Proud To Be Indian

The first thing that strikes one about Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam and Dr. YS Rajan€ ¦’²s book, India 2020: A Vision for the New Millennium is its positive tone. A man who always believed in teamwork, he insists that every reply he gives is further elaborated upon by his colleague and co-author Dr. Rajan, who has put in a long innings with the Indian Space Research Organization. Dr. Kalam says: € ¦’³ We are confident that poverty will be substantially reduced and that no Indian will be living below the poverty line by 2020. We believe that once food and job availability increase, this will have a triggering effect on the whole economy. We also believe this can be achieved without huge capital investments and have elaborated on this in our book.€ ¦’´
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Tipu Sultan€ ¦’²s army was the first to use rockets. Abdul Kalam tells the story, in half jest and half pain that the British leant about accurate rocket propulsion from Tipu Sultan€ ¦’²s armoury.
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The ATM bank card technology was developed in India in the late Eighties but it was patented in the US. It was a one million-dollar sale to Unisys which in turn made $700 million by selling it all over the world.
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The bathing complex at Shirdi, Nasik in Maharashtra, built and maintained by Sulabh International for the Shirdi Saibaba Trust is the largest bathing complex in the world. The complex can serve 30000 people a day.
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India has the second largest English-speaking graduates in the world (next to the USA).
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The word navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word € ¦’³navigath€ ¦’´. The word navy is also derived from the Sanskrit word € ¦’³nou€ ¦’´. Which means boat in sanskrit and few other Indian languages. The art of navigation was developed in the river Sindhu 6000 years ago. The strong Maratha navy had the British at bay for a long time.
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India€ ¦’²s professional standing army of 1.1 million is the second largest in the world after China€ ¦’²s.
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India has 18 officially recognized languages with a number of dialects and spin-offs. The nation has newspapers in 87 languages, radio programs in 71 and films in 15.
Sanskrit literature is more than 5000 years old and tamil 3000. Some Indian languages do not have a script. Although some languages are called € ¦’³tribal€ ¦’´ or € ¦’³aboriginal€ ¦’´, their populations may be larger than those that speak some European languages. Bhili and Santali both tribal languages, each have more than 4 million speakers. Gondi is spoken by more than 2 million people.
With 366 and 207 million speakers, Hindi is second and Bengali fifth among the top ten languages spoken in the world. Chinese tops the list as those speaking Chinese Mandarin number 874 million according to the World Almanac and Book of Facts, Modern Language Association of America and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
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India produces the highest number of feature films per year from eight centres in a record 30 languages and dialects. Between 1912 and 1999, India produced 31264 feature films, both silent and talkies, of which Hindi films comprise 8566.
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Abhinav Bindra of Chandigarh, is the only person to have shot a perfect score 600/600 in the air rifle (ISU) category at the Chandigarh State Shooting Championship at Patilal Rao range, eclipsing the previous mark 597/600 set by Austria€ ¦’²s Wolfram Wibel.
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India is the largest producer of milk in the world. The milk is processed and distributed using state-of-the-art technology. The National Dairy Development Board now handles more than 10,900 metric tonnes of milk a day. It is estimated that Operation Flood increased milk-production during the period 1974-94 by 44 million metric tonnes per year. The entire operation is run on a commercial basis. Of the 72,000 village level co-operatives, milk was collected only from 53,000. The rest of them were considered to be commercially unviable. It is estimated that this alone is responsible for more than a billion dollars of rural income. Here is an indigenous initiative that converted the poor into consumers. More importantly, it created six million entrepreneurs in India€ ¦’²s villages.
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India possesses the largest postal network in the world. It comprises 154149 post offices of which 89 per cent are located in 604341 villages. Letters are collected from 564701 letterboxes and processed by a network of 573 Railway Mail Service (RMS).
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According to the Gemological Institute of America until 1896, India was the only source for diamonds to the world.
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There are more than 5000 dailies, 16,000 weeklies and over 6000 fortnightlies in all Indian languages, higher than in any other country.
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Chennai based eye hospital Sankar Netralaya is the first eye hospital in Asia to obtain an ISO certification.
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Bharat Bala talks about a moment four years ago as the turning point in his life. His father, a freedom fighter and a close associate of Kamaraj, looked at him and said, € ¦’³ You say that good advertising is being able to encapsulate a product€ ¦’²s Big Idea. Can you create a Big Idea for our country? Can you sell India to Indians?€ ¦’´ That€ ¦’²s how Vande Mataram was born.
