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Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Jan/11/2012


Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina arrives in Agartala

Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina inspects the Guard of Honour at the State Guest House, Agartala on Jan. 11, 2012. Photo: Ritu Raj Konwar.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina arrived here on Tuesday by a special aircraft on a two-day visit to Tripura.
She was received at the airport by Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal as a special emissary of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, State Governor D Y Patil and Chief Minister Manik Sarkar.
In the evening, Ms. Hasina will participate in a discussion with business delegations of both the countries.
Tomorrow she will be conferred D Litt by the Tripura Central University at its ninth convocation.

No respite from cold in Valley

A view of snow covered residence in Srinagar on Tuesday. A cold wave tightened its grip in Jammu and Kashmir for the past three days. Photo: Nissar Ahmad

There was no respite for residents of Kashmir as mercury across the Valley remained below the freezing point for the third consecutive day on Wednesday.
In the summer capital Srinagar, the minimum temperature was recorded at minus 3.3 degrees Celsius, an decrease of 0.5 degrees from last night, a MeT official said.
Srinagar city on Tuesday recorded the maximum temperature of minus 1.0 degrees Celsius which was the coldest day in many years.
North Kashmir’s Gulmarg resort recorded a low of minus 14.8 degrees Celsius, an increase of 1.4 degrees from last night.
In Pahalgam resort of south Kashmir, mercury touched a low of minus 10.7 degrees Celsius, the official said.
The south Kashmir gateway town of Qazigund recorded a minimum of minus 5.4 degrees Celsius, while north Kashmir’s frontier Kupwara town recorded a low of minus 4.4 degrees Celsius, the spokesman said.

Slow start to Punjab Assembly polls

Shiromani Akali Dal MP Harsimrat Kaur Badal filing nomination papers from Lambi Assembly seat in Malout, Muktsar on Tuesday. Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and depty Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal are also seen.

With Thursday being the deadline for filing nomination for the coming assembly elections in Punjab and political heavy-weights like Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and State Congress chief Captain Amarinder Singh having filed their nominations, other candidates from all political parties are lining up to file their papers. However, campaigning is yet to pick up to attract voters to their respective sides.
Elections to the 117 assembly constituencies in Punjab is scheduled for January 30 and the date for completing the process of scrutiny of nomination papers and withdrawal of candidature is still five days away.
Under the strict eye of the Election Commission monitoring all electoral activities, including expenses of prospective candidates in the run up to the polls, major political parties are exercising all caution. Political parties need to inform the returning officers about placing of advertisements, putting up hoardings and even organizing rallies in their respective assembly segments. With the expenditure limit put at Rs. 16 lakh for an assembly seat, candidates have to maintain their log books in a register on expenses incurred in organizing meetings, hiring vehicles and tents and even for offering refreshments to the party workers.

Four People's Principles

Markandy Katju. File photo: R.V.Moorthy

Only modern science can solve the many problems that India's masses face.
When we discuss science, we must ask what its purpose is. The answer, to my mind, is: to make our lives better and happier. Science is that knowledge by which we understand nature and harness it for our benefit.
Some people may oppose this view, saying that the atom bomb destroys lives, and that science has created weapons of destruction. Scientific knowledge can be misused, but also used to benefit mankind. But without science we will be living precarious, wretched lives.
An objection could also be raised that it is only the applied sciences (technology) that benefit people, not the fundamental sciences. It is true that a scientist doing fundamental research does not care whether his discoveries are of any utility or not. Newton and Einstein did not bother whether their discoveries would benefit mankind. However, these benefit mankind in the long run.
Today India faces huge problems; only science can solve them. Some 80 per cent of its people live in poverty, with unemployment, sky-rocketing prices, problems of healthcare, education and housing, and so on. Forty-eight farmers commit suicide on an average each day. And 47 per cent of the children are malnourished. Our national aim must be to abolish these evils and make India prosperous for all.
To address the problems, I present Four People's Principles (following Sun Yat Sen's Three People's Principles). These should be our guiding principles: Science, Democracy, Livelihood, and Unity of the People.

SCIENCE

When India was on the scientific path, it prospered. With the aid of science we built mighty civilisations thousands of years ago when most people in Europe (except in Greece and Rome) lived in the forests. We made outstanding scientific discoveries. However, we subsequently took to the unscientific path of superstition and ritual. The way out is to go back to the scientific path shown by our ancestors — Aryabhatta and Brahmagupta, Sushruta and Charaka, Ramanujan and C.V. Raman.
Here are three examples of Indian scientific achievements in ancient times.
1. The decimal system was perhaps the most revolutionary and greatest scientific achievement in the ancient world. The Europeans called the numbers in the decimal system Arabic numerals, but surprisingly the Arabs called them Hindu numerals. Were they Arabic or Hindu? The languages Urdu, Persian and Arabic are written from right to left, but if you ask any speaker of these languages to write a number, he will write it left to right. This shows the numbers were taken from a language that was written left to right. It is accepted now that these numbers came from India, and were copied by the Arabs.
The decimal system has revolutionary significance. Ancient Rome was a great civilisation, but its people were uncomfortable with numbers above 1000. They wrote their numbers in alphabets, I standing for 1, V for 5, X for 10, L for 50, C for 100, D for 500 and M for 1000. There was no alphabet expressing a number higher than 1000. If one would have asked an ancient Roman to write the number one million, he would have gone crazy: to write one million he would have to write the letter M, which stands for millennium (or one thousand), one thousand times. On the other hand, under our system, to express one million we have just to write the number one followed by six zeroes. We could thus express astronomically high numbers by adding zeroes. In the Roman numerals there is no zero. Zero was ancient India's invention.
2. Five thousand years ago in the Indus Valley civilisation was created the system of town planning, with covered drains and the sewage system.
3. Plastic surgery was invented in India in the 6th century B.C.; Westerners discovered it about 200 years ago.
I am not going into our other great scientific achievements (for details, see ‘Sanskrit as a Language of Science' at the website, www. kgfindia.com).
However, today we are far behind the Western countries in science; that is the real cause of our poverty and other social evils. We must spread science — not physics, chemistry and biology alone: it is the entire scientific outlook. We must spread rational and logical thinking among our masses and make them give up backwardness and superstition. The mindset steeped in casteism, communalism and superstition must change. Science is not the natural sciences alone, but also the social sciences. A worldwide recession is on. This can only be solved by knowledge of economic theory, not of natural sciences or engineering.

