named after its founder Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of India from 1884 to 1894. It was first began as a football tournament for different departments and regiments of Armed forces of India and the princely states. Since independence, the army's presence is maintained by the participation of several clubs of different regiments Indian Armed Forces as guest invitees. Army Green became the latest Army team to win the competition in 2016. At present, Bengaluru FC are the holders of the Durand Cup.


title: Durand Cup

text: The Durand Football Tournament, known as Durand Cup, was started by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand in Shimla in 1888. Sir Durand was recuperating from illness in Shimla in North India. Having become conscious of the value of sport as a means to maintain health, he decided to present a prize to encourage sporting competition in India. In 1940, the venue of the tournament was shifted to New Delhi.


title: Durand Cup

text: The Durand tournament was initially a military affair, open to the British Armed Forces, the Indian Army and other armed units such as provincial frontier-security regiments and the volunteer regiments of the reserves. In practice, however, the native soldiers traditionally preferred field hockey to football, a fact which has been evident from the Indian and Pakistani dominance of that sport in international events such as the Olympics. The exception to this tradition were the Nepali men of the brigades of Gurkhas. Initially, this tended to leave the field open to the Indian Army until football's popularity took hold and it became the more universal sport it is today.


title: Durand Cup

text: The matches were played in Dagshai, near Shimla, with the inaugural final becoming a Scottish affair, where the first name on the trophy been inscribed was the Royal Scots Fusiliers, who beat the Highland Light Infantry by 2–1. In 1940 the tournament was relocated to the capital city of New Delhi and, with most military units dispatched in World War II, the tournament was opened to civilian teams so as to maintain the level of competition, wherein Mohammedan became the first civilian team to win the tournament at the Irwin Amphitheater. The tournament would get suspended due to the war, which would soon be followed by the Indian independence movement leading to the partition of India.


title: Durand Cup

text: Following the turmoil of in 1947, the Durand Cup was accidentally discovered in the office of Commander-in-Chief Sir Claude Auchinleck and efforts were made in order to shift the tournament to the newly formed Pakistan, but was strongly resisted by the Defence Secretary H.M. Patel, who acquired and stored it in the State Bank of India, ensuring that the Durand Cup remains a part of Indian football. Since then the tournament is hosted by the Durand Football Tournament Society, a registered society at Delhi, presided by the Chief of Defence Staff and chaired by the three Service Chiefs of Indian Armed Forces. At the first edition of the tournament since the independence of India, Hyderabad City Police defeated Mohun Bagan AC by 1–0 in the replayed final. For the next ten years, the trophy would go on to swap hands frequently among East Bengal Club, Mohun Bagan AC, Madras Regimental Centre and Hyderabad City Police, who played as Andhra Pradesh Police after 1960. After a year of halt due to Sino-Indian War, the tournament would get dominated by Mohun Bagan and East Bengal, with Border Security Force and JCT FC challenging their dominant run at times. In 1997, FC Kochin became the first South Indian club to get their hands on the Durand Cup.


title: Durand Cup

text: Mahindra United FC won the first title of the 3rd millennium and their second time, following its 1998 win. In 2006, Osian's became the first civilian organisation to co-host the Durand Cup on a 5-year deal with DFTS until 2010, in order to develop the tournament and revive the interest in the game. In the following years however, clubs from Goa produced a run of winning form with clubs like Salgaocar FC, Sporting Clube de Goa, Dempo SC and Churchill Brothers FC Goa. Churchill Brothers FC Goa won the tournament thrice in 2007, 2009 and 2011, and narrowly missed a hat-trick, as runners-up in 2008. Since 2000, only twice the tournament was won by the Indian Armed Force teams– Army XI in 2005 and Army Green in 2016. In 2013, Mohammedan SC would win the tournament for the second time after 73 years and for the first time since the independence of India. Due to lack of adequate response in New Delhi, the following year Durand Cup was relocated to Goa, under the instructions of Minister of Defence Manohar Parrikar. The significance of the tournament had dissipated with time but the Indian Armed Forces kept the Durand Tournament tradition alive for decades. The tournament had been scrapped-off from the Indian football calendar a number of times without any significant reason, for instance in the years 2015, 2017 and 2018.


title: Durand Cup

text: In 2019, the tournament was jointly organised by the Armed Forces and the Government of West Bengal, thus relocated to West Bengal in favour for higher attendance figures. In that edition, Gokulam Kerala FC became the second football club from Kerala to win the tournament. In 2020, the tournament was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the Armed Forces decided to host the tournament in West Bengal, jointly with the Government of West Bengal, till 2025. As the significance of the tournament depraved, usually the participating ISL clubs would field their respective reserve squads, in order to focus on the more important league games. However, at 130th edition of the tournament, organisers took an effort to revive the lost legacy and most clubs decided to field full-strength squads. FC Goa became fourth Goan club to win the tournament by defeating Mohammedan SC. The following year, AIFF decided to make Durand Cup a mandatory tournament for all ISL clubs to participate since a club must play at least 27 domestic games to be eligible for AFC competitions, therefore AFC for the first time recognised Durand Cup as one of the cup tournaments of India. Hence, in the 131st edition, for the first time, all the clubs of ISL participated in the tournament along with five invited clubs from I-League and the usual four armed force teams. Due to expansion of the competition, the matches were hosted at more than one venue, alongside Kolkata, which was unprecedented till then.


title: Durand Cup

text: While there is no record of the competition's format in its earlier days, currently the Durand Cup is played in two phases: round-robin and knockouts.


title: Durand Cup

text: A total of 20 teams feature in the group stage round. Each team is allowed to have a maximum of 30 players to complete their rosters.


title: Durand Cup

text: After the round-robin schedule, top teams from each group would progress into the knockout stage, which culminates with 2 teams facing each other in the finals.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: In mathematics, the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT) is a form of Fourier analysis that is applicable to a sequence of values.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: The DTFT is often used to analyze samples of a continuous function. The term "discrete-time" refers to the fact that the transform operates on discrete data, often samples whose interval has units of time. From uniformly spaced samples it produces a function of frequency that is a periodic summation of the continuous Fourier transform of the original continuous function. Under certain theoretical conditions, described by the sampling theorem, the original continuous function can be recovered perfectly from the DTFT and thus from the original discrete samples. The DTFT itself is a continuous function of frequency, but discrete samples of it can be readily calculated via the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) (see ), which is by far the most common method of modern Fourier analysis.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: Both transforms are invertible. The inverse DTFT is the original sampled data sequence. The inverse DFT is a periodic summation of the original sequence. The fast Fourier transform (FFT) is an algorithm for computing one cycle of the DFT, and its inverse produces one cycle of the inverse DFT.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: The discrete-time Fourier transform of a discrete sequence of real or complex numbers , for all integers , is a Fourier series, which produces a periodic function of a frequency variable. When the frequency variable, ω, has normalized units of "radians/sample", the periodicity is , and the Fourier series is:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: The utility of this frequency domain function is rooted in the Poisson summation formula. Let be the Fourier transform of any function, , whose samples at some interval ("seconds") are equal (or proportional) to the sequence, i.e. .  Then the periodic function represented by the Fourier series is a periodic summation of in terms of frequency in hertz ("cycles/sec"):


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: The integer has units of "cycles/sample", and is the sample-rate, ("samples/sec"). So comprises exact copies of that are shifted by multiples of hertz and combined by addition. For sufficiently large the term can be observed in the region with little or no distortion (aliasing) from the other terms. In Fig.1, the extremities of the distribution in the upper left corner are masked by aliasing in the periodic summation (lower left).