In three and half years Bharat Bala, Kanika and the team travelled 60,000 kilometers of India for Vande Mataram, Vande Mataram II and Jana Gana Mana. Ma Tujhe Salam, one of Rahman€ ¦’²s compositions in the first Vande Mataram album, played in 400 cinema halls. € ¦’³ There was chaos in the theatres,€ ¦’´ Bharat Bala says proudly, € ¦’³they kept playing the song again and again!€ ¦’´
Jana Gana Mana took 65 musicians to Ladakh. And they weren€ ¦’²t just any musicians: Bhimsen Joshi, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, Jasraj, Shiv Kumar Sharma€ ¦’¥. you name them, they were there. Each one gave his/her own unique rendition of the national anthem, each wearing white, each standing dramatically against the area€ ¦’²s bleak backdrop.
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Carlene Moore Ellis, director, education programme, for Intel Corporation, thinks that the computer education in India is fairly unique. She says: € ¦’³Our concerns in the US have not enough home work, too much free time, not enough time spent on math and science in classrooms. It is a great concern that American students are scoring last in math and science in the whole world. The top scorer in math and science is pretty much Asia. I think India€ ¦’²s math and science skills are outrageously good. I should have put my children in India from KG through class 8. I greatly admire this country€ ¦’²s passion for education. The valuing of education as a culture, the indisputable regard for educators and people attempting to educate a country of a billion people is very much to be admired. You should be proud of what you€ ¦’²ve done as a country.€ ¦’´
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Hero Cycles Ltd., the flagship company of the Hero group, has been the largest manufacturer of bicycles in the world since 1986. The two units at Ludhiana and Sahibabad have a combined production capacity of more than 16,500 bicycles a day.
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The Keeled Chana National Park, Bharatpur (Rajasthan) is considered one of the finest bird sanctuaries in the world.
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Taranath Shenoy, who is deaf, dumb and blind in one eye, did not let his physical disability stop him from swimming across the English Channel and the Straits of Gibraltar.
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Jaipur foot looks exactly like the normal foot and matches the color of the skin. An Indian creation, Jaipur foot is now a part of medical terminology. Sudha Chandran who is a famous Bharatanatyam dancer lost her leg in an accident. She gave her first performance with the artificial limb on January 28 1984 and danced for nearly two hours.
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In Surya Siddhanta, Bhaskaracharya calculates the time taken for the earth to orbit the sun to 9 decimal places (365.258756484 days). The modern accepted measurement is 365.2596 days. The difference between the ancient measurement (1500 years ago) and the modern measurement is only 0.00085 days (0.0002%). India has given the world the idea of the smallest and the largest measure of time € ¦’¶ from 34,000 th of a second (Krati) to 4.32 billion years (Kalpa).
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Amartya Sen is high up in the world league of serious thinkers and a Nobel laureate in economics. He could have also won the prize for philosophy if the committee recognized the subject.
His work on the causes of famine changed public perceptions by showing why thousands might starve even when a country€ ¦’²s food production has not diminished, and his analysis of poverty has been enormously influential. Arguing that simple measures of GNP were not enough to assess the standard of living, he helped to create the United Nations€ ¦’² Human Development Index€ ¦’¥.
€ ¦’³He has a mind like a searchlight, yet he works at Mozartian speed. His output is staggering in its volume,€ ¦’´ comments Robert Cassen, an economist at the LSE.
-Jonathan Steele, March 31, 2001, The Guardian
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From 173 million voters 50 years ago, the number grew to 619 million in the 1999 general elections, making India€ ¦’²s elections the largest in the world.
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In 1997, Cipla launched transparent Rotahaler, the world€ ¦’²s first dry powder inhaler device now patented by Cipla in India and abroad.
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Mr. Narayan NR Murthy, Chairman and CEO of Infosys, was named among the € ¦’±25 most influential global executives€ ¦’² by TIME/CNN in 2001. Infosys was ranked number two in corporate governance in a survey of 495 emerging companies conducted by CLSA emerging markets.
Mr. Narayan Murthy has sold 36,500 of his own shares in Infosys to contribute to charitable activities. The total value of this sale will be close to Rs.12 crores, based on that day€ ¦’²s closing price of Rs.3,210 on BSE. According to a notice sent to the stock exchange, Mr.Narayan Murthy owned 5.64 lakh shares in Infosys that, after the sale, has come down to 5.28 lakh shares.
Mr.Narayan Murthy and other Infoscians see social responsibility as a way of life. Mr. Narayan Murthy is a regular contributor to several charities. He and his wife Sudha Murthy have contributed close to Rs. Eight crores for the creation of 100 Nirmala Bangalore sanitation systems, HealthNet Infrastructure, under the Bangalore Agenda Task Force.
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India is already the globe€ ¦’²s largest producer of films, annually cranking out some 800 titles. Exports earned $100 million in 1999, a tenfold increase since 1990. The year 2000 earnings were estimated at $250 million. Management consultant Arthur Andersen predicts Indian exports will expand by at least 50 per cent each year, earning around $3 billion by 2006.
