2. Thesis and Dissertations

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    Women’s Writing in Kannada: An Analysis of Select Writings of Sarah Aboobackar
    (National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, 2016) Kamath, Ambika; Koudur, Shashikantha
    The aim of this study is to analyse one of the finest women writers of the Kannada literary world – Sarah Aboobackar. She belongs to the Beary community, a Muslim ethnic minority community, identified with the coastal regions of Karnataka and northern parts of Kerala. Sarah emerged on the Kannada literary scene in the 1980s. She is a gifted writer and has won much acclaim. Sarah is recognized as one of the major literary figures of the Bandaya period (Navyothara or post-modern in Kannada) and is considered one of the powerful voices in contemporary Kannada literature. She is important to the Kannada literary scene because she is the first Muslim writer to emerge in Kannada. The new vigour and energy that she brought into the Kannada context got her wide acclaim and she has been adorned with some of the very prestigious awards. Sarah’s writings are a door opened into the lives of people not only of Beary community, but that of coastal Karnataka. When she focuses on Beary community, she portrays the problems caused by practices like dowry, polygamy and instant divorce (talaq). Though the community lives in close proximity, many of the problems faced by the community were not known to the wider public. Sarah’s portrayal of her society gives a rare insight into the culture of an ethnic group, thereby providing an exceptional glimpse of the lived-in realities of a people living amidst us, more the reason to take up her writings for analysis. At a time when community relations are under duress in the Indian context, it becomes an issue of equivalent importance that Sarah be read and contextualised. The current research has research method inputs from Textual Analysis, Autobiography, Ethnographic Method, Quantitative Method, and Interviewing. Therefore, this research is a mix of qualitative and quantitative studies. The study merges both descriptive and exploratory approaches in order to provide a better understanding of literature and culture of the people of a region. Since the study is about the writings of a woman from an ethnic community, and since Sarah is an important female voice from Kannada literature, who is assertive on questions ofgender and identity, it becomes appropriate to consider the questions of feminist critical theory, and gender studies, apart from questions of Comparative Literature. Sarah's belongingness and indebtedness to the Kannada tradition is discussed. For a brief comparative study of Sarah Aboobackar, significant Muslim women writers like Qurratulain Hyder, Ismat Chugtai and Banu Musthaq, are selected who are known to be the outstanding voices emerging from the margins. In addition, since the researcher is working on Sarah Aboobackar from Kannada literature, it becomes essential to look at Translation studies and its relevance to Comparative studies. The qualitative part of the study attempts to analyze the writings of Sarah, apart from trying to understand the lived-in realities and culture of Beary community, represented through the literature of a region. It is believed that a text speaks of the lived-in experiences of the author and gives us a picture of his or her world. We look into her autobiographical writings and identify her distinction between the religious text and the interpretation of that text; we look at her fictional writings and look for patterns of representation and identify Sarah's contribution in crafting out a New Womanhood in her fiction. The quantitative study is exploratory in nature and is more limited than the qualitative part. The data collected using sections of Sarah’s readership is analyzed and interpreted, and the results obtained, not very surprisingly, shows that girls agree more with Sarah as a writer than boys do. This descriptive and exploratory research, it is expected, will throw up new questions in future, with a possibility of opening up new research areas.
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    Studies on Performance Characteristics of Hydrogen Loaded Concrete Mixes
    (National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, 2016) Malkapur, Santhosh M.; Narasimhan, Mattur C.
