STORY | SEBI pushes for resilient capital markets, focuses on investor protection: Chairman
SEBI Chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey on Saturday said the regulator is continuously working to make the country's capital markets more accessible, efficient and resilient, with a core approach focused on facilitating capital formation, improving ease of doing business and strengthening investors' protection.
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This year, the whole internet lost its heart to a baby monkey in Japan.
You remember Punch. A tiny Japanese macaque at a zoo outside Tokyo. His mother rejected him. The zookeepers raised him by hand and gave him a stuffed orangutan from IKEA, and he dragged it everywhere. Across the rocks. Around the whole enclosure. Every time the other monkeys pushed him away, he ran back to that orangutan and held on.
Millions of you watched. Millions of you cried. Don't deny it. IKEA sold out.
The whole world typed the same words. Hang in there, Punch.
(Last we heard, he's making friends. Okay. Continuing.)
I'm Japanese, and I know a different Punch. A human one. This is about the Americans who did a lot more than type.
My coworker's son, Kanta, was eight when his father's job took the family to a little town in Maryland.
He knew no English. None. And he had a stuffed Shiba Inu named Kuro. Missing one ear. Gray from being loved. In Japan, his teacher had told him he was too old for it and it had to stay home.
In Maryland, on his first Monday of third grade, Kanta brought Kuro.
He walked into a classroom of strangers speaking a language he didn't understand, holding a one-eared dog. And a boy near the window laughed.
His name was Jaxon. Biggest kid in the class. He didn't mean anything by it. He was eight. It was just funny.
Kanta didn't know a single word of English. He didn't need one for that laugh. He put Kuro in his backpack and didn't take him out again.
That night, Jaxon told his dad about the weird new kid with the broken dog.
His dad works at a tire shop. Big guy. Beard. Hands like oven mitts. He listened to the whole story. Then he went upstairs and dug through the hall closet. When he came back down, he was holding a stuffed animal from Jaxon's baby days.
A pink unicorn. Named Princess Sparkle.
"You're bringing this tomorrow."
"Dad. No."
"In this house," his dad said, "we don't let anybody be the only one."
The next morning, Jaxon, the biggest kid in the third grade, walked into class holding a pink unicorn.
Nobody laughed. Because the night before, Jaxon had called four friends.
So on Tuesday, half the class had a stuffed animal on their desk.
By Wednesday, all twenty-four of them did. A bear with no eyes. A dinosaur. A frog that had been through a washing machine many, many times.
On Thursday, the teacher brought her old rabbit from 1979.
On Friday, the principal walked into the room in his tie, holding a stuffed bass. The singing kind. He pressed the button. It sang.
Kanta laughed until he slid off his chair.
Then he unzipped his backpack and put Kuro on the desk.
It became a thing. Every Friday until June, the whole third grade brought one. They called it Kuro Friday. They still do it. Kanta went home to Japan four years ago. A school in Maryland is still doing Kuro Friday, and most of the kids have no idea who Kuro is.
Kanta is thirteen now.
Last spring, a new boy transferred into his class in Tokyo. From somewhere far away. No Japanese. Scared out of his mind. That first morning, the new boy pulled a little stuffed bear out of his bag, and somebody laughed.
The next morning, Kanta walked into class with a one-eared Shiba Inu on top of his desk.
He was thirteen. He knew what it would cost him.
He did it anyway, because a tire-shop dad in Maryland taught him the rule.
Nobody gets to be the only one.
The whole world told a little monkey to hang in there.
Maryland doesn't tell you to hang in there.
Maryland brings a unicorn.
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