India€ ¦’²s IT software and engineering savvy is spilling into India€ ¦’²s fast-growing reputation as an outsourcing center for high-quality, low-cost animation and special effects. (Indian companies typically charge 75 percent less than U.S. companies.) Arthur Andersen forecasts that Indian animation exports alone will reach $2 billion in 2003.
€ ¦’³Indians have it in them to match Hollywood€ ¦’²s standards shoulder to shoulder. For instance Signs, Manoj Night Shyamalan€ ¦’²s latest film, debuted at number one in mid-August 2002 with a staggering $60.3 million in ticket sales. Signs played in 3,264 theatres, averaged $18,469 per location and grossed more than the rest of the Top Five combined. Manoj Shymalan is described as the next Steven Spielberg. He improved on the record openings of his previous film, Unbreakable (2000), which grossed $30.3 million in the first weekend and eventually closed with $95 million. The Sixth Sense (1999) debuted at $26.7 million and raked in $293.5 million. Both films, starring Bruce Willis, collectively grossed over $900 million at the global box office. Signs posted the 11 th largest opening weekend ever, the fifth best among sequels and the second biggest in August 2002 after Rush Hour 2, which premiered around the same weekend a year ago.€ ¦’´
Source: Article by Anil Padmanabhan in India Today, August 2002
Manoj Night Shyamalan also wrote the screenplay for the family hit Stuart Little and became the first Indian-American or € ¦’±person of color€ ¦’² to ever be nominated in both the best writer and director Oscar categories.
The Gladiator recreates ancient Rome in all her majesty and film critics are going nuts about the perfect atmospheric smoke and the dazzling sets. The large chunks of these sets were not made in Dream Work€ ¦’²s fancy Hollywood studio, but right here in India. A Mumbai-based art-decorator firm, Nitish Roy & Associates, was hired to design portions of the sets for the spectacular Roman saga. The offer to prop up the Gladiator came like a bolt from the blue. Mr.Roy and his partner Sunil Pillai got a call in January 1999 from an old friend, Crispan Sallis, who had been hired as art decorator for the Gladiator to replace the existing one who had made a hash of things and had run through most of the budget. Recounts Mr.Pillai, € ¦’³ Crispan called us and said, € ¦’± I have no time and almost no money. You have to help me.€ ¦’´ It was an order they couldn€ ¦’²t refuse. Also one does not refuse a $107 million-budget Ridley Scott film.
Gurinder Chadha€ ¦’²s Bend It Like Beckham shot to number one in the British Box office, which represents a record for a film directed by an Indian.
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The world€ ¦’²s first university was established in Takshila in 700 BC.
Nalanda University, the Harvard of its times was built in 4 th century BC and was one of the greatest achievements in the field of education. More than 10,500 students studied over 60 subjects at the Nalanda University. The subjects included Brahminical and Buddhist, sacred and secular, philosophical and practical. Nalanda attracted students not only from parts of India but also from far off lands.
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The fact about the awe of Indian railways continues: Tracks of 1,00,000 Km. 700 stations. 2,300 railway yards. 11,000 freight and passenger trains a day. Over a million passengers a day. The longest tunnel in the world. The highest station in the world. One of the most challenging bits of construction (Konkan Railway). The largest railway in the world. In 1906, the largest railway station in the world was built at Howrah. One of the largest employers in the world. And perhaps among the cheapest tickets in the world.
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Reuters is today the world€ ¦’²s largest news and television agency, with 198 bureaus serving 150 countries and revenues of more than $ six billion. The reputation of the service has been enhanced as much by its scoops and pioneering use of technology as by its fierce determination to protect its independence. Now, for the first time, it has placed its trust on an Indian to preserve its neutrality by appointing Mammen Mathew, Editor and Managing Director of the Malayala Manorama Group of Publications, as a Reuters trustee and director. Mammen Mathew, Chief Editor of TheWeek, is modest about the honour. € ¦’³It is a national recognition,€ ¦’´ he says. € ¦’³ It is an acceptance of the vibrancy of Indian journalism.€ ¦’´
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Four Indian scientists have discovered that a type of chilli grown in the country€ ¦’²s Northeast region has the highest Scoville units per capsaicin € ¦’¶ a measure of hotness. The hottest chilli on earth is Indian indeed! Called the Tezpur Chilli after the area where it is grown, scientists say the pepper has beaten Mexico€ ¦’²s Red Savina Habanero, widely acclaimed as the hottest chilli in the world. € ¦’±The Tezpur Chilli was rated 85,000 Scoville units€ ¦’¥ The Mexican Chilli contained 57,000 Scoville units of pure capsaicin,€ ¦’² one of the scientists said.
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A number of foreign airlines like British Airways, Singapore airlines and Swissair get their software developed in India-one good reason why their airlines run so efficiently.
