January 12, 2012

Rs. 152 crore allocated for Virudhunagar

: The Tamil Nadu Assembly Petitions committee, led by MLA, Mohan, reviewed the process of petitions received by officials from the public on important issues, here on Wednesday.

Mr. Mohan said that Virudhunagar was the 11{+t}{+h}district in the State the panel was visiting. The panel took up 45 out of the 133 petitions received from the people for review. The members instructed the district administration to process all the petitions.

A total of Rs. 152 crore had been allocated for Virudhunagar district for various works, he said.

The committee inspected the railway level crossing gate on Ramamoorthy Road where a road over bridge had been proposed. It also inspected the underground drainage work and the Government hospital in Virudhunagar town and the bus stand in Tiruthangal.

New president of ISTE

: The Vice-Chancellor of Anna University of Technology, Madurai, R.Murugesan has been elected as the president of Indian Society for Technical Education, New Delhi, for 2012 to 2014.

Addressing a press conference here on Wednesday, Dr. Murugesan said the election for the post was held during the 41{+s}{+t}ISTE Annual National Convention hosted by Baba Bandha Singh Bahadur Engineering College, Fatehgarh Sahib in Punjab on December 16, 2011. Dr.Murugesan now joins the elite group of G.R.Damodaran and V.C. Kulandaisamy by becoming the third person from the state to hold that position after a gap of 15 years. He is also the 15th president of the society.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi frowns on over-celebration of icons

Former West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi on Tuesday disapproved of the tendency to “contradict heritage at every step of celebrating the country's heritage” and overdoing the commemoration of national icons.

Launching a set of four books on Rabindranath Tagore by scholar-lawyer K. Chandrasekharan re-published to mark the 150{+t}{+h}anniversary of Tagore, Mr. Gandhi said one of the four ways in which people gratified their sense of indebtedness to individuals was by oversimplifying the object of commemoration — thus Tagore becomes a national poet and universalist, Mahatma Gandhi becomes the apostle of non-violence and Jawaharlal Nehru the architect of modern India.

The other means were to over-decorate — by erecting statues, issuing stamps and instituting memorial orations — over-celebrate (starting centenaries a year late and going on after “zero-point”), and overwhelm (through extravagance, exaggeration and excess), Mr. Gandhi said.

Tsunami scare in Cuddalore

The much harried coastal community was in the grip of panic on Wednesday when the news broke out that an earthquake that occurred off the Sumatra coast might trigger tsunami.

The residents of Singarathope coastal village collected their belongings and took their children to places of safety. Many of them went to the high-level bridge there that saved hundreds of lives during the December 2004 tsunami. Most of the residents stayed outside for the better part of the day.

Some of the fishermen said that the early symptoms they witnessed before the tsunami strike was that the sea waves advanced well into the shore, much beyond the usual level.