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: The modulated Dirac comb function is a mathematical abstraction sometimes referred to as "impulse sampling".


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: An operation that recovers the discrete data sequence from the DTFT function is called an "inverse DTFT". For instance, the inverse continuous Fourier transform of both sides of produces the sequence in the form of a modulated Dirac comb function:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: However, noting that is periodic, all the necessary information is contained within any interval of length . In both and , the summations over n are a Fourier series, with coefficients . The standard formulas for the Fourier coefficients are also the inverse transforms:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: When the input data sequence is -periodic, can be computationally reduced to a discrete Fourier transform (DFT), because:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: as expected. The inverse DFT in the line above is sometimes referred to as a Discrete Fourier series (DFS).


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: When the DTFT is continuous, a common practice is to compute an arbitrary number of samples () of one cycle of the periodic function :


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: The formula_6 sequence is the inverse DFT. Thus, our sampling of the DTFT causes the inverse transform to become periodic. The array of values is known as a "periodogram", and the parameter is called NFFT in the Matlab function of the same name.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: In order to evaluate one cycle of formula_6 numerically, we require a finite-length sequence. For instance, a long sequence might be truncated by a window function of length resulting in three cases worthy of special mention. For notational simplicity, consider the values below to represent the values modified by the window function.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: A cycle of formula_6 reduces to a summation of segments of length .  The DFT then goes by various names, such as:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: Recall that decimation of sampled data in one domain (time or frequency) produces overlap (sometimes known as aliasing) in the other, and vice versa. Compared to an -length DFT, the formula_6 summation/overlap causes decimation in frequency, leaving only DTFT samples least affected by spectral leakage. That is usually a priority when implementing an FFT filter-bank (channelizer). With a conventional window function of length , scalloping loss would be unacceptable. So multi-block windows are created using FIR filter design tools.  Their frequency profile is flat at the highest point and falls off quickly at the midpoint between the remaining DTFT samples. The larger the value of parameter , the better the potential performance.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: When a symmetric, -length window function (formula_12) is truncated by 1 coefficient it is called "periodic" or "DFT-even". The truncation affects the DTFT.  A DFT of the truncated sequence samples the DTFT at frequency intervals of . To sample formula_12 at the same frequencies, for comparison, the DFT is computed for one cycle of the periodic summation, formula_14


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: In order to take advantage of a fast Fourier transform algorithm for computing the DFT, the summation is usually performed over all terms, even though of them are zeros. Therefore, the case is often referred to as zero-padding.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: Spectral leakage, which increases as decreases, is detrimental to certain important performance metrics, such as resolution of multiple frequency components and the amount of noise measured by each DTFT sample. But those things don't always matter, for instance when the sequence is a noiseless sinusoid (or a constant), shaped by a window function. Then it is a common practice to use "zero-padding" to graphically display and compare the detailed leakage patterns of window functions. To illustrate that for a rectangular window, consider the sequence:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: Figures 2 and 3 are plots of the magnitude of two different sized DFTs, as indicated in their labels. In both cases, the dominant component is at the signal frequency: . Also visible in Fig 2 is the spectral leakage pattern of the rectangular window. The illusion in Fig 3 is a result of sampling the DTFT at just its zero-crossings. Rather than the DTFT of a finite-length sequence, it gives the impression of an infinitely long sinusoidal sequence. Contributing factors to the illusion are the use of a rectangular window, and the choice of a frequency (1/8 = 8/64) with exactly 8 (an integer) cycles per 64 samples. A Hann window would produce a similar result, except the peak would be widened to 3 samples (see DFT-even Hann window).


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: An important special case is the circular convolution of sequences and defined by formula_19 where formula_6 is a periodic summation. The discrete-frequency nature of formula_21 means that the product with the continuous function formula_22 is also discrete, which results in considerable simplification of the inverse transform:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: The significance of this result is explained at Circular convolution and Fast convolution algorithms.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: When the real and imaginary parts of a complex function are decomposed into their even and odd parts, there are four components, denoted below by the subscripts RE, RO, IE, and IO. And there is a one-to-one mapping between the four components of a complex time function and the four components of its complex frequency transform:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: formula_26 is a Fourier series that can also be expressed in terms of the bilateral Z-transform.  I.e.:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: where the formula_28 notation distinguishes the Z-transform from the Fourier transform. Therefore, we can also express a portion of the Z-transform in terms of the Fourier transform:


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: Note that when parameter changes, the terms of formula_26 remain a constant separation formula_31 apart, and their width scales up or down. The terms of remain a constant width and their separation scales up or down.


title: Discrete-time Fourier transform

text: This table shows some mathematical operations in the time domain and the corresponding effects in the frequency domain.


title: Swasika

text: Pooja Vijay, better known by her stage name Swasika, is an Indian actress, dancer, and television presenter. She predominantly appears in Malayalam films and television shows, and has also worked in a few Tamil and Telugu films.


title: Swasika

text: Swasika, was born as Pooja Vijay to Vijayakumar (an accountant in Bahrain) and Girija and hails from Perumbavoor of Ernakulam in Kerala. She has a brother, Akash. After taking Bachelor of Arts degree in literature, she enrolled for dancing lessons.


title: Swasika

text: Her first film was Sundarapandi's "Vaigai", a love story, her character was based on a real life individual. She then did "Goripalayam" (2010) by Rasu Madhuravan, in which she played the second lead. She was still a student, when she acted in the film. Her third film "Maithanam" (2011) got positive reviews from both the critics and the audience. She played a village girl, who "values culture and tradition" in the film. In her next venture, "Kandadhum Kaanadhadum" by director Seelan, she played a "city-bred college girl". She made her Malayalam debut with "Cinema Company" (2012) and was the lead actress in Sajeevan Anthikkad's "Prabhuvinte Makkal" (2012). In the 2014 Tamil thriller "Panduvam" she played a psychiatrist, a modern character as opposed to her earlier roles in Tamil films.


title: Swasika

text: She has worked as television anchor too. In 2014, she hosted a show on Jeevan TV. She later played the lead role in a television serial named "Dhathuputhri" on Mazhavil Manorama. She has appeared in some advertisements also. Her next TV serial, "My Marumakan" telecasted on Surya TV. In 2017, Chinthavishtayaya Seetha on Asianet rose her fame among the Malayali audience and won her several allocades. She is currently playing the lead role in Seetha on Flowers which a sequel to the later. She had signed a serial "Pranayini" but later opted out. She is an active presence in stage shows mainly as a dancer and is also anchoring several television shows. Apart from this, she has acted in some advertisements, dance- music video dramas, short films, albums, dance covers etc.


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: 9K114 "Shturm ( - "Assault", borrowed from German "Sturm" - Storm/Assault) - is a SACLOS radio guided anti-tank missile system of the Soviet Union. Its GRAU designation is 9K114. Its NATO reporting name is AT-6 "Spiral. The missile itself is known as the 9M114 Kokon (Cocoon).