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Sanskrit is the mother of all European languages. According to Forbes (July 1987), Sanskrit was considered the most suitable language for speech recognition in Computer.During the early years of software revolution when western scientists were figuring out a way of constructing a protocol for writing code, they realized that the principles had already been laid down in the Sanskrit language by Panini some 2500 years ago.
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India€ ¦’²s promising contribution to the world, the Simputer, a low cost portable alternative is out and its worldwide demand already exceeds the one million mark. It was formally launched here by its creators, four professors of the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) in Bangalore and three experts from Encore Software. The name Simputer, derived from € ¦’±Simple€ ¦’² and € ¦’±Computer€ ¦’² is about the size of a palm top but much more powerful and has ten times its processing speed. If produced in large volumes, it would cost Rs.9000 or less than $200.
The Simputer is expected to enable IT benefits to reach the common man. It has a special role in the third world because it ensures that illiteracy is not longer a barrier to handle computers. The key to bridging the digital divide is to have shared devices that permit truly simple and natural user interfaces based on sight, touch and audio. The Simputer meets these demands through a browser for the Information Markup Language (IML). IML has been created to provide a uniform experience to users and to allow the rapid development of solutions on any platform. Multi-lingual, it can operate in English, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Bengali. It can play MP3 files, send and receive e-mail and browse the web. It has a touch screen graphical interface, a speech synthesizer that can read text aloud to illiterates and a Smartcard for multiple sharing.
Simputers can be set up either at info kiosks, in the village panchayat, schools or even shops. Media Lab Asia has also purchased 100 units, state governments € ¦’¶ especially in the South € ¦’¶ are launching trials, and so are countries in Africa, Europe, the Far East, South East Asia and South America. Experts predict that the Simputer will revolutionize the market much in the same way as Sony€ ¦’²s Walkman.
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Hindalco was adjudged the worldwide runner-up for the Millennium Business Award for Environmental Achievement under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme. The company€ ¦’²s Hirakud smelter was adjudged the Best Performing Smelter in the one to three million hours category by the International Primary Aluminium Institute, UK.
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The Patang museum in Ahmedabad is one of the only two kite museums of the world. The other one being located in Tokyo.
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In many ways, the 1200 hectare township called Kumbhanagar is a mini-India, a temporary home to people from all over the country and, indeed, the world. The clean Kumbha is a creation of 6000 sweepers working virtually round the clock. It has been gratifying to see workers remove trash from bathing ghats almost as soon as it is spotted. A monumental 200 tonnes of solid waste is trucked away from the Kumbhanagar every day. The 30 million pilgrims who took a holy dip on January 24, 2001 numbered more than the residents of Delhi and Mumbai put together; to use another reference point, they equalled the Canadian population.
India Today, 5 February 2001
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In a breakthrough in brain research, the Indian American scientist has discovered that the part of the brain used for hearing can also be made to see. Mriganka Sur, head of the department of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that when an animal€ ¦’²s brain was rewired so that visual input was directed to the auditory cortex, or the part used for hearing, it responded to visual stimuli
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Indian-American scientist Rusi Taleyarkhan is making waves. He, along with his US colleagues, has caused a stir in the world scientific community by claiming to be the first to have achieved nuclear fusion in a small table-top experiment at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, USA.
Taleyarkhan, an alumnus of IIT Chennai, along with another scientist Richard Lahey, led the research team. Taleyarkhan opine, € ¦’³ The real significance of my discovery is that now for the first time one can use simple mechanical means to initiate and control fundamental forces of nature, specifically nuclear fusion. This has immense potential for limitless and clean form of energy. Presently we have been able to utilize simple tabletop mechanical energy to induce and control a nuclear fusion phenomenon. This can be used for a variety of applications like materials synthesis, chemical reactions, radiography and medicinal treatment.
In the future, is this technique can be scaled, it will be possible to generate a limitless and a relatively clean energy source for several hundred years. Fusion reactions of a certain type would produce about the same energy that will be a million times greater than either gasoline or coal.
Source: The Times of India
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In the number of companies listed, India is in second place, only after US. The US leads with 6355 listed companies as of end 2001. India follows closely with 5795.
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The Darjeeling Himalayan Railways (DHR) is a world heritage site, the second after the Semming Railway in Australia to be accorded the status. The UNESCO world heritage committee said, € ¦’³ DHR is the first and still the most outstanding example of hill passenger railway,€ ¦’´ the committee said. Opened in 1881, it applied bold and ingenious engineering solutions to the problems of establishing an effective rail link across a difficult mountainous terrain of great beauty. Fully operational and retaining most of its original features intact, the DHR is an outstanding example of the influence of an innovative transportation system on the social and economic development of a multicultural region.
