Spirituality

The meaning of spirituality has developed and expanded over time, and various connotations can be found alongside each other.Spiritual is the adjective form of the word spirit which comes from the Latin word for "breath," and means the thing that animates life. Spiritual can be used to talk about anything that goes beyond mere physical existence, from ghost spirits to religious feelings. As a noun, spiritual describes a religious song originating in the African-American culture of the American South.

Some may find that their spiritual life is intricately linked to their association with a church, temple, mosque, or synagogue. Others may pray or find comfort in a personal relationship with God or a higher power. Still others seek meaning through their connections to nature or art. Like your sense of purpose, your personal definition of spirituality may change throughout your life, adapting to your own experiences and relationships.

The path to spirituality starts with curiosity. It is possible only if one thinks about the existence of the world. There are so many things for which Science has no answers as of now. Spirituality is a science beyond science. In the initial stages of spiritual development, one may develop ideas that are contrary to the normal beliefs and religion, but with time the same person realizes that whatever exists in the world has a reason. So, he will start accepting the normal beliefs as well as the religion and when he reach a stage where he is able to fully connect the material existence and soul existence through his own thoughts then the person becomes truly spiritual and hence enlightened.

-            Ms AnshuPunshi 

        Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies.

Inside out : Body and Mind

How do we describe a flower, By its colour or fragrance?. Intact, by both. It is not only its beautiful colour that fills our hearts with joy but also and essentially the captivating and exhilarating fragrance it emits into the air. Similarly , a man is not only  what he looks like- his complexion, clothes, physique etc, but also what he speaks, does and think. apart from his exterior, it is essential to look him inside out to have his thorough portrayal. It is rightly said that all beautiful faces do not possess the hearts of gold, and all ugly faces do not possess a devil “s hearts. A golden pot may contain honey, so we can not judge people by their coats.. Being proud of his beautiful body, once a leopard bragged to a fox “Look at my skin, well decorated with spots. That makes me the finest specimen among animals “But the fox , as foxy he was, retorted : “ And more beautiful than you stand I, decorated so well, not in body, but in mind “ Bhim Rao Ambedkar “Unlike a drop of water which loses its identity when it joins the ocean, man does not lose his being in the society in which hje lives”. This Identity is one’s personality. It encompasses many things in its ambit. Many things mixed up to form a personality. Literally speaking, personality is made from the word to which we affix two suffixes, person +al+ity. Person  means a living individual being. Adding al to it connotes having  individual traits and suffixing ity to it further extends it to convey to have the states of being individual. So literally personality means to have distinct qualities  or features which distinguish one person from the other from any other and so on. Human personality is not   static piece of art that remains the same, but is dynamic and grows with the passage of time  as an earthbound caterpillar goes into flying butterfly, so must human personality grow  - both in mind and body. Mind is the CEO and the body is the servant that carries out the orders and the instruction  sent by the mind. We can not have solid mind without solid body and without solid mind human body is useless. So finally the character of a person could not judge by  external body , it should be judged by by his / her internal  beauty.  It is not necessary the person who has beautiful body has a good character and good attributes. Therefore by the physical appearance the mind of a person could not be judge. But    the mind of a person can reflect hi / her body language. Therefore inside mind always reflects  by the physical body of a person. So we should judge a person by his /her mind and physical body both. Generally it is understood that the mind is a controller of the body, and body is the servant of mind.

Dr. Hakimuddin Khan

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR

DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Email Security: Issues and Awareness

In an organization each and every individual should aware of email security issues to be taken care of by one and individual. There are various challenges which are to be overcome to get rid of them. Few issues and challenges one should be area of are:

1)      User Behavior: The end users are at the top pf email security issues list because the decisions they take can either prevent bad situations or creates the worst situation. It’s a major issue in an organization as the perception of end user and IT security experts appears to be at odds many times. When the security experts see sharks in the form of threats swimming around, end users simply perceive it in the form of spam. Few organizations do Ethical phishing attacks and social engineering penetration testing on their employees to assess their security awareness. The results reveal that even being aware of attacks, they click on phishing emails.