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: The missile called 9M114 Kokon (Cocoon) was developed by the Kolomna Machine Design Bureau, which was also responsible for the 3M6 Shmel and 9M14 Malyutka. Work on the missile began in 1967, with the hope of using the missile on Mi-24s. However, delays forced the design of an upgraded Falanga system (9M17 Skorpion) using SACLOS guidance as a stopgap. Testing of the missile was completed in 1974, and it was accepted into service in 1976. The missile has no direct western counterpart; in role it is similar to the TOW and HOT missiles which entered service around the same time, though the Shturm has greater weight, speed, and range.


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: The missile can be deployed on a variety of platforms, including the Mi-24V and from 1979-onwards the MT-LB based 9P149 tank destroyer. There is also a shipborne version of the missile, with the launcher holding six missiles.


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: The missile is transported and launched from a glass-reinforced plastic tube. The missile uses a Soyuz NPO solid-rocket sustainer, with a small booster stage to launch the missile from its tube.


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: The missile is SACLOS with a radio command link. The use of a radio link allows the missile to travel much faster and further than if it were wire guided. The radio link is a VHF system with five frequency bands and two codes to minimize the risk of jamming. The system comprises a KPS-53AV 8× daylight-only direct vision sight with an integrated laser rangefinder. After the missile is launched, the gunner has to keep the sight's crosshairs on the target until impact. Appropriate steering commands are transmitted to the missile via the radio link.


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: The missile flies above the gunner's line of sight to the target. With the range of the target determined by the laser rangefinder, the missile descends onto the target just before impact. This is done primarily to clear obstacles, instead of achieving a top-attack, and can be switched off. It is possible to engage low and slow moving helicopters with the system; however, since the missile only has a contact fuze, a direct hit would be needed.


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: The first use of the missile was during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where it was employed in the later stages of the war. By this time the Mujahideen got access to more advanced anti aircraft weapons that forced Mi-24 pilots to adopt standoff tactics using the missile to increase survivability. Sources report kill ratios of 75–85% during the war. Also a Mil demonstration in Sweden in late 1995 using an Mi-28A firing Shturm and Ataka missiles also showed good results: from a hovering helicopter, a Shturm was fired at a target 900 m away; and from level flight at 200 km/h an Ataka was fired at a target 4,700 m away. Both missiles passed within 1 m of their aiming point. Other countries such as Iraq and Syria attempted to procure the missile in the 1980s but the Soviet Union did not export the system outside of the Warsaw Pact, fearing it might fall into western hands via Iran or Israel.


title: 9K114 Shturm

text: In 2014, a modernized variant, the 9K132 Shturm-SM, was adopted by the Russian army, featuring a sight with television and thermal channels as well as a new missile with a high-explosive fragmentation warhead and a proximity fuse.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: Borg vs McEnroe (, ) is a 2017 biographical sports drama film focusing on the famous professional rivalry between tennis players Björn Borg and John McEnroe at the 1980 Wimbledon Championships, culminating in their encounter in the men's singles final, one of the most dramatic tennis matches of all time. The film, a production between Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, is directed by Janus Metz Pedersen, from a screenplay written by Ronnie Sandahl, and stars Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgård, Tuva Novotny, and Robert Emms. The film opened the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: In 1980, disciplined Swedish tennis champion Björn Borg and abrasive American upstart John McEnroe prepare to compete at Wimbledon. As the number one ranked player in the world, Borg is under enormous pressure to win his fifth consecutive Wimbledon title. Living in Monaco with his fiancée Mariana, Borg is uncomfortable with his celebrity, and Mariana struggles with the lack of control over their lives.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: Taking up tennis at an early age, young Borg is suspended due to angry outbursts on the court. Retired champion and Davis Cup captain Lennart Bergelin notices Borg's potential and his unusual backhand, and becomes his coach. Borg struggles with his temper and clashes with Bergelin, who is pressured to enter 15-year-old Björn as the youngest ever Davis Cup player. Bergelin relents, but urges Borg to hide his emotions and channel them into his game.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: As a child, McEnroe idolizes Borg, and is a gifted student but struggles with his parents' high expectations. By age 21, McEnroe is tennis' number two ranked player and a rising star, determined to win his first Wimbledon title. In sharp contrast to the famously unflappable Borg, McEnroe is prone to aggressive outbursts and confrontations with umpires, much like Borg in his youth.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: Arriving in London, Borg sets out his meticulous Wimbledon routine, and McEnroe draws his own tournament bracket on his hotel room wall. They proceed through the first and second rounds, and McEnroe and fellow player Vitus Gerulaitis discuss rumors of Borg's superstitious habits, including fine-tuning his rackets and cooling rooms to lower his heart rate.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: When his third round match is paused due to rain, an overwhelmed Borg lashes out at Bergelin and Mariana. Flashbacks to Borg winning his first French Open in 1974 and Wimbledon two years later, as each tournament’s youngest player ever, emphasize the pressure his career has placed on him. That night, Bergelin and Mariana commiserate over the toll Björn’s success has taken on their lives.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: In the quarter-final, McEnroe faces his own doubles partner Peter Fleming. The day of the match, he snubs Fleming, who accuses him of stealing his ankle brace. McEnroe wins and tries to reconcile, but Fleming warns John that he is not well liked and will only be remembered for his temper, not his skill. McEnroe's father arrives in London to watch him play.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: Borg wins his semi-final match, but still struggles to cope with the pressure. A year earlier, he agrees to recreate a home movie for a television interview — playing tennis outside his childhood home in Stockholm — but becomes agitated when he is unable to relive the exact experience, and leaves. At Wimbledon, Borg is comforted by Bergelin, and reaffirms his commitment to win.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: McEnroe's reputation and confrontational attitude lead him to be booed by the crowd throughout his semi-final match. He wins, but storms out of a contentious post-game press conference, and later completes his handmade bracket: Borg faces McEnroe in the Wimbledon final.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: The final match begins, with public confidence high for Borg's anticipated fifth title, while McEnroe is booed again. McEnroe unexpectedly dominates the first set, but Borg wins the second. McEnroe chooses not to overreact to debatable calls, and receives brief words of encouragement from Borg, who wins the third set. The fourth set results in an unprecedented and punishing tie break, won by McEnroe. Despite facing seven match points, Borg rallies to win the fifth set and the title, while McEnroe's sportsmanship receives a standing ovation.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: At the airport, Borg and McEnroe part on friendly terms. An epilogue reveals that John defeated Björn at the following Wimbledon championship, with Borg retiring that year at the age of 26, but they later became close friends — "Former rivals, best enemies".


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: In May 2016, a film about tennis rivals Björn Borg and John McEnroe was in development. Janus Metz Pedersen was chosen to direct the film, from a screenplay written by Swedish writer Ronnie Sandahl. Pedersen is mostly known for directing the 2010 documentary film "Armadillo" and one episode of the HBO drama "True Detective". The film was produced by Jon Nohrstedt, who produced the Swedish animated film "Bamse and the Thief City", and Fredrik Wikström Nicastro, who is best known for producing the 2010 film "Easy Money". The film is distributed by Nordisk Film in Scandinavia and internationally by SF Studios.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: In May 2016, Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBeouf were cast as Björn Borg and John McEnroe, respectively. In an interview with "Variety" at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, LaBeouf was excited about the script and working with Scandinavian directors, stating, "They make better movies. Scandinavian film making is different. It's a different pace, a different relationship between the crew—the bonds are different".