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Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics scientists achieved a 99.995 per cent concentration of helium. India is now a part of an elite club comprising US, Poland, Russia, Algeria and Falkland Islands, which have the technology to produce liquefied helium. The breakthrough means India may not have to import helium from US, which costs Rs. 400 per cu.m. The technology has applications in medicine, space research, defense and atomic energy. The capability to produce liquid helium will boost cryotechnology in India.
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Bangalore has been named one of the top seven intelligent communities in the world for 2002 by Intelligent Community Forum (ICF), a project of the World Teleport Association. The other six intelligent communities named by ICF are: Calgary in Canada, Florida High Tech Corridor Council and La Grange in the US, Seoul in South Korea, Singapore and Sunderland in the UK.
ICF developed a list of five Intelligent Community Indicators that provide the first global framework for understanding how communities and regions could gain a competitive edge today. The indicators relate to the deployment of broadband communications, knowledge work, programmes to overcome the digital divide, access to risk capital and effective economic development marketing.
According to ICF, the top seven have been chosen not because they excel in all these areas, but because each demonstrates excellence in at least one.
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Dr.A.D. Karve, an Indian scientist heading a Pune-based non-governmental organization, has won a 30,000 pound sterling international award for discovering and implementing a unique technology for producing clean fuel from sugarcane waste. Karve, grandson of social reformer Maharshi Dondo Keshav Karve, was chosen for the award from among four finalists from over the world. The project converts a large-scale environmental problem € ¦’¶ burning millions of tonnes of sugarcane waste in open fields each year € ¦’¶ into a huge income-generating opportunity: providing clean and cheap domestic fuel.
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Shaleen Haralalka, a 12 th standard student of St.John€ ¦’²s High School at Kota in Rajasthan, has developed equipment that can destroy landmines. He is among the four youngsters from India to be awarded a British Council scholarship to attend the two-week international science forum in London. He was one of the eight students in the world chosen by the Indian Space Research Organization and NASA to participate in the € ¦’³Red Rover Goes to Mars€ ¦’´ mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles in March. The equipment developed by Shaleen Haralalka is remote controlled, small, portable, lightweight and economical (production cost of Rs 10,000 per piece only).
Source: The Times of India, 25 July 2002
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Copernicus published his theory of revolution of the earth in 1543 AD. Some 1000 years earlier, Aryabhatta stated that the earth revolves around the sun using the following specific words: € ¦’³ Just as a person travelling in a boat feels that the trees on the bank are moving, people on the Earth feel that the Sun is moving.€ ¦’´
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A few drops of this medicine put in a band-aid strip and pressed against the skin on a patient suffering from malignant brain tumor gave immense relief from the excruciating pain! Prof. Asru Sinha and a group of scientists in Jadhavpur University introduced this anti-neoplastin. It has shown remarkable efficacy in nearly 30,000 people in the last two years. The success rate was 78- 80% from esophageal cancer, 60% for colon and for rectum it was 65%.
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The managers of Yahoo! And scores of other search engines that enable netizens to cruise the Infobahn have the late Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan to thank. He was the pioneer of Library Science. In the thirties, while studying in England, Ranganathan created a classification and retrieval system that formed the technical basis of many search engines today. He wrote the classic € ¦’± The five laws of Library Science€ ¦’² in 1931. In a recent Yahoo! Article, Aimee Glassel, the Internet Scout Projects€ ¦’² lead Internet cataloger says, € ¦’³ What Ranganathan recognized was that the world of knowledge was growing very quickly, with new areas being discovered and new ways to combine existing subjects. Any classification that attempted to enumerate a finite number of subjects without full capabilities for expansion to allow for new areas of knowledge could never meet the needs of the future. Ranganathan wanted to classify knowledge into broad classes, which were then broken down
into basic concepts or elements according to characteristics called facets. Individual facets were then synthesized to form a complete class number, which could describe in detail a single book. This is the underlying principle of colon classification.€ ¦’´

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Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad is the toughest management school in the world to get into, ahead of Harvard Business school, Columbia University, Spain€ ¦’²s Institute de Empressa and France€ ¦’²s Insead, according to a survey by The Economist. There€ ¦’²s more. In terms of the course content, it comes in fifth after Yale, Harvard, IE and Paris€ ¦’² Haute Etudes Commercials. Even in times of crisis in the global job markets, the McKinseys, JP Morgans and AT Kearneys of the world flock to recruit youngsters from IIM campuses. They clock and average pay of Rs 21 lakh a year € ¦’¶ a little less than half the starting average for graduates of Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Stanford.
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Pere Vicens, president of the International Publishers Association feels that the Calcutta Books Fair is the biggest of its kind in the world. € ¦’³I€ ¦’²ve never seen anything like this before. In fact, an open-air fair of this nature is quite unparalleled. The Madrid fair too is out in the open. But the Calcutta event is unique in its diversity.