2)      Targeted Phishing attacks can make a comeback:Earlier Work-intensive manual attacks were common. Now hackers perform targeted phishing attacks or automated attacks which need much more efforts and are a much bigger payoff. Hackers use public social media resources to target a person or a company and learn their particulars like who’s who in the company. Once they get the knowledge, it becomes easy to masquerade as the boss and fire whaling attacks. It is very easy for them to include company logo and other company’s information to make a malicious email more realistic and credible. In one case Hacker has impersonate the cellphone number of a boss and triggered an attack by sending a text message to an employee that referenced as email message.

3)      A Gateway to takeover Account to exploit more: Hackers penetrates less secure computers like laptops used in public Wi-Fi and are then able to weaponize them against the organization. Hackers take overs the Account of an organization which is an indirect challenge to email security. Once a computer of an organization or of an individual is compromised, hackers use Mimikatz, an open source tool and Microsoft’s built-in Remote Desktop Protocol to dump all credentials of a machine. Once the account get takeover by Hackers, they can use powerful tools like Power shell, Windows Management Console to reach out to machines exists on the corporate network. They can easily uses services to exploit vulnerabilities on networked computers.

4)      IoT and Mobile Device Security Challenges: IoT and handheld devices can also be compromised and can become a part of phishing and other security attacks. Hackers can use a targeted phishing attempt or can take over account easily via a clean application of an iPhone or android Phone. This application might contains a code that takes users to a phishing site that requests its credentials Even IoT devices like surveillance cameras , Wi-Fi routers based an open source code are open and viable to exploitation. Usually IoT devices are small networked computers which all can be used as jumping off points for security incursions.

5)      Think Beyond Perimeter Security: All the organizations implements highly effective security perimeters like firewalls, Web Application Firewalls, intrusion Detection/prevention systems and email security gateways. That is why Hackers hack machines and compromise emails and users that might be outside the perimeter. They use plain and harmless email to trap inside users outside the perimeter. Perimeter security plays an essential role but at the same time one has to be careful about other potential attack surfaces.

Summary: It is very much required to be vigilant as vigilance is the key in order to address email security issues. It has been observed that the nature of attacks transforms boundlessly. There is no standard way, how the hackers can attack for better or worse and it’s very difficult for security vendors to have a standard method to identify and stop these changing attacks.

Ms. Arpana Chaturvedi

Assistant Professor

Information Technology

Information and Communications Technology

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The Sustainable Development Goals

Nowadays we cannot think about any kind of development without technological involvement.  As we are facing so many problems like environmental change, poverty, weak education system and its reach, water crises and its purity etc. So the world is trying to overcome from these all the crises and now such all issues covered in sustainable development goals. In sustainable development goals, we are having 17 goals and under these 17 goals, we have 169 distinct targets. Now the question, Can we imagine to achieve these goals without any information technological involvement? 

And things are becoming more difficult when these sustainable development goals are the same for developing countries. For overall sustainable economic growth, technology would be an unavoidable aspect.  We see technology as a powerful enabler – an agent of change to help solve many of the challenges facing the world today as governments seek sustainable growth and development models and focus on the future of our planet and its people.Technology specially related to IT has amazing potential to help achieving the SDGs, but it can also be at the root of exclusion and inequality. We need to standardize the use of all technological benefits. There are list of new technologies those can have potential like artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, IOT and blockchain etc. These technologies are in use at every level like from home to research projects.

This year’s there are many platform those discussed about the many different ways in which digital technology provide the next level support in achieving SDGs. For example, technology might help minimize inequality by providing access to basic services, such as e-health or online education. Moreover government makes sure that the citizens are very much aware about the services and they feel connected through services like e-government tools and citizens must use the technological benefit. Information management and its privacy and security policy should be ensuring by the government to better connect to their citizens and to improve citizen’s participation. ICT has the potential to transform the manufacturing sector through advancements such as IOT, cloud and robotics – all of which reduce costs, increase efficiency and drive economic growth.

The deployment of new technologies could be essential for achieving the SDGs, considering the need for accelerated progress to fulfil the goals by 2030. At the same time, as new technologies are usually unavailable to marginalised populations, it will be a key challenge to ensure that no one is left behind in the fourth industrial revolution, as new innovations often exacerbate existing divides in society between those who can benefit and those who are left behind. In addition, with the current speed of innovation, there are many opportunities and risks that are still unknown but could rapidly crystallise, without regulators being able to respond in a timely manner. Therefore, it is imperative for decision-makers to be aware of, and to understand technological change as much as possible. In the words of the Ministerial Declaration, ‘the introduction of new technologies should never blind us from our pledge to leave no one behind’.