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: Stellan Skarsgård had been cast as Borg's coach Lennart Bergelin, which is his first role in a Swedish film in several years. Tuva Novotny and Robert Emms had joined the cast as Mariana Simionescu and Vitas Gerulaitis, respectively.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: The filming began in August 2016, and took place in Gothenburg, Prague, London, and Monaco. Filming also took place in Borg's hometown of Södertälje, where he grew up, and started playing tennis as a child. The production has recreated the Studio 54 nightclub at a studio in Gothenburg. The tennis arena Štvanice in Prague, stands in for the Centre Court arena in Wimbledon, London, where they shot the finals of the 1980 Wimbledon Championships. Gudnason described that he felt "a huge sense of authenticity, when I [he] and Shia walked from the changing room to what [was] supposed to look like the Centre Court arena, before hundreds of extras".


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: In October, the first set photos of Sverrir Gudnason and Shia LaBeouf as Björn Borg and John McEnroe, respectively, were released.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: "Borg vs McEnroe" opened the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, concurrent with its Swedish theatrical release. It was released in the UK on September 22, and was released in the U.S. 13 April 2018.


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 84%, based on 147 reviews, with an average rating of 6.5/10. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100, based on 30 critic reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: Peter Debruge of Variety magazine praised director Janus Metz: "When the big tennis finale arrives, Metz finds all sorts of ways to make the match interesting, blending urgent music, creative camera vantages and ridiculously hyperbolic announcer commentary to generate the desired tension. But the real reason we’re invested is far simpler than that: Metz and his cast have made us care about both Borg and McEnroe by this point."


title: Borg vs McEnroe

text: John DeFore of "The Hollywood Reporter" called it "An acting-forward sports film capable of engaging viewers who don't know their 30-loves from their birdies or hat tricks."


title: Splenda

text: Splenda is a global brand of sugar substitutes and reduced-calorie food products. While the company is known for its original formulation containing sucralose, it also manufactures items using natural sweeteners such as stevia, monk fruit and allulose. It is owned by the American company Heartland Food Products Group. The high-intensity sweetener ingredient sucralose used in Splenda Original is manufactured by the British company Tate & Lyle.


title: Splenda

text: Sucralose was discovered by Tate & Lyle and researchers at Queen Elizabeth College, University of London, in 1976. Tate & Lyle subsequently developed sucralose-based Splenda products in partnership with Johnson & Johnson subsidiary McNeil Nutritionals, LLC. The Splenda brand was transferred to Heartland Food Products Group after their purchase of the line with investor Centerbridge Partners in 2015.


title: Splenda

text: Since its approval by the United States government in 1998 and introduction there in 1999, sucralose has overtaken Equal in the $1.5-billion artificial sweetener market, holding a 62% market share. According to market research firm IRI, Splenda sales were $212 million in 2006 in the U.S. while Equal's totaled $48.7 million. According to a 2012 article in "The New Zealand Herald" it is "the category leader in table-top sweetener in the US".


title: Splenda

text: The energy content of a single-serving (1 g packet) of Splenda is 3.36 kcal, which is 31% of a single-serving (2.8 g packet) of granulated sugar (10.8 kcal). In the United States, it is legally labelled "zero calories"; U.S. FDA regulations allow this "if the food contains less than 5 Calories per reference amount customarily consumed and per labeled serving". 3.2 packets (3.36 kcal each) of Splenda contain the same caloric content as one packet of sugar (10.8 kcal). Further, Splenda contains a relatively small amount of sucralose, little of which is metabolized; virtually all of Splenda's caloric content derives from the dextrose or highly fluffed maltodextrin "bulking agents" that give Splenda its volume. Like other carbohydrates, dextrose and maltodextrin have 3.75 kcal per gram.


title: Splenda

text: Unlike other artificial sweeteners, sucralose is heat stable up to 450 °F (232 °C), so Splenda can be used as a replacement for table sugar in cooking and baking, and there are Splenda products packaged specifically for this purpose. In product testing by "Cook's Illustrated", the major drawback to cooking with Splenda was found to be that it does not produce the browning or caramelization the way table sugar does. However, "Cook's Illustrated" also found that desserts baked with Splenda were "lacking the artificial flavors that just about every other sugar substitute brings with it".


title: Splenda

text: Splenda usually contains 95% dextrose (D-glucose) and maltodextrin (by volume) which the body readily metabolizes, combined with a small amount of mostly indigestible sucralose. Sucralose is made by replacing three select hydrogen-oxygen groups on sucrose (table sugar) molecules with three chlorine atoms. The tightly bound chlorine atoms create a molecular structure that is stable under intense conditions. Sucralose itself is recognized as safe to ingest as a diabetic sugar substitute, but the sugars or other carbohydrates used as bulking agents in Splenda products should be evaluated individually. The recommended amount of sucralose that can be consumed on a daily basis over a person's lifetime without any adverse effects is 900 mg/kg BW/day, or about 60 g for a 70 kg (150 lb) person.


title: Splenda

text: A repeated dose study of sucralose in human subjects concluded that "there is no indication that adverse effects on human health would occur from frequent or long-term exposure to sucralose at the maximum anticipated levels of intake". Conversely, a Duke University animal study funded by the Sugar Association found evidence that doses of Splenda between 100 and 1000 mg/kg BW/day, containing sucralose at 1.1 to 11 mg/kg BW/day, fed to rats reduced fecal microflora, increased the pH level in the intestines, contributed to increases in body weight, and increased levels of P-glycoprotein (P-gp). These effects have not been reported in humans. In response, McNeil Nutritionals, along with an expert panel that included scientists from Duke University, Rutgers University, New York Medical College, Harvard School of Public Health, and Columbia University reported in "Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology" that the Duke study was "not scientifically rigorous and is deficient in several critical areas that preclude reliable interpretation of the study results". The other ingredients in Splenda—dextrose and maltodextrin—are listed as generally recognized as safe because of their long history of safe consumption.


title: Splenda

text: Sucralose may not be completely biologically inert, and a study showed that cooking with sucralose at high temperatures could cause it to degrade into potentially toxic compounds. However, only a very small amount (approximately 2–8% of sucralose consumed) is metabolized by the body, on average, and the amount of sucralose present in Splenda is slight.


title: Splenda

text: In 2006, Merisant, the maker of Equal, filed suit against McNeil Nutritionals in U.S. District Court, Philadelphia, alleging that Splenda's tagline; "made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar" is misleading. McNeil argued during the trial that it had never deceived consumers or set out to deceive them, since the product is in fact made from sugar. Merisant asked that McNeil be ordered to surrender profits and modify its advertising. The case ended with an agreement reached outside of court, with undisclosed settlement conditions. In 2004, Merisant filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau regarding McNeil's advertising. McNeil alleged that Merisant's complaint was in retaliation for a ruling in federal court in Puerto Rico, which forced Merisant to stop packaging Equal in packages resembling Splenda's. McNeil filed suit in Puerto Rico seeking a ruling which would declare its advertising to not be misleading. Following Merisant's lawsuit in Philadelphia, McNeil agreed to a jury trial and to the dismissal of its lawsuit in Puerto Rico. However, on May 11, 2007, the parties reached a settlement on the case, the terms of which were not disclosed.


title: Splenda

text: In 2007, Merisant France prevailed in the Commercial Court of Paris against subsidiaries of McNeil Nutritionals LLC. The court awarded Merisant $54,000 in damages and ordered the defendants to cease advertising claims found to violate French consumer protection laws, including the slogans; "because it comes from sugar, sucralose tastes like sugar" and "With sucralose: comes from sugar and tastes like sugar".