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In many ways, the 1200 hectare township called Kumbhanagar is a mini-India, a temporary home to people from all over the country and, indeed, the world. The clean Kumbha is a creation of 6000 sweepers working virtually round the clock. It has been gratifying to see workers remove trash from bathing ghats almost as soon as it is spotted. A monumental 200 tonnes of solid waste is trucked away from the Kumbhanagar every day. The 30 million pilgrims who took a holy dip on January 24, 2001 numbered more than the residents of Delhi and Mumbai put together; to use another reference point, they equalled the Canadian population.
India Today, 5 February 2001
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The great Brihadeshwarar or the Meenakshi temple or Dilwara were built at the same time the great cathedrals in Europe were built. In sheer conception, scale and aesthetics, India matched and challenged the best.
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The four religions born in India are Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. These religions are followed by 25 per cent of the world€ ¦’²s population. Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism are the third, fourth and fifth largest religions respectively in the world today. There are 300,000 active mosques in India, more than in any other country including the Muslim world. The largest religious building in the world is Angkor Wat, a Hindu Temple in Cambodia, built at the end of the 11 th century. The Venkateshwara temple in the city of Tirupathi built in the 10 th century, is the world€ ¦’²s largest religious pilgrimage destination, larger than either Rome or Mecca, with an average of 30,000 daily visitors donating $6 million a day.
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Perched on a lonely desolate hill, high in the inner Himalayas, is the latest hot spot for international astronomers € ¦’¶ the site for the spanking new Indian Astronomical Observatory (IAO). Situated 4,517 m above mean-sea-level in the village of Hanle in Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, this observatory € ¦’¶ commissioned in the year 2002 is the highest in the world. The Hanle telescope tops by 200m, the highest so far, the Meyer-Womble Observatory in the US, operated by the University of Denver, deep in the Ricky Mountains. For astronomers, the observatory€ ¦’²s height is crucial. The higher you go, the lesser the aberrations caused by the earth€ ¦’²s atmosphere.
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The International Mathematical Union awarded the prestigious R. Nevanlinna Prize for Computer Science, at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing, to the Chennai-born Professor Madhu Sudan of MIT. An IITian and doctorate from Caltech, Professor Madhu Sudan was being recognized by the international mathematical fraternity for his € ¦’³wide-ranging and brilliant€ ¦’´ error-correcting codes.
Three Indian computer engineers € ¦’¶ Professor Manindra Agrawal and his students Neeraj Katyal and Nitin Saxena at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur € ¦’¶ made world headlines by solving an age-old mathematical problem. They devised a way for a computer to state quickly and definitively if a number is prime. Experts around the world raved that the result was one of the most definitive proofs in computer science in a decade.
29-year-old Nirav Tolia of epinions.com first headed to medical school, switched over to Stanford, then joined Yahoo. He left after three years to start his own company, epinions.com. Today it is listed among one of the top five shopping sites and among the 50 most useful sites by Yahoo Internet Live. It was nominated by Wired Magazine as the most innovative start-up and selected as one of the top 10 companies of 2000 by the Industry Standard.
Source: The Times of India, 15 September 2002
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185 Fortune 500 companies are outsourcing software from India.
The Indian software industry will grow by at least 30 per cent this year.
IBM Global Services, Bangalore, has bagged a ten-year project from AT&T, with more than 5000 people likely to work on the project.
Sun Microsystems identified its Indian operations as one of the top five locations with a potential to earn over $ one billion revenue over the next five years. They may increase their Indian manpower from 400 to 4000 in the coming years.
Cisco purchased 29 acres in Bangalore and plans to invest Rs. 900 crore in India to expand operations.
GE plans to invest $800 million in IT and expects software exports from India to rise to $ three billion by 2004, with software outsourcing accounting for a third of the export targets.
Intel is investing $25 million for a technology development centre in Bangalore and could expand engineering staff by 50 per cent.
Computer Science Corporation is setting up development centres in Noida and Hyderabad.
Consultancy firm Ernst & Young is planning to set up its second software development centre in India.

Source: Outlook, 24 December 2001
Jack Welch salutes India € ¦’¶ € ¦’³I had recently returned from a tour of our R & D operations in India and was excited by what I had seen. We could not have the R & D teams in United States doing all the advanced, fun work while farming out the lower-value projects to places like India. My visits to India convinced me that their research labs were filled with scientists equal to or better than those in United States € ¦’¶ and in a lot more disciplines than software.€ ¦’´
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India is now a part of the global space-faring elite. India successfully launched the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) placing the country€ ¦’²s first meteorological satellite, Metsat, in orbit. So far, these satellites have been put in orbit only by US, Japan and some European nations. The action took place at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The 44-metre rocket set off with a blast with the satellite weighing 1060 kilograms. The cost of the satellite was Rs. 75 crore.