    In many nuclear installations like particle accelerators and medical cyclotrons, concrete has been used as a radiation shield due to its gamma and neutron radiation shielding capabilities. The gamma radiation shielding properties of concrete mixes are found to be enhanced by using high density ingredients. It has been professed that the neutron radiation shielding properties can be enhanced by use of ingredients containing higher amounts of lighter elements like hydrogen and boron. In the present work, attempts are made to use alternative materials as additional hydrogen sources within the concrete mixes and evaluate their effectiveness in enhancing the neutron radiation shielding properties. In the first phase, commercially available Styrene Butadiene Rubber (SBR) latex was used to produce latex modified concrete mixes and their neutron shielding capabilities were evaluated. It is observed that the latex modified mixes showed enhanced neutron shielding capabilities reflected in terms of lower dose transmission values vis- à-vis a control concrete mix. In the second phase, pulverized high density polyethylene (HDPE) was used as a partial replacement (replacement in the range of 30-50% by volume) to the fine aggregate fraction of the concrete mix. It was necessary to proportion these mixes as a class of self compacting concrete mixes so as to restrict the segregation behavior of the polymeric particles, in such Polymer Incorporated Self Compacting Concretes (PISCC) mixes. The segregation characteristics of PISCC mixes are found to be within allowable limits, their fresh properties and the mechanical strength properties are satisfactory. It is found that such PISCC mixes have significantly improved neutron shielding performances. Though there are improvements in the attenuation of neutron flux, the PISCC mixes are in particular, more effective in reducing the neutron dose rates. In the final phase, efforts were made to incorporate high density aggregates (both fine and coarse) so as to enhance the shielding properties and produce highly flowing concrete mixes. The maximum polymer replacement was retained; high density fine and coarse aggregates and a small amount of borax were added. Based on the detailed experimental investigations, recommendations are made to design such class of mixes so as to have good slump flows (> 400mm) and better segregation resistance characteristics. The studies on neutron radiation shielding characteristics indicated greater improvements in the shielding properties with a maximum of 12.7% reduction in half value layer (HVL) thickness for neutron radiation. The gamma radiation shielding studies of these mixes have also indicated significant improvements with a maximum of 13.7% reduction in HVL thickness.
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    Synthesis of Some New Pyrazole Derivatives and Their Antituberculosis Screening
    (National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, 2017) Nandam, Harikrishna; Isloor, Arun M.
    Antibiotics improve the better living life in the world for human as well as animals. Many types of bacteria are dramatically reduces illnesses and deaths caused by various infections. Therefore, it occupies great importance to discover newer, effective and safer drugs in the modern world. In the last few decades, the process of drug discovery program has undergone fundamental transformation to synthesize customs molecules and new chemical entities (NCEs). Organic synthesis approaches towards designing, innovation and low molecular chemical structures, which are easily available, biologically active, will definitely aid in combating the ailments prevailing universally. Although, the increasing cost for discovery of such molecules in terms of research and development, analysis, in vitro and in vivo studies for new sites were worries the pharmaceutical research. Newer heterocyclic compounds are being employed constantly in the hope of striking a proper perspective in combating the pathogen bacterial infections. A systemic investigation of this class of heterocyclic lead revealed that, pyrazole and its derivatives are well known nitrogen containing heterocyclic compounds occupy an important role in medicinal chemistry with wide variety of biological properties. Owing to this therapeutic degree of pyrazole and its derivatives, in the current research work, it has been planned to find out various potent heterocyclic moieties with pyrazole through active functional systems to form a new molecular framework. Accordingly, different libraries of pyrazole based compounds comprising of thiazole (T1-12), pyrazoline (T13-27), 1,4-dihydropyridine (T28-45), 1,3,4-oxadiazole (T46-54), [1,2,4]triazolo[3,4-b] [1,3,4]thiadiazole (T55-63), benzimidazole (T64-79) and trifluoromethylbenzyloxy derivatives (T80-97) have been designed and synthesized. Newly synthesized chemical derivatives were confirmed by various spectroscopic techniques viz. FT-IR, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR, LC-MS and elemental analyses. Additionally, three dimension structures of few molecules were confirmed by single crystal X-ray diffraction (S-XRD) studies. Further, the target compounds were subjected to screen preliminary in vitro antitubercular, antibacterial and antifungal activities. The active molecules were identified and tested for their cytotoxicity studies against non-cancerous cells.