 Mr. Pramod Pandey

 Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

HUMAN RESOURCE ACCOUNTING: THE WAY FORWARD

Human resources are one of the most important assets of an organization that are very different from the physical assets. Physical assets unlike human assets do not have emotions and feelings, they don’t get depreciated.

Human resource accounting is accounting for people as the organizational resources. It includes measurement of cost and value of people to organizations. It includes cost of recruiting, selecting, hiring, training and developing employees and judging their economic value to the organization.

The American Accounting Associations’ Committee on Human Resource Accounting (1973) has defined Human Resource Accounting as “the process of identifying and measuring data about human resource and communicating this information to interested parties”

In the traditional concept of accounting all expenses on human resources like training, recruitment, etc. are treated as expenses and written off against revenue instead of being treated as investments, to be amortized over a period of time.

Such a system will ensure proper furnishing of cost value information about acquisition, allocation, development and maintenance of human resources, their effective monitoring by management, development of management principles in context etc.

There are various methods of valuation of human resource accounting like Historical Cost Method, Replacement Cost Approach, Opportunity Cost, etc.

In the first method the actual cost incurred on recruiting, hiring, training and development of human resources are capitalized and amortized over the expected useful life of the human resources. If the human assets are liquidated before their expected useful life of human resources the whole amount not written off is charged to the income of the year in which liquidation takes place.

The second method values the human resources on the assumption that if the current human resources are to be replaced with equally qualified and experienced individuals what will be the cost to the company in recruiting, hiring, training and developing the replacement.

As per the third method several divisional heads bid for the services of various people they need among themselves and then include the bid price in the investment cost.

These methods have certain advantages as well as disadvantages; therefore, there is always a bone of contention among the firms that which method is ideal one.

Also as there are no standardized procedures developed so far, only few organizations are providing the data but only as additional information. The system will take a few years to flourish but it is indeed the right way forward.

Ms. Divya Gupta

Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies

ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS

Increasing attention towards the environment   becomes important once we realize that we are but a small part of the planet. Since time immemorial we have thrived on the abundant resources provided to us by nature. In our greed for more and more we have been extracting the maximum with total disregard to the fact that our insatiable greed has done irreparable damage to nature. There is an increasing awareness that if we continued in our quest without paying back to our planet and Mother Nature our very existence would become difficult.

People have voiced their concerns in World Forums. Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) was published between 1999 and 2005. It was developed to evaluate environmental sustainability relative to the paths of other countries. It was followed by Environmental Performance Index (EPI). This index was developed from the Pilot Environmental Performance Index (published in 2002).It was designed to supplement the environmental targets set forth in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. EPI is a method of quantifying the environmental performance of a state's policies. Both these indices were developed by Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy, Yale University and Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Columbia University, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.

Another world body, The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the leading global environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system. It also serves as an authoritative advocate for the sustainability of the global environment.

 UNEP's mission is "to provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations."

UNEP has a multifaceted agenda for promoting and developing regional programmes for environmental sustainability. It creates environmental awareness. Another important function is providing country-level environmental capacity building and technology support. It also helps to develop international environmental law, and provides expert advice on the development and use of environmental concepts and instruments. A major contribution being - the facilitator in the coordination of UN activities on matters concerned with the environment, and ensuring, through cooperation, liaison and participation, that their activities take environmental considerations into account.

 India’s position continues to be dismal. Statistics reveal that India is among the bottom five countries on the Environmental Performance Index 2018, plummeting 36 points from 141 in 2016, according to a biennial report by Yale and Columbia Universities and the World Economic Forum.

While our country is at the bottom of the list in the environmental health category, it ranks 178 out of 180 as far as air quality is concerned.

 NASA’s  visible infrared imaging radiometer suite (VIRS) ,which has a high spatial resolution of 375 meters and provides good response in detecting fires of relatively small areas, both during the day and at night time has reported more than 15,000 fires in the states of Punjab and Haryana during October,2018

 In order to curb vehicular pollution in the National Capital Region, about 1.8 lakh old vehicles face ban in Noida and Ghaziabad alone. The vehicular ban is for all petrol vehicles that are more than fifteen year old and diesel vehicles that are ten years old. Fingers point towards the numerous construction works in progress. Bursting of crackers has been banned. In spite of these measures the air pollution levels remain hazardous.