title: Splenda

text: A Sugar Association complaint to the Federal Trade Commission stated that "Splenda is not a natural product. It is not cultivated or grown and it does not occur in nature." McNeil Nutritionals, the manufacturer of Splenda, has responded that its "advertising represents the products in an accurate and informative manner and complies with applicable advertising rules in the countries where Splenda brand products are marketed." The Sugar Association created a web site to criticise sucralose which cites an association-sponsored study.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: Granuloma annulare (GA) is a common, sometimes chronic skin condition which presents as reddish bumps on the skin arranged in a circle or ring. It can initially occur at any age, though two-thirds of patients are under 30 years old, and it is seen most often in children and young adults. Females are two times as likely to have it than males.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: Aside from the visible rash, granuloma annulare is usually asymptomatic. Sometimes the rash may burn or itch. People with GA usually notice a ring of small, firm bumps (papules) over the backs of the forearms, hands or feet, often centered on joints or knuckles. The bumps are caused by the clustering of T cells below the skin. These papules start as very small, pimple looking bumps, which spread over time from that size to dime, quarter, half-dollar size and beyond. Occasionally, multiple rings may join into one. Rarely, GA may appear as a firm nodule under the skin of the arms or legs. It also occurs on the sides and circumferential at the waist and without therapy can continue to be present for many years. Outbreaks continue to develop at the edges of the aging rings.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: The condition is usually seen in otherwise healthy people. Occasionally, it may be associated with diabetes or thyroid disease. It has also been associated with auto-immune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme disease and Addison's disease. At this time, no conclusive connection has been made between patients.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: Granuloma annulare microscopically consists of dermal epithelioid histiocytes around a central zone of mucin—a so-called palisaded granuloma.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: Granuloma annulare is an idiopathic condition, though many catalysts have been proposed. Among these is skin trauma, UV exposure, vaccinations, tuberculin skin testing, and "Borrelia" and viral infections.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: The mechanisms proposed at a molecular level vary even more. In 1977, Dahl et al. proposed that since the lesions of GA often display a thickening of, occlusion of, or other trauma to blood vessels, blood vessels may be responsible for GA. From their study of 58 patients, they found that immunoglobin M (IgM), complement, and fibrinogen were in the blood vessels of GA areas, suggesting that GA may share similarities with an immune-mediated, type 3 reaction or that chronic immune vasculitis may be involved in the pathogenesis. Another study found evidence suggesting blood vessel involvement with masses of intercellular fibrin and thickened basal lamina found around capillaries.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: Umbert et al. (1976), proposed an alternative pathogenesis: cell-mediated immunity. Their data suggests that lymphokines, such as macrophage-inhibiting factor (MIF), leads to sequestration of macrophages and histiocytes in the dermis. Then, upon lysosomal enzyme release by these sequestered cells, connective tissue damage ensues, which results in GA. Later, these authors found data suggesting that activation of macrophages and fibroblasts are involved in the pathogenesis of GA and that fibrin and the rare IgM and C3 deposition around vessels were more likely a delayed-type hypersensitivity with resulting tissue and vessel changes rather than an immune-complex mediated disease. Further data has been collected supporting this finding.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: Because granuloma annulare is usually asymptomatic and self-limiting with a course of about 2 years, initial treatment is generally topical steroids or calcineurin inhibitors; if unimproved with topical treatments, it may be treated with intradermal injections of steroids. If local treatment fails it may be treated with systemic corticosteroids. Treatment success varies widely, with most patients finding only brief success with the above-mentioned treatments. Most lesions of granuloma annulare disappear in pre-pubertal patients with no treatment within two years while older patients (50+) have rings for upwards of 20 years. The appearance of new rings years later is not uncommon.


title: Granuloma annulare

text: The disease was first described in 1895 by Thomas Colcott Fox as a "ringed eruption of the fingers", and it was named "granuloma annulare" by Henry Radcliffe Crocker in 1902.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Brahmin is a Hindu Brahmin subcaste mainly from the Indian state of Maharashtra and northern area of the state of Karnataka. Other than these states, according to authors K. S. Singh, Gregory Naik and Pran Nath Chopra, Deshastha Brahmins are also concentrated in the states of Telangana , Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh Author Pran Nath Chopra and journalist Pritish Nandy says, "Most of the well-known saints from Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh were Deshastha Brahmins". The mother tongue of Deshastha Brahmins is either Marathi or Kannada. Some Deshasthas who settled in Telugu states also adopted Telugu as their mother tongue.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Over the millennia, the Deshastha community has produced Mathematicians such as Bhāskara II, Sanskrit scholars such as Bhavabhuti; Bhakti saints such as Dnyaneshwar, Sripadaraja, Eknath, Samarth Ramdas and Vijaya Dasa; Logicians such as Jayatirtha and Vyasatirtha.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The traditional occupation of Deshastha Brahmins is priesthood and the Kulkarni Vatan (village accountants). They also pursued secular professions such as writers, accountants, moneylenders and also practised agriculture. In historic times a large number of Deshasthas held many prominent positions such as Peshwa, Diwan, Deshpande (district accountants), Deshmukh, Patil, Gadkari, and Desai. Authors Vora and Glushkova states that "Deshastha Brahmins have occupied a core place in Maharashtrian politics, society and culture from almost the beginning of the Maharashtra's recorded history. Occupying high offices in the state and even other offices at various levels of administration, they were recipients of state honours and more importantly, land grants of various types."


