JAIN (Deemed-to-be University)

Bengaluru, 8th August 2026: Harsha R P once came close to shutting down the company he had built. He did not open his talk with that story. He opened it by asking students what they assumed about him, and about themselves.

The Entrepreneurship Cell at JAIN (Deemed-to-be University)'s School of Commerce hosted the training session, "Take a Breath, Take the Leap: Entrepreneurship Redefined," at Room 520, with Harsha, Founder, Director and CEO of Pause and Breathe Pvt. Ltd., as speaker. The interactive opening set the tone for a session that treated entrepreneurship less as theory and more as something students could examine from the inside.

Harsha framed entrepreneurship as the work of noticing problems worth solving and building value around them. He pointed to Meta, Instagram, WhatsApp and Google as examples of companies that grew by spotting gaps others had missed, then turning that observation into something usable.

The session's most candid moment came when he described a period when he seriously considered closing his own company and did, for a time, halt its operations. Rather than framing it as a setback he had overcome, he used it to talk about what patience and self belief actually look like when a business is not going as planned.

From there, the conversation moved to practical ground: converting ideas into workable solutions, taking calculated risks, communicating clearly, collaborating well and protecting one's mental wellbeing while building something new. Staying anchored to one's values, he said, mattered as much as any business strategy.

The session closed with Harsha encouraging students to back ideas that meant something to them, and to treat setbacks as part of the process rather than the end of it. For a room full of students still deciding what to build, it was a fairly honest place to start.

Bengaluru, 7th August 2026: A textbook can describe intellectual disability in a paragraph. It takes a visit to an actual classroom to understand what that paragraph leaves out.

Five students from JAIN (Deemed-to-be University)'s MSc Child and Adolescent Psychology programme spent the day at the Association for Mentally Challenged School, near Kidwai Hospital, as part of an experiential learning module organised by the Department of Psychology, School of Sciences. Faculty coordinator Dr Mamatha K led the visit, with Ms Srija Dorai coordinating on the student side.

The day began with an orientation session led by Ms Priyadarshini, Principal Coordinator for IDD Education and Programs, who introduced the students to the school's approach before taking them through its facilities, including a vocational training room stocked with products the children had made themselves.

Throughout, the emphasis fell less on what children with intellectual disabilities cannot do and more on what they can. Ms Priyadarshini spoke about individualising support rather than applying one method across the board, since two children with the same diagnosis can need very different levels of help. Patience, consistency and structured reinforcement, she said, matter more than any single technique.

The vocational training room stood out to the group. Seeing objects the children had made themselves shifted the conversation from limitation to capability, and from care to preparation for adult life.

For MSc students used to meeting intellectual disability through case studies and diagnostic criteria, the visit offered something classroom material rarely does: a chance to watch theory translate into daily practice, and to see communication take forms that have nothing to do with words.

By the end of the day, the group returned with fewer assumptions and a clearer sense of what the profession will actually ask of them.

Mannarkkad, Kerala, 7th August 2026: A staged crime scene gives nothing away easily. It has to be walked, measured, photographed and argued over before it starts to make sense, and that was the exact test set for the students who gathered at MES Kalladi College (Autonomous) for CrimQuest 2K26, the South India Regional Crime Scene Investigation Competition, held in collaboration with the Centre for Criminal Investigation and Forensic Science (CCIFS).

More than 150 teams, roughly 650 students from 46 plus colleges and universities, took on the same simulated scene, each team of five working across forensic science, criminology, law, psychology and cyber forensics to reconstruct what had happened and defend their conclusions.

JAIN (Deemed-to-be University) sent four teams from its Department of Forensic Science, part of the School of Sciences, into the field. One of them, made up of third semester M.Sc Forensic Science students Sarath, Manesh, Sneha, Stuti and Yashashri, worked through the scene methodically enough to be named Overall Champions, taking first place against the entire regional field.

A second recognition went to Hemanth P, a fifth semester BSc Forensic Science student from the same department, who won Best Photographer/Videographer, a category built around the discipline of documenting a scene exactly as it was found, before anything is moved or lost.

Between the two wins sits a fuller point about what forensic training is meant to produce. A crime scene rewards patience and precision over guesswork, and a regional field of this size leaves little room for either team to fake its way through. For JAIN's forensic science students, CrimQuest 2K26 was less a competition to win than a fairly public test of how well the classroom holds up once the scene is real, or close enough to it.