Twenty minutes after lift-off it was celebration time even in the mission control room. The PSLV had successfully placed the satellite in the geosynchronous transfer orbit € ¦’¶ when the satellite matches the earth€ ¦’²s rotation and appears stationary from the ground. A camera on board the satellite will constantly watch over the developing weather systems. High-technology instruments will relay the information to the Meteorological Utilization Centre in New Delhi. Thus unexpected natural calamities like the 1999 super cyclone in Orissa will be history. Now India will be prepared.
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Dhar district has a population of 1.7 million, with 54 per cent of the population being tribal and 60 per cent of the population living below the poverty line € ¦’¶ not really a promising territory for an IT revolution.
An intranet, named Gyaandoot, connects 21 rural cybercafes called Soochanalaya kiosk. Each Soochanalaya provides services to about 10 to 15 Gram Panchayats, 20 to 30 villages and to a population ranging between 20000 to 30000. The intranet covers five out of 13 blocks in the district and three out of seven tehsils in the district. The Soochanalayas are located along roadsides, bordering villages, which people normally traverse. They together serve a population of over half a million. The € ¦’±manager€ ¦’² of the Soochanalaya (kiosk) is a matriculate, not an employee but an entrepreneur who runs these on commercial lines without receiving salary or stipend.
Today, people can send applications, various certificates, forms and complaints of practically all types at a cost of only Rs. 10 and thereafter, in a maximum period of 10 days. Sometimes in less than 10 days, an intimation of the readiness of the certificate or grievance redressal is sent back to them through e-mail at the concerned Soochanalaya. Perhaps the most satisfying acknowledgment for the Gyaandoot project was the Stockholm Award in 2000, which was won competing against 109 IT projects from around the globe. It is the only Indian project to receive this award in any category in the past four years. There is a lot to be learnt from such initiatives if only we allowed ourselves to think.
Source: Economic Times
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Bikram Choudhary is a 56-year-old, California based yoga exponent. His sequence of 26 asanas (each of which is performed twice) and two breathing exercises, are practised in temperatures crossing 100 degrees. Bikram runs over 600 yoga studios in the US alone. He claims to have cured every major disease, including former US president Richard Nixon€ ¦’²s phlebitis. His celebrity followers include Michael Jackson, Shirley Maclaine and Madonna. His $ 7 million empire makes him one of the biggest players in the burgeoning of yoga industry.
Born in Kolkata, Bikram started learning yoga at four. At 13, Bikram won the National India Yoga contest. At his guru€ ¦’²s urging, Bikram travelled to the West. He opened his first studio in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, in the early 70s, in a basement, where he slept on the floor and conducted free classes. Today, a 90-minute class at his institute costs $ 200 € ¦’¶ one of the most expensive sessions in the city. Bikram€ ¦’²s diligence in spreading the good word of yoga has resulted in over 75 per cent of all US health clubs offering yoga classes.
Source: Time News Network Magazine
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The Darjeeling Himalayan Railways (DHR) is a world heritage site, the second after the Semming Railway in Australia to be accorded the status. The UNESCO world heritage committee said, € ¦’³ DHR is the first and still the most outstanding example of hill passenger railway,€ ¦’´ the committee said. Opened in 1881, it applied bold and ingenious engineering solutions to the problems of establishing an effective rail link across a difficult mountainous terrain of great beauty. Fully operational and retaining most of its original features intact, the DHR is an outstanding example of the influence of an innovative transportation system on the social and economic development of a multicultural region.
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When people call Silicon Valley€ ¦’²s Indian population a mafia, they mean that the immigrants who live in the Bay Area and work in high tech € ¦’¶ roughly 200,000, according to siliconindia magazine € ¦’¶ have formed an amazing web. Indians invest in one another€ ¦’²s companies, sit on one another€ ¦’²s boards and hire each other in key jobs. Many live in close proximity and hang out together. The network might be only mildly interesting if so many of the Valley€ ¦’²s Indian immigrants hadn€ ¦’²t become phenomenally wealthy and successful in the past ten years. People generally don€ ¦’²t think of it this way, but Bay Area Indian immigrants represent America€ ¦’²s most successful immigrant group. Collectively, they€ ¦’²ve created companies that account for $235 billion of market value.
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A scale of four notes known as Svaratantra came into being. The ancient Aryans like the ancient Greeks had their music confined to four notes. An account of seven notes is found in the Manduki Siksha of the Atharva Veda. The seven notes are Shadja, Rishaba, Gandhara, Madhyama, Panchama, Dhaivata and Nishada abbreviated to Sa, Ri, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni respectively. It is stated that the note produced by the peacock at the highest point of rapture is the note Shadja. Rishaba is said to represent the sound that is made by the cow while calling her calf. Gandhara is the bleat of the goat. Madhyama is the identified with the cry of the heron. The nightingale of India the Koel sings always in Panchama. Dhaivata is the neighing of the horse. Nishada is the trumpeting of the elephant.