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The word "Deshastha" derives from the Sanskrit "deśa" (inland, country) and "stha" (resident), literally translating to "residents of the country". The valleys of the Krishna and the Godavari rivers, and a part of Deccan plateau adjacent to the Western Ghats, are collectively termed the "Desha" – the original home of the Deshastha Brahmins.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: In Tamil Nadu, Deshastha Brahmins are also referred as "Rayar Brahmins". The word "Rayar" means king in South India.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Brahmins fall under the Pancha Dravida Brahmin classification of the Brahmin community in India. Along with the Karhade and Konkanastha Brahmins, the Marathi-speaking Deshastha Brahmins are referred to as Maharashtrian Brahmins, which denotes those Brahmin subcastes of the Deccan Plateau which have a regional significance in Maharashtra, while the Kannada-speaking Deshastha Brahmins from the Deccan Plateau region of Karnataka are referred to as Karnataka Brahmins or Carnatic Brahmins.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Brahmins are further classified in two major sub-sects, the Deshastha Rigvedi and the Deshastha Yajurvedi, who earlier used to inter-dine but not inter-marry but now intermarriages between the two sub-groups is common. These sub-sects are based on the Veda they follow.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins (DRB) are followers of Rigveda and follow Rigvedic rituals. Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins are followers of Ashvalayana sutra and Shakala Shakha of Rigveda. Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins are the most ancient sub-caste among Deshasthas and are found throughout the Deccan. According to Iravati Karve, Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins are found in western and central Deccan along the banks of the Godavari and the Krishna rivers and are spread deep into Karnataka. Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins are endogomous group which include families from difference linguistic regions. Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins include some families that speak Marathi and some speak Kannada, majority of marriages happen within the families of same language but the marriages between Marathi and Kannada speaking families do happen often.<ref name="David Goodman Mandelbaum 1970 https://archive.org/details/societyinindia0002mand/page/n192 18"></ref> Marriage alliance between Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins, Telugu Brahmins and Karnataka Brahmins also takes place quite frequently.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins are treated as a separate and distinct caste from the Deshastha Yajurvedi Madhyandina and Deshastha Kannavas Brahmins by several authors, including Malhotra and Iravati Karve.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The Deshastha Yajurvedi Brahmins are followers of Yajurveda and follow Yajurvedic rituals. They are further classified into two groups called the Madhyandins and the Kanavas. The Madhyandinas follow the Madhyandina Shakha of the Shukla Yajurveda. The word "Madhyandina" is a fusion of two words "Madhya" and "dina" which mean middle and day respectively. Ghurye says Madhyandhina is the name of the person, a pupil of Yajnavalkya, the founder of Shukla-Yajurveda and followers of Madhyandhina are known by this name. The other meanings of the name are they are so-called because they perform "Sandhya Vandana" at noon or it also means these Brahmins are supposed to attain Brahmin-hood only after mid-day. Ghurye says apparently the name 'Madhyandhina' was misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted by the southern Brahmins. Some Yajurvedi Deshasthas follow the 'Apastamba' subdivision of Krishna Yajurveda. Recently, the Yajurvedi Madhyandin and Yajurvedi Kannava Brahmins have been colloquially being referred to as Deshastha Yajurvedi Madhyandin and Deshastha Yajurvedi Kannava, although not all have traditionally lived or belonged to the Desh. Like Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins, Deshastha Yajurvedi Brahmins of Shukla Yajurvedi section are also spread throughout Deccan.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The Deshastha Rigvedi's and Deshastha Yajurvedi's started following the Vedantas propounded by Adi Shankara and Madhvacharya. They have produced a number of acharyas who has presided over various mathas. These seats of learning spread the teachings of the vedas, smritis, puranas and especially Advaita and Dvaita philosophies all over India, because of this they have Smarthas as well as Madhvas among them. These sub-sects are based on the Vedanta they follow.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Madhva Brahmins, also referred as "Deshastha Madhvas" (or simply "Madhvas") are Deshastha Brahmins who follow Dvaita Vedanta of Madhvacharya. Deshastha Madhva Brahmins are followers of ten Madhva Mathas. Out of the ten mathas, Uttaradi Math is the largest and most of Deshastha Madhvas are followers of this matha. The other two prominent mathas whome Deshastha Madhvas follow are Raghavendra Math and Vyasaraja Math. These three mathas are combinedly known as "Mathatraya" in Madhva Sampradaya. In South India Deshastha Madhvas have traditionally been bilingual in Marathi and Kannada, Telugu or Tamil.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshasthas following Advaita Vedanta of Adi Shankara have two divisions among them. They are "Vaishnav Advaitins" and "Smarta Advaitins". The Smarta Advaitins are also known as Deshastha Smarta Brahmins or Deshastha Smartas


