Godse is often a misunderstood character. He is referred to as a Hindu fanatic. It is often hard to understand Godse because the Government of India had suppressed information about him. His court statements, letters etc. were all banned from the public until recently. Judging from his writings one thing becomes very clear – He was no fanatic. His court statements are very well read out and indicate a calm and collected mental disposition. He never even once speaks ill about Gandhi as a person, but only attacks Gandhi’s policies which caused ruin and untold misery to Hindus. Another interesting point to note is that Godse had been working with the Hindu refugees fleeing from Pakistan. He had seen the horrible atrocities committed on them. Many women had their hands cut off, nose cut off, even little girls had been raped mercilessly. Despite this Godse did not harm even single Muslim in India which he could easily have. So it would be a grave mistake to call him a Hindu fanatic.
Continue reading “Godse The Misunderstood character” »
Homi Jehangir Bhabha-The Father of Indian Nuclear Research Prog
Bhabha was born into a wealthy and prominent Parsi family, through which he was related to Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Dorab Tata. He received his early education at Bombay’s Cathedral Grammar School and entered Elphinstone College at age 15 after passing his Senior Cambridge Examination with Honors. He then attended the Royal Institute of Science until 1927 before joining Caius College of Cambridge University. This was due to the insistence of his father and his uncle Dorab Tata, who planned for Bhabha to obtain an engineering degree from Cambridge and then return to India, where he would join the Tata Iron and Steel Company in Jamshedpur.
Return to India : In September 1939, Bhabha was in India for a brief holiday when World War II broke out, and he decided not to return to England for the time being. He accepted an offer to serve as the Reader in the Physics Department of the Indian Institute of Science, then headed by renowned physicist C. V. Raman. He received a special research grant from the Sir Dorab Tata Trust, which he used to establish the Cosmic Ray Research Unit at the institute. Bhabha selected a few students, including Harish-Chandra, to work with him. Later, on 20 March 1941, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society . With the help of J. R. D. Tata, he played an instrumental role in the establishment of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay.
Death and legacy : He died when Air India Flight 101 crashed near Mont Blanc on January 24, 1966. Many possible theories have been advanced for the aircrash, including a conspiracy theory in which CIA is involved in order to paralyze Indian nuclear weapon programme. After his death, the Atomic Energy Establishment at Trombay was renamed as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in his honour.
In addition to being an able scientist and administrator, Bhabha was also a painter and a classical music and opera enthusiast, besides being an amateur botanist. He is one of the most prominent scientists that India has ever had. Bhabha also encouraged research in electronics, space science, radio astronomy and microbiology. The famed radio telescope at Ooty, India was his initiative, and it became a reality in 1970. The Homi Bhabha Fellowship Council has been giving the Homi Bhabha Fellowships since 1967 Other noted institutions in his name are the Homi Bhabha National Institute, an Indian deemed university and the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mumbai, India.
Start on time, know the agenda well, keep it moving, be modest but efficient, and
end promptly after allowing time for discussion.
Preside only over meetings that are important for your unit and only where your
leadership is essential. Your chairing also provides increased significance to a
meeting.
Make it known that you are giving the opportunity to your deputies and close
associates to exercise leadership by having them conduct less-important gatherings.
Essentials:
Distribute a summary of the agenda well ahead of the meeting.
Start exactly on the scheduled time. (Multiplying the typical 15-min delays to
starting meetings over the course of a year adds up to an enormous waste of
time).
Continue reading “How to Run Meetings” »
The Rules of the Game
by Carl Sagan
The Rules of the Game
by Carl Sagan
Everything morally right derives from one of four sources: it concerns either full
perception or intelligent development of what is true; or the preservation of organized
society, where every man is rendered his due and all obligations are faithfully discharged;
or the greatness and strength of a noble, invincible spirit; or order and moderation in
everything said and done, whereby is temperance and self-control.
Cicero, De Officiis, I, 5 (45-44 B.C.)
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Dreams Are Maps: Exploration and Human Purpose
An Essay by Carl Sagan
Editor’s Note: Former Planetary Society President Carl Sagan died on December 20, 1996 of pneumonia after a
prolonged illness. This essay is reprinted from the September/October 1992 issue of The Planetary Report.
I know where I was when the Space Age began. In early October 1957, I was a graduate
student at the University of Chicago, working toward a doctorate in planetary astronomy. The
previous year, when Mars was the closest it ever gets to Earth, I had been at the McDonald
Observatory in Texas, peering through the telescope and trying to understand something of
what our neighboring world is like. But there had been dust storms on both planets, and Mars
was 40 million miles away. When you’re stuck on the surface of Earth, those other worlds,
however tantalizing, are inaccessible.
Continue reading “Dreams Are Maps: Exploration and Human Purpose” »
Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault – October 25th, 1982.
From: Martin, L.H. et al (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock. pp.9-15.
Q. Why did you come to the University of Vermont?
A: I came to try to explain more precisely to some people what kind of work I am doing, to know what kind of work they are doing, and to establish some permanent relationships. I am not a
writer, a philosopher, a great figure of intellectual life: I am a teacher. There is a social phenomenon that troubles me a great deal: Since the 1960s, some teachers are becoming public men with
the same obligations. I don’t want to become a prohet and say, “Please sit down, what I have to say is very important.” I have come to discuss our common work.
Q. You are most frequently termed “philosopher” but also “historian”, “structuralist”, and “Marxist”. The title of your chair at the College de France is “Professor of the History of Systems of Thought”. What does this mean?
A. I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began
a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write
it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related
to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations. The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane
- maybe very narrow – which is the path of the historian of thought.
Q. In The History of Sexuality, you refer to the person who “upsets established laws and somehow anticipates the coming freedom.” Do you see your own work in this light?
A. No. For rather a long period, people have asked me to tell them what will happen and to give them a program for the future. We know very well that, even with the best intentions, those programs become a tool, an instrument of oppression. Rousseau, a lover of freedom, was used
in the French Revolution to build up a model of social oppression. Marx would be horrified by Stalinism and Leninism. My role – and that is too emphatic a word – is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be
criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people – that’s the role of an intellectual.
Q. In your writing you seem fascinated by figures who exist on the margins of society: madmen, lepers, criminals, deviants, hermaphrodites, murderers, obscure thinkers. Why?
A. I am sometimes reproached for selecting marginal thinkers instead of taking examples from the mainstream of history. My answer will be snobbish: It’s impossible to see figures like Bopp and Ricardo as obscure.
Q. But what about your interest in sociel outcasts?
A. I deal with obscure figures and processes for two reasons: The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don’t perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people. It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape – that people are universal – are
the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space
of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.
Continue reading “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault – October 25th, 1982” »
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