Though there was only one system of music in India, cultural development has produced two broad systems of Indian classical music, Hindustani and Karnatak. In spite of many variations in their structure and style, there is a marked fundamental unity between the two systems. Raga concept is a unique feature of Indian music. Raga is the basis of Indian melody. Indian music is built on Raga and Tala concepts. The word Raga is derived from the Sanskrit root, meaning € ¦’±to color€ ¦’², and the basic idea being that certain melodic shapes produce a continuity of emotional experience and color the mind. Ragas are classified in various ways according to regions, seasons, time to sing, aesthetic qualities, scientific capabilities, their individual characters, pleasing capacities and many other ways. This time classification is strictly adhered to in Hindustani music but not so much in Karnatak music.
€ ¦’³In the ancient times, men of medicine were also men of music. They were vaids who would, after checking a patient€ ¦’²s pulse, say: € ¦’±Give him so-and-so medicine and make him hear a recital of Raag Gandhar.€ ¦’² These vaids successfully correlated the sa-re-ga-ma-pa to the various points of the body. This is what has made our music a veritable treasure house.€ ¦’´ - Naushad Ali, legendary composer
The Sapta Swaras have a distinct power and the vibrations produced by these notes have an inherent potential in them. A yogi through intense meditation acquires the required power, which is communicated to the common man in various ways, music being one of them. The vibration produced by combination of notes has psychological impact on the person and can cure him of his mental and physical problem. - Layam,
September 1994.
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India€ ¦’²s higher education sector is vast. In the number of students enrolled in higher education as a percentage of the population aged 20 to 24, not only is India a considerable distance ahead of any other country of comparable income level, but there is in fact no country with even twice India€ ¦’²s per capita income that comes anywhere close to its higher education ratio (World Bank 1982: World View 1982). In the number of doctors per unit of population, India is second only to China among all countries having an income per head no higher than twice India€ ¦’²s.
Source: How is India doing by Amartya Sen
Vinod Gupta was a boy from a remote village in Uttar Pradesh€ ¦’²s Rampur district. He now makes US $370 million through his Omaha-based ( Nebraska state) software company InfoUSA with a market capitalization of US $900 million in 33 years. He is known for his Rs 25 crore donation to his alma mater, IIT Kharagpur, and a women€ ¦’²s polytechnic in Rampur worth Rs 1.2 million.
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€ ¦’³Most US companies are totally dependent on our database for their e-net business, which includes Infospace, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, etc. I have friends like President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. I have helped her raise election funds from a state like Nebraska. I even helped Vice President Al Gore in his campaign. It€ ¦’²s not only friendship, the Democrats are more keen on Indian affairs which I like. I also helped a few Republican candidates and have a long list of Republican friends as well,€ ¦’´ says Gupta.
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Conde Nast Traveler, a reputed magazine, has chosen India as € ¦’±the best value for money€ ¦’² destination and the eleventh best holiday destination in the world (scoring an impressive 96.73 out of 100) in a poll conducted among the magazine€ ¦’²s readers worldwide, ranking it above otherwise popular bets such as Singapore, Malaysia and Switzerland.
Source: Business Line, 2 November 2002
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Rabindranath Tagore is not just the first Indian Nobel Laureate, but also the first Asian to be so honoured, taking into account all the subjects in which the award is given by the Nobel Committee.
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The Lifeline Express (or the Jeevan Rekha Express) is the world€ ¦’²s first hospital on wheels. The train set out on June 16, 1991 on its pilot journey to provide people living in remote parts of India with free medical and surgical facilities.
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The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.
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India has 18 officially recognized languages with a number of dialects and spin-offs. The nation has newspapers in 87 languages, radio programs in 71 and films in 15.
Sanskrit literature is more than 5000 years old and tamil 3000. Some Indian languages do not have a script. Although some languages are called € ¦’³tribal€ ¦’´ or € ¦’³aboriginal€ ¦’´, their populations may be larger than those that speak some European languages. Bhili and Santali both tribal languages, each have more than 4 million speakers. Gondi is spoken by more than 2 million people.
With 366 and 207 million speakers, Hindi is second and Bengali fifth among the top ten languages spoken in the world. Chinese tops the list as those speaking Chinese Mandarin number 874 million according to the World Almanac and Book of Facts, Modern Language Association of America and the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.
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The first scheduled airline in the world to enroll a woman pilot was Indian airlines. This happened in the year 1966. On 8 March 1998 it operated two all-women crew flights to mark Women€ ¦’²s day.
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