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The valleys of the Krishna and Godavari rivers, and the plateaus of the Western Ghats (Sahyadri hills), are collectively called the Desha – the original home of the Deshastha Brahmins.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Brahmins constitute 8-10% of the total population of Maharashtra. Almost 60 percent (three-fifth) of the Maharashtrian Brahmins are Deshastha Brahmins. In North Karnataka, especially in the districts of Bijapur, Dharwad and Belagavi Deshasthas were about 2.5% of the total population in the 1960s. Earlier this region was known as "Bombay-Karnataka region". The Illustrated Weekly of India says, The exact percentage of population belonging to Deshastha community is very difficult to find out since they are spread throughout the Deccan.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The Deshastha Brahmins are equally distributed all through the state of Maharashtra, ranging from villages to urban areas. In Karnataka, the Deshastha Brahmins are mostly concentrated in the districts of Bijapur, Dharwad, Kalaburagi, Belagavi, Bidar, Raichur, Bellary, Uttara Kannada, and Shivamogga.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshasthas also settled outside Maharashtra and Karnataka, such as in the cities of Indore in Madhya Pradesh and those of Chennai and Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, which were a part of or were influenced by the Maratha Empire. The Deshastha Brahmins of Vadodara in Gujarat are immigrants who came from the Deccan for state service. In Andhra Pradesh, the Deshastha Brahmins have settled in various parts, particularly in the cities of Anantapur, Kurnool, Tirupati, Cuddapah, Hyderabad (which is now part of Telangana). In Coastal Andhra, Deshastha Brahmins settled in Nellore district, Krishna district and Guntur district. In Telangana, Deshastha Brahmins are distributed throughout all the districts of the state. The Deshastha families who migrated to Telugu states completely adapted themselves to the Telugu ways, especially in food.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The military settlers (of Thanjavur) included Brahmins of different sub-castes and by reason of their isolation from their distant home, the sub-divisions which separated these castes in their mother-country were forgotten, and they were all welded together under the common name of Deshasthas. Today's Marathi speaking population in Tanjore are descendants of these Marathi speaking people. The isolation from their homeland has almost made them culturally and linguistically alien to Brahmins in Maharashtra.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The early British rulers considered Deshastha from the south to be a distinct community and heavily recruited them in administrative service in the present-day areas of Northern Karnataka after the fall of Peshwa rule in these areas in preference to Deshastha and other Brahmins from Desh.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: According to PILC Journal of Dravidic Studies, Maratha people who migrated towards the South India were originally from Pune and Bijapur. They took the land route and passed through Satara, Sangli and Kolhapur. Another set of migrants migrated from Bijapur through North Karnataka, the districts of Cuddupah, Kurnool, Chittoor and North Arcot.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The word Deshastha comes from the Sanskrit words "Desha" and "Stha", which mean inland or country and resident respectively. Fused together, the two words literally mean "residents of the country". Deshastha are the Maharashtrian Brahmin community with the longest known history, making them the original and the oldest Hindu Brahmin sub-caste from Maharashtra. The Deshastha community may be as old as the Vedas, as vedic literature describes people strongly resembling them. This puts Deshastha presence on the Desh between 1100 and 1700 BC. As the original Brahmins of Maharashtra, the Deshasthas have been held in the greatest esteem in Maharashtra and they have considered themselves superior to other Brahmins.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Marathi Brahmins started migrating to the Hindu holy city of Benares in the medieval period. They dominated the intellectual life of the city and established an important presence at the Mughal and other north Indian courts.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: During the Deccan sultanates era and early Maratha rule, the Deshasthas were closely integrated into the texture of rural society of Maharashtra region, as village record keepers (Kulkarnis) and astrologers (Joshis). As such they featured far more prominently in the eyes of the rural communities than any other Brahmin groups in the region. Before the rise of the Peshwas from the Bhat family, the Maratha bureaucracy was almost entirely recruited from the Deshastha community along with the Chandraseniya Kayastha Prabhu community; but Balaji Vishwanath's accession to power shattered their monopoly over the bureaucracy, even though they retained influence as Kulkarnis and Deshmukhs on rural Maharashtra.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Many Deshastha Brahmins moved to present day Andhra Pradesh for lack of opportunities in Chitpavan dominated Peshwa era.This group became part of the elite in this region, specifically around Guntur. By the 19th century, Deshasthas had held a position of such strength throughout South India that their position can only be compared with that of the Kayasthas and Khatris of North India.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: At the time of Indian independence in 1947, urban dwelling and professional Marathi Hindu people, mostly belonged to communities such as the Chitpavans and the CKPs. However, researcher Donald Kurtz concludes that although Deshasthas and other brahmin groups of the region were initially largely rural, they were mostly urbanised by the end of the 20th century.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: One of the traditional occupations of the Deshasthas was that of priesthood at the Hindu temples or officiating at socio-religious ceremonies. Records show that most of the religious and literary leaders since the 13th century have been Deshasthas. In addition to being village priests, most of the village accountants or Kulkarnis belonged to the Deshastha caste. Priests at the famous Vitthal temple in Pandharpur are Deshastha, as are the priests in many of Pune's temples. Other traditional occupations included village revenue officials, academicians, astrologer, administrators and practitioners of Ayurvedic medicine. Deshasthas who study the vedas are called Vaidika, astrologers are called "Joshi" and practitioners of medical science are called Vaidyas, and reciters of the puranas are called Puraniks. In historic times Deshasthas also engaged in manufacturing and trading of salt and cereals in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Hence they also adopted the surnames related to them.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshasthas have contributed to the fields of Sanskrit, Marathi literature and Kannada literature, mathematics, and philosophy.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The Deshastha community in the Karnataka region produced the fourteenth century Dvaita philosopher saint Jayatirtha, the fifteenth and sixteenth century stalwarts of Haridasa movement and philosophers of Dvaita order, Vyasatirtha, who was also the "Rajaguru" of Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara Empire and his disciples Purandara Dasa and Vijayendra Tirtha, the seventeenth century philosopher-saint Raghavendra Tirtha. In fact, according to Sharma, all the pontiffs of Uttaradi Matha (a Dvaita monastery) beginning from Raghunatha Tirtha, Raghuvarya Tirtha, Raghuttama Tirtha to Satyapramoda Tirtha, without a single exception, belonged to the community.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshasthas produced prominent literary figures in Maharashtra between the 13th and the 19th centuries. The great Sanskrit scholar Bhavabhuti was a Deshastha Brahmin who lived around 700 AD in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra. His works of high Sanskrit poetry and plays are only equalled by those of Kalidasa. Two of his best known plays are "Mahāvīracarita" and "Mālatī Mādhava". Mahaviracarita is a work on the early life of the Hindu god Rama, whereas Malati Madhava is a love story between Malati and her lover Madhava, which has a happy ending after several twists and turns.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Mukund Raj was another poet from the community who lived in the 13th century and is said to be the first poet who composed in Marathi. He is known for the "Viveka-Siddhi" and "Parammrita" which are metaphysical, pantheistic works connected with orthodox Vedantism. Other well known Deshastha literary scholars of the 17th century were Mukteshwar and Shridhar Swami Nazarekar. Mukteshwar was the grandson of Eknath and is the most distinguished poet in the "ovi" meter. He is most known for translating the "Mahabharata" and the "Ramayana" in Marathi but only a part of the Mahabharata translation is available and the entire Ramayana translation is lost. Shridhar came from near Pandharpur and his works are said to have superseded the Sanskrit epics to a certain extent. Other major literary contributors of the 17th and the 18th century were Vaman Pandit, Mahipati, Amritaraya, Anant Phandi and Ramjoshi.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: The Deshastha community has produced several saints and philosophers. Most important of these were Dnyaneshwar, Eknath and Ramdas. The most revered of all Bhakti saints, Dnyaneshwar was universally acclaimed for his commentary on the Bhagvad Gita. It is called Dnyaneshwari and is written in the Prakrit language. He lived in the 13th century. Eknath was yet another Bhakti saint who published an extensive poem called the "Eknathi Bhagwat" in the 16th century. Other works of Eknath include the "Bhavartha Ramayana", the "Rukmini Swayamwara" and the "Swatma Sukha". The 17th century saw the "Dasbodh" of the saint Samarth Ramdas, who was also the spiritual adviser to Shivaji.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Hemadpant who was the prime minister from 1259 to 1274 C.E. in the regimes of Kings Mahādeva (1259–1271) and Ramachandra (1271–1309) of Seuna Yādav Dynasty of Devagiri, which ruled in the western and southern part of India was a Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmin.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Brahmins also held prominent roles in the political, military and administrative hierarchy of the Vijayanagara Empire.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: According to Robert Eric Frykenberg, the very origin of the Bahamani power appears to have been linked with support from local deccani leadership. Frykenberg also quotes that, The reason to Mahmud Gawan greatness as an administrator was due to his sagacious employment of groups of Maratha Brahmans known as Deshasthas.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: According to Robert Eric Frykenberg, the breakup of Bahamani authority following the senseless execution of the able Diwan in 1481 led to increasing dependence upon the services of the Deshasthas by the Sultanates of Bijapur, Golkonda, and Ahmednagar.