The New Millennium Challenges for
Indian Science & Technology
By Dr. R.A.Mashelkar, Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India. Member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
India was a leader in innovation several centuries ago. These innovative contributions ranged from the decimal place value counting system using nine digits and the zero to the highly developed holistic philosophy and practice of Ayurveda, which was so different from the approach of western medicine. Many developments in mathematics, which bear the names of westerns today, took place in India. We had great innovations in astronomy, chemistry, metallurgy, sophisticated aspects of grammar, linguistics and logic as a part of philosophy. There is another definition of an innovator; he is one who sees what everyone else sees but thinks of what no one else thinks. The India that I am speaking about thought ahead of the rest of the world. Can we not bring the spirit of that glorious innovative India back? Indeed we have an opportunity to start the resurgence of an innovative India today. This will not only entail building new social, legal and economic structures that support innovation, but also making a national symbol of 'I' in 'India' to stand for 'Innovation'. The 61' in IIT will then stand for innovation, 'I' in industry will stand for innovation and 'I' in every individual will stand for innovation. It is this innovation centred India that will lead the world and not follow it.MORE
The world's first multinational
By Nick Robins
In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part of his "prison trilogy", written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort, Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on the country he would shortly rule. "The corruption, venality, nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of British rule in India," he wrote, "is something which passes comprehension." It was, he added, "significant that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is 'loot'".
Perhaps Nehru can help us. In The Discovery of India, he examined the consequences of England's long domination of India in terms of karma, the spiritual law of cause and effect. "Entangled in its meshes," he wrote, "we have thus struggled in vain to rid ourselves of this past inheritance and start afresh on a different basis." Independence was a necessary starting point for India, wrote Nehru, but Britain, too, needed to "start afresh". As we approach the 250th anniversary of Palashi, we do not need further glorification of the East India Company's contribution to consumerism or of the celebrity of its executives. We need an honest reckoning with the human costs of its quest for market domination.MORE
North by Southeast
By Subhash Kak
Advances in genetics have made it possible to trace ancient migrations. It is now generally accepted that modern man arose in Africa about 200,000 years ago and from there spread first into India and Southeast Asia by coastal migration that probably included some boat crossings. There are several estimates of the time when this spread into India took place. According to the geneticist Stephen Oppenheimer, settlements in India appear about 90,000 years ago. From India there were later northeastern and northwestern migrations into Eurasia and the Far East.
The “Out of Africa” theory has superseded the earlier multiregional model according to which the Europeans, the Asians, and Indonesians arose independently in different parts of the world. There is overwhelming evidence that archaic lines --- such as Neanderthals in Europe --- simply died out, and the specific characteristics of the different races is not a consequence of a mixing of the regional and modern populations but rather of adaptation to unique climatic conditions.MORE