AKMG Kerala Piravi Celebrations

MESSAGE FROM DR. NIGIL HAROON, PRESIDENT AKMG

AKMG is proud to launch the HELPING HANDS program during our Kerala Piravi Celebrations on Oct 31, 2021. COVID has impacted us in many ways and the traditional performance arts scene has been on of the hardest hit. It is our responsibility to make sure that our rich traditional art forms are not left behind as we live our lives in the fast lane. Let us come together and support our rich heritage and culture. Let this also be a reminder to preserve our environment for our children. The natural calamities that are hitting us repeatedly in increasing frequency are nothing but a reflection of our behaviour and how we have treated this place we call home. We sincerely thank our well wishers who will join us on the occasion of Kerala Piravi. Zoom link was sent out by email to AKMG members. If you are interested in joining and do not have the link please contact the entertainment committee chair of AKMG Dr. Susan Thomas, MD, FAAFP. Susan Thomas.

November 1, 1956: The day, modern. day Kerala was born by the amalgamation of four separate regions South Canara (Kasaragod region), Malabar, Cochin and Travancore.

We will have award winning and popular playback singer, our dear Shri Venugopal Gee Venuettan and Kalaimamani Smt. Dasyam Gopika Varma, acclaimed and national award winning mohiniyattam exponent with us. Thank you for taking the time our of your busy schedule and joining us despite the additional difficulties with the time zone difference. 🙏🏽

Thank you to the Remembrance Theatre group led by acclaimed artist and director, Sri. Sasidharan Naduvil. We will be streaming their award winning malayalam play 'Old man and the sea' on this day.

Old man and the sea won the Pulitzer prize for fiction and was one of the major works of Nobel price winning author Ernest Hemingway. It is a story of grit, conviction and commitment. Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, still has got the drive within him and sets out on a journey ignoring his health in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Cuba.

Please see the teaser below. href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_aTFPKyEXg&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR0zSnyxuxGpYFx2P7pJvivfkIgSLAkByc0-ReY6xvVO8VXsU6EA3Rr7Vbg" target="_blank">

We will also have an introduction to the art and instruments used in Panchavadyam, followed by melam led by Vadya Praveen Kalashri Sri. C.K. Marar, Director of the Delhi Panchavadyam trust and International Centre for Kathakali, New Delhi.

None of this would have been possible without the leadership, commitment and selfless work by Smt. Shailaja Kumar, a musician, composer, Kathakali artist and retired bank officer from Peruvanam, Thrissur who has taken on the challenge of rejuvenating the art and culture field in Kerala. Hats off to your dedication.

AKMG TORONTO: Please see the teaser below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVCp6ZnaVJM

UNDERSTANDING CRYPTO CURRENCY

Written by Dr. Khaleel K. Ashraf, MD, FACP

Bitcoin is completely reshaping our understanding and use of money. A common critique one hears about this revolutionary monetary and technological idea is that Bitcoin is an illusion, just numbers in cyberspace. What may be less easy to grasp is that U.S. dollars are likewise an illusion. They too consist of numbers out there in cyberspace. Sometimes they are stored in paper or coins, but a huge percentage of U.S. dollars are purely abstract — they do not exist in any tangible form, not even as paper cash or coin. (As of July 2021, the total money supply in US or M2 is around $20.8 Trillion, of which the physically represented money, also called M0 is only $6.3 Trillion, or less than one-third of the M2.)

The U.S. dollar and other national currencies are what is known as a “fiat” currency. Fiat is Latin for “let there be,” as in fiat lux, let there be light; hence, fiat denarii, let there be dinars, dollars, rupees, pesos, and rubles. The temptation for leaders of nation-states to manufacture money has historically been limitless. One obvious result of this is inflation: The purchasing power of $1 in 1960 is now around ten cents – a 10 time decline in value. The bitcoin blockchain was created, in part, to address this historical weakness. After the 21 millionth bitcoin is mined, in around 2140, the system will produce no more. Most of the world’s economic activity is still based on the fiat currency system which uses printed paper and coins as representation of value, a system dating back to 660 BCE Greece in the case of coins, and 1023 AD China in the case of printed paper money. Then came along one of the most enigmatic and revolutionary figures of our times, Satoshi Nakamoto, who created not only an entirely new digital monetary system, but a 21st century paradigm shift in how we can transfer value over the internet, thus laying the foundation of so called “Internet 3.0”

What is Bitcoin and what is Blockchain? For starters, Bitcoin is a digital currency and a technology for storing and transferring value. The current value of one bitcoin is about $49,185 as of this writing (October 4, 2021) but this is a highly fluctuating number. It is the first truly deflationary (due to the limited supply) and completely digital asset. One can buy things with Bitcoin, sell things for Bitcoin, and exchange Bitcoin for other currencies (and vice versa). At its core, Bitcoin is a decentralized digital currency: a virtual money based on software. It eliminates the need for banks, gets rid of exchange fees, money transfer fees, and reduces the need for lawyers in transactions… all good things. It is often equated to gold, but it’s value could be more than gold.