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Madhva Brahmins held high positions during the rule of Qutb shahis of Golkonda. The posts held by them include Deshmukh, Deshpande, Majumdar, Mannavar (Head of Police) etc. in the districts of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Most of Shivaji's principal Brahmin officers were Deshasthas, including all of his Peshwas. Other significant Deshasthas of the period were warriors such as Moropant Trimbak Pingle, Ramchandra Pant Amatya, Annaji Datto Sachiv, Abaji Sondev, Pralhad Niraji, Raghunath Narayan Hanmante and Melgiri Pandit. At one point in the history of the Maratha Empire, seven out of eight Ashta Pradhan (Council of Eight Ministers) came from the community. In 1713, Balaji Vishwanath Bhat, a Kokanastha Brahmin was appointed as the sixth Peshwa and the seat of Peshwa remained in Konkanastha hands until the fall of the Maratha Empire. To obtain the loyalty of the locally powerful Deshastha Brahmins, the Konkanastha Peshwas established a system of patronage for Brahmin scholars. The most prominent Deshastha Brahmin families during the Peshwa rule were The Pant Pratinidhis, The Vinchurkars, The Purandares, The Gandekars (Pant Sachiv family) and The Bavadekars.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: During the Peshwa era, The lack of administrative positions forced Deshastha and other literate groups to find opportunities elsewhere in India such as the Guntur area in present-day Andhra Pradesh.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Historian Govind Sakharam Sardesai lists 163 prominent families that held high ranks and played significant roles in politics, military and finance in 18th century Pune, the cultural capital of Maharashtra. Of these 163 families, a majority(80) were Deshastha, 46 were Chitpawan, 15 were CKP, and Karhade Brahmin and Saraswat accounted for 11 families each.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: This Deshastha Brahmin migrant who served under Hyder Ali and Tippu Sultan as the most trustworthy aide could successfully win over the confidence of the English in 1799. Diwan Purnaiah was a typical example of an elite adept in the art of accommodation and survival by changing loyalties in a most astonishing and successful manner. But the most important plus point in him that attracted the English was perhaps his technical abilities as a successful administrator, which the English could use to their advantage in later years'. Although, many Deshastha Brahmins were employed in the service of Hyder and Tippu, a greater penetration of them into the service was witnessed during the Dewanship of Purnaiah and during the succeeding years. One Rama Rao was appointed Foujdar of Nagar in 1799 by Purnaiya. Sowar Bakshi Rama Rao, Bargir Bakshi Balaji Rao, Babu Rao, Krishna Rao and Bhim Rao of Annigere were some of the notables among this class. When Purnaiah was Prime Minister of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: In 17th century Deshastha Madhva Brahmins started migrating to Andhra Pradesh and held high level administrative positions during the ascendancy of Qutub Shahis of Golconda. In Guntur district between 1788 to 1848, two out of five Zamindars i.e., Chilkalurpet Zamindari and Sattanapalli Zamindari were ruled by Deshastha Madhva Brahmins, whose title was "Deshmukh", but Frykenberg also tells us that in the earlier phase the Deshasthas had to contend for power with the zamindars many of whom were not Brahmins at all but Kammas, Velama and Rajus. This structure of competition was evidently not created ex nihilo by British rule, but existed before Maratha period and earlier. According to Eric Frykenberg, By mid-nineteenth century all the vital positions in the subordinate civil and revenue establishments in the Guntur district were monopolized by certain Deshastha Brahmin families. According to Asian Economic Review, The tendency of the Deshastha Brahmins to consolidate the power by appointing their own relations was not only confined to Guntur, but this habit extended throughout South India. By the 19th century, Deshasthas had held a position of strength throughout South India. According to Eric Frykenberg, "Deshastha Madhva Brahmins—a vestige of former regimes— who possessed the requisite clerical skills and knowledge of the revenue system and a capacity for concealing this knowledge through the use of this complicated book-keeping system and the Modi script who conspired to subvert the orders of the and to absorb a sizeable amount of land revenues". According to Frykenberg, This was the reason why most of the Sheristadars, Naib Sheristadars and Tehsildars in Madras Presidency are exclusively selected from Deshastha Brahmin community, who are fluent in writing Modi script. According to Frykenberg, Deshasthas also are noted for their English skills during British colonial rule. At the beginning of the British colonial rule, the most powerful Brahmin bureaucrats in the South India were Deshastha Brahmins, who were migrants from Maharashtra and North Karnataka. During the later years of the colonial rule Deshasthas increasingly lost out to the Tamil Brahmins due to the latter community's enthusiasm towards English education.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Even though the majority of Deshasthas speak Marathi, one of the major languages of the Indo-Aryan language family, a significant minority speak Kannada, one of the major languages of the Dravidian languages family. The major dialects of Marathi are called Standard Marathi and Warhadi Marathi. Standard Marathi is the official language of the State of Maharashtra. The language of Pune's Deshastha Brahmins has been considered to be the standard Marathi language and the pronunciation of the Deshastha Rigvedi is given prominence. There are a few other sub-dialects like Ahirani, Dangi, Samavedi, Khandeshi and Puneri Marathi. There are no inherently nasalised vowels in standard Marathi whereas the Chitpavani dialect of Marathi, spoken in Pune does have nasalised vowels. Deshastha Brahmins who are spread throughout South India have either Marathi or Kannada as their mother tongue and speak in local languages with other people.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: As with most Pancha-Dravida Brahmin communities, Deshastha Brahmins are also vegetarians. Deshastha use black spice mix or "kala", literally black, masala, in cooking. Traditionally, each family had their own recipe for the spice mix. However, this tradition is dying out as modern households buy pre-packaged mixed spice directly from supermarkets. A popular dish in Deshastha cuisine is the "varan" made from tuvar dal. "Metkut", a powdered mixture of several dals and a few spices is also a part of traditional Deshastha cuisine.Puran poli for festivals and on the first day of the two-day marriage is another Marathi Brahmin special dish.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Most middle aged and young women in urban Maharashtra dress in western outfits such as skirts and trousers or shalwar kameez with the traditionally "nauvari" or nine-yard sari, disappearing from the markets due to a lack of demand. Older women wear the five-yard sari. Traditionally, Brahmin women in Maharashtra, unlike those of other castes, did not cover their head with the end of their saree. In urban areas, the five-yard sari is worn by younger women for special occasions such as marriages and religious ceremonies. Maharashtrian brides prefer the "very Maharashtrian" saree – the Paithani – for their wedding day.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: In early to mid 20th century, Deshastha men used to wear a black cap to cover their head, with a turban or a pagadi being popular before that. For religious ceremonies males wore a coloured silk dhoti called a "sovale". In modern times, dhotis are only worn by older men in rural areas. In urban areas, just like women, a range of styles are preferred. For example, the Deshastha Shiv Sena politician Manohar Joshi and former Chief Minister of Maharashtra prefers white fine khadi kurtas, while younger men prefer modern western clothes such as jeans.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: In the past, caste or social disputes used to be resolved by joint meetings of all Brahmin sub-caste men in the area.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshastha Rigvedi Brahmins still recite the "Rig Veda" at religious ceremonies, prayers and other occasions. These ceremonies include birth, wedding, initiation ceremonies, as well as death rituals. Other ceremonies for different occasions in Hindu life include "Vastushanti" which is performed before a family formally establishes residence in a new house, Satyanarayana Puja, originating in Bengal in the 19th century, is a ceremony performed before commencing any new endeavour or for no particular reason. Invoking the name of the family's "gotra" and the "Kula Daivat" are important aspects of these ceremonies. Like most other Hindu communities, Deshasthas have a shrine called a "devaghar" in their house with idols, symbols, and pictures of various deities. Ritual reading of religious texts called "pothi" is also popular.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: In traditional families, any food is first offered to the preferred deity as "naivedya", before being consumed by family members and guests. Meals or snacks are not taken before this religious offering. In contemporary Deshasthas families, the naivedya is offered only on days of special religious significance.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Deshasthas, like all other Hindu Brahmins, trace their paternal ancestors to one of the seven or eight sages, the saptarshi. They classify themselves into eight "gotras", named after the ancestor rishi. Intra-marriage within gotras (Sagotra Vivaha) was uncommon until recently, being discouraged as it was likened to incest, although the taboo has considerably reduced in the case of modern Deshastha families who are bound by more practical considerations.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: In a court case "Madhavrao versus Raghavendrarao", involving a Deshastha Brahmin couple, the German philosopher and Indologist Max Müller's definition of gotra as descending from eight sages and then branching out to several families was thrown out by reputed judges of a Bombay High Court. The court called the idea of Brahmin families descending from an unbroken line of common ancestors as indicated by the names of their respective gotras "impossible to accept". The court consulted relevant Hindu texts and stressed the need for Hindu society and law to keep up with the times emphasising that notions of good social behaviour and the general ideology of Hindu society had changed. The court also said that the mass of material in the Hindu texts are so vast and full of contradictions that it is almost an impossible task to reduce it to order and coherence.


title: Deshastha Brahmin

text: Every Deshastha family has their own family patron deity or the "Kuladaivat". This deity is common to a lineage or a clan of several families who are connected to each other through a common ancestor. The Khandoba of Jejuri is an example of a Kuladaivat of some Maharashtrian Deshastha families; he is a common Kuladaivat to several castes ranging from Brahmins to Dalits. The practice of worshiping local or territorial deities as Kuladaivats began in the period of the Yadava dynasty. Other family deities of the Deshasthas of Maharashtra and Karnataka are Bhavani of Tuljapur, Mahalaxmi of Kolhapur, Mahalaxmi of Amravati, Renuka of Mahur, Saptashringi on Saptashringa hill at Vani in Nasik district, Banashankari of Badami, Lakshmi Chandrala Parameshwari of Sannati, Renuka Yellamma of Savadatti. Venkateswara of Tirupathi, Narasimha and Vithoba (Vittala) of Pandharpur are popular forms of Vishnu who are worshipped as kuladevatha among Deshasthas.