It must be noted that the above paragraphs deal only with the air pollution. The pollutants of the water and soil are also a cause of major concern.

Amidst various steps taken up by international bodies, governments of countries, different NGOs and self help groups, it is important that each individual becomes alert about the dire consequences of enviromenmental degradation and acts in a responsible manner. It is our daily activities that need modification.

Small steps that can be taken up in our homes such as:

1. Reducing the use of plastics.

2.  Eliminating the use of poly bags.

3. Segregation of wastes

4. Building of compost pits in the societies/ colonies where garden wastes and organic wastes from homes can be processed. This would lead to formation of compost which can be used as valuable manure for the trees in the societies/ colonies as well as on the streets. This would also eliminate the need of burning these leaves/organic wastes and thereby reduce the air pollution.

5. Reducing wastage of water.

6. Reducing wastage of electricity.

7. Installation of Solar Panels to supplement Power requirements.

There is some hope for the future only when all of us act in a coordinated manner to protect the environment. It is our thinking that has to be modified if we plan a future for our progeny. This awareness has to be taken up with a level of seriousness that we exercise while carrying out financial planning. It must be strongly engrained in our psyche that we all stand to lose once we neglect/harm Nature.

Our planet is our home, our only home.

Where should we go if we destroy it?

(The Dalai Lama)

Ms Suchitra Srivastava

Associate Professor,

Department of Management,

JIMS, Vasant Kunj  

Do What You Love Or What Pays?

Excuse us for signaling cliched, but in my opinion everyone should have the prospect to get the career they want. Everybody has a passion in life, something they’ve continually wanted to do, but numerous of us get held up in the daily grind, and find ourselves slipping further away from our ambitions.

A career has a natural progression with which we build up skills, and will be promoted to greater levels within a company. On the other hand, a job is rather which pays the rent, and might not necessarily be pleasing or fascinating. Above all, we have ALL been there! Most of us will have to take jobs which we  don’t want, and don’t relish. So try and stay positive, there is a way out. It really is never too late to start a new career, and fulfill your dreams.

While making a career decision, ‘follow your passion’ is usually a  heard advice. Reality said, it can actually be a tad misleading, at least going by research. If you have been somebody fervent about becoming a designer or blogger or singer since your childhood and still pursued the dream till you got your dreamed job, you are certainly a fortunate person.

A well written quote which I like a lot says:

“LEARN TO BALANCE A DREAM AND A JOB, UNTIL YOUR DREAM BECOMES YOUR JOB”

Unquestionably the truth is all of us need a source of income, indeed a stable one to live our lives. This is one thing we are constantly reminded of, since our childhood. Somewhere amongst choosing the right course to study and finding the right job, we overlook what we call as ‘inner calling’. We are so dedicated about the stability and monetary aspects of life that we overlook our passion. Most people, settle for a job and never even try to build a career in the first place.

I feel personally that our ultimatum must be about feeling contented and happy, on every single day of our life with whatever we choose to do. People have jobs paying lucratively, but stress is all they carry back home along with their six or seven digit paycheck, whereas, there are others, who live a middle class, but come back home with a big  smile and an eagerness to pick their work the next from where they left it. This zeal only comes with the sense of fulfillment and gladness in your work is giving you. Basically, I believe this kind work is what all of us have to choose and build a career in.

Wise people say that money is not everything, but on the other hand you’d be more contented in a sedan than a bus. Truly, money can’t buy happiness. But in the world we live today, we need money to do the things we love. Therefore, we have to have a career or job that provides us with that paycheck. But the genuine key to happiness is, doing what you love to earn money. Only a lucky few in this world gets to have it that way. But surely, you can find something that you are passionate about in what you do to earn a living. If not? By all means, you need a career change. After all, that’s what I did.

Chasing your dreams and taking risks to do what you love, is never easy. But I’ve learnt that, at the end of the day, it’s worth it. Life is not about how fat your paycheck is. It’s about how fulfilled you feel at the end of a working day.

Ms. Sakshi Chhabra

Assistant Professor

Department of Management Studies