DEMOCRACY

The second principle is Democracy. When King Ajatashatru of Magadha was planning to attack the Vajjian democracy, he sent a messenger to the Buddha for advice. Instead of speaking to this messenger, the Buddha told one of his disciples: “Have you heard, Anand, that the Vajjians foregather often and frequent the public meetings of their clan? So long, Anand, as the Vajjians so foregather and so frequent the public meetings of their clan, so long they may be expected not to decline but to prosper.
Similarly, Avadan Shatak, a Buddhist Sanskrit text of the second century A.D., mentions that a group of merchants went from North India to the Deccan and were asked by the Deccan King, who was the king who ruled over North India. The merchants replied: Deva, kechit deshah ganadheena, kechit rajaadheena, iti, which means “Your Majesty, some regions are under democratic rule, while others are under kings.” So, democracy is nothing new to India.
The method of shastrarthas was developed in ancient India, which permitted free discussion in the presence of a large assembly. This resulted in growth in philosophy, law, grammar and so on, and also in science, including medicine, mathematics and astronomy.
Some people say democracy is not good for India. I disagree. The problem in India is not that there is too much democracy but too little. We need more democracy, not less, and that means educating the masses, raising their cultural level, and involving them actively in national reconstruction.
Democracy and science go hand in hand. Scientific growth requires certain supportive values, namely, the freedom to think, criticise, and dissent, tolerance, plurality, and free flow of information. These are the values of a democratic society.

LIVELIHOOD

The third principle is livelihood for the masses. Today, 80 per cent of Indians are poor, and there is massive unemployment, lack of healthcare, housing and good education. In the recent period, the rich have become richer, and the rich-poor divide has increased. Economic growth has benefited only a handful.
The French thinker, Rousseau, wrote: “It is obviously contrary to the law of nature for a handful of people to gorge themselves on superfluities while the starving multitudes lack the necessities of life.” (Discourse on the Origins of Inequality)
Using our creativity we must find ways to raise the standard of living of the masses. Ultimately, that is what matters. Let the system we adopt be called capitalism or socialism or communism, the real test is whether the standard of living of the masses is going up or not. Surely, a system in which a quarter million farmers have committed suicide in the last 15 years and vast masses live in poverty is unacceptable.
Before the Industrial Revolution, which began in Western Europe in the 18th century, there was feudalism everywhere. In the feudal system the methods of production were primitive and very little wealth was generated, and only a handful of people could be rich. In contrast, modern industry is powerful and big, and enough wealth can be generated to meet everybody's basic needs. Nobody needs to be poor. It is the state's duty to ensure that.

UNITY OF THE PEOPLE

India has great diversity, with a number of castes, languages, religions and ethnic groups, as it is broadly a country of immigrants (see the article, ‘Kalidas Ghalib Academy for Mutual Understanding,' and the video, ‘What is India,' at www. kgfindia.com). So the only policy that will work here is secularism, giving equal respect to all communities. This was the policy of Emperor Akbar, who was really the architect of modern India. This policy was continued by Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues who created our secular Constitution.
In 1947, religious passions were inflamed; Pakistan had declared itself an Islamic state. There must have been tremendous pressure on Nehru and his colleagues to declare India a Hindu state. It is not easy to keep a cool head when passions are inflamed, but our leaders said India would not be a Hindu state but a secular one. It is for this reason that there is more stability in India than in the neighbouring country.
Powerful vested interests are trying to destroy the unity and make us fight one another on the basis of religion, caste, region, language, and so on. It is the duty of all patriotic people to expose these designs and maintain the unity of the people; without that we cannot progress.
(Justice Markandey Katju is Chairman of the Press Council of India. This is an edited version of the address he delivered on January 11 at an international conference organised by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, on ‘Science Communication for Scientific Temper,' in New Delhi)

Intel enters smart phone market

Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini introduces the Intel smart phone during his keynote address at the 2012 International CES tradeshow, on Tuesday, in Las Vegas.
Intel Corp on Tuesday announced plans to team up with Motorola Mobility Inc and Lenovo to make the first smart phones running on Intel chips.
Lenovo will use a 1.6GHz Atom z2640 chip on a phone to debut in China in the second quarter, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Motorola has also entered into a multi-year, multi-product agreement with Intel, Otellini said.
"The best of Intel computing is coming to smartphones," the Intel chief said. "Our efforts with Lenovo and Motorola Mobility will help to establish Intel processors in smartphones and provide a solid foundation from which to build in 2012 and into the future."
The devices from the two manufacturers represent Intel's belated entry into the surging smartphones market. In contrast to the computer world, where Intel's dominant X86 chip is dominant, most smartphones run on the rival architecture of chips by ARM Holdings Plc, which is thought to be use less power than Intel's chips.


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