While gold is certainly less inflationary than fiat currency, gold miners are producing 2% more gold each year, which reduces its scarcity value over time, and with potential for mining gold from near earth asteroids the global supply could go up even faster in the future. Also consider the practical implications of moving and storing gold – one cannot easily carry $1M of gold through an airport. Gold is currently $1605 per ounce, and $1M is around fifty pounds. And putting large amount of gold in a bank has historically been risky. Bitcoin could be considered as “digital gold on an open protocol monetary network with a fixed supply.” As noted, there would ever be twenty-one million digital and dematerialized “gold coins” on this network (in practice closer to 19 million as many of the original Bitcoins mined are lost forever) and it is impossible to create more than these 21 million - ever. Each Bitcoin is divisible by one hundred million units, each called a Satoshi.

This Bitcoin network is built on a foundational new technology known as the blockchain. One can think of a blockchain as a decentralized database shared across a network of computers, or “nodes,” that can only be altered after approval from all the nodes in the system. What this means is that we now have a decentralized, global protocol that enables any computer to send Bitcoin to any other computer in the world without an intermediary. And because there are thousands of computers simultaneously running the software with identical copies of the Bitcoin ledger, no company, government, or regulatory body can meddle with it. Going back to the example above, for the first time in history if you have $1M stored in a Bitcoin wallet instead as gold bars - you can hold the key for the wallet in your head, or on a piece of paper in your pocket, walk across a border, and/or send it to anyone else around the world—all in a split second. Another way to gauge the growing significance of Bitcoin is to look at just how fast it is being adopted. For example, the internet took 7.5 years to go from 150 million users in 1997 to a billion users by 2005. Bitcoin, right now, is roughly where the internet was in 1997, estimated at just over one hundred million users. It is projected to reach a billion users in four years, nearly twice as fast as the internet. In fact, when we compare the adoption rate of various technology from radio to internet to cell phone to social media to digital currency, we could see an ever-increasing pace at which this technology is being adopted. And the evidence of this accelerating adoption is all around us. El Salvador recently became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender. The Sacramento Kings basketball team is offering a Bitcoin salary to all of its players. And Goldman Sachs has recognized crypto as a new asset class. And yet, as notable and popular as Bitcoin is, it is merely one aspect of a far deeper and more profound transformation of our entire financial system called Decentralized Finance, or DeFi.

What is DeFi? The flow and velocity of our money represents the circulation of energy throughout our society. DeFi represents a profound transformation in how this energy travels and flows. While Bitcoin uses blockchain to remove intermediaries in simple transfers of value, DeFi expands on those use cases and removes intermediaries from all kinds of complex transactions. DeFi applications are built on top of another blockchain platform known as Ethereum. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum is a decentralized network following a mining protocol. However, Ethereum can also function like a decentralized cloud computer, via the usage of smart contracts and ERC-20 tokens. Smart contracts and ERC-20 tokens are part of the application layer of Ethereum, a second layer that exists on top of the core Ethereum mining protocol. One can think of smart contracts as pieces of code that automatically execute when certain conditions are met. ERC-20 tokens are a form of digital asset that can be issued by these smart contracts, using the core Ethereum network to verify its transactions. Much like how HTTP (the protocol that most web apps use to send data) sits on top of the basic TCP/IP protocol (how computers in networks talk to each other), smart contracts and ERC-20 tokens enable developers to launch their own decentralized currencies and applications on top of the Ethereum network. This “Layer 2” capability is unlocking the floodgates for all sorts of decentralized applications, especially in the world of finance (hence DeFi). These applications include lending, insurance, exchange, stable coins (coins that track the US dollar), and prediction markets. In all these cases, DeFi applications eliminate middlemen and friction, while allowing secure peer-to-peer flows of money and energy to take place.

What is Web 3.0? Web 2.0, coined as such by O’Reilly and others between 1999 and 2004, moved the world on from static desktop web pages (Web 1.0) designed for information consumption and served from expensive servers to interactive experiences and user-generated content that brought us Uber, AirBnB, Facebook and Instagram. The rise of Web 2.0 was largely driven by three core layers of innovation: mobile, social and cloud. With Web 3.0, which will be built using Blockchain platform, we will be able to trade not only information but value across the globe without an intermediary. Web 3.0 will fundamentally expand the scale & scope of both human and machine interactions far beyond what we can imagine today. These interactions, ranging from seamless payments to richer information flows, to trusted data transfers, will become possible with a vastly increased range of potential counterparties. Web 3.0 will enable us to interact with any individual or machine in the world, without having to pass through fee-charging middlemen, creating entirely new business opportunities and wealth. ................................................................................................................................ Reference: Paul Vigna and Michael Casey: The age of Cryptocurrency – How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order.

AKMG Dubsmash Challenge, October 2021

Hello everyone, Our Kerala Piravi celebration is round the corner and no time would be greater than now to unravel the hidden creative energy within you. Please follow the guidelines outlined below and submit your video entries through gmail to akmgkakmg@gmail.com on or before October 29, 2021. Top entries in four categories (solo male, solo female, family or couple) will be played online during our Kerala Piravi Zoom event on October 31, 2021. Winners will also be awarded special prizes during the gala night of AKMG Toronto to be held in August 2022. Audio and visuals should be based on recordings or sound bites from Malayalam movies, movie songs or skit. A maximum of four participants are allowed for group performances. Maximum video duration shoud be three minutes. Videos are to be recorded preferably in landscape mode with good lighting and sound quality. Entry is restricted to AKMG members and families. Evaluation will be based on acting skills, theme and originality. Use of abusive or offensive language is not permitted. Jury decision will be final.