Pune: In good news for lovers of antiquity, the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) in Pune is offering online access to some very rare books housed in the institute. The institute is also transforming its online courses in languages, philosophy, science, arts, and medicine, among others, and will develop a mobile application for people who are interested in the courses.

Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman will inaugurate the initiative on Wednesday.

BORI has digitised 20,000 books and 14,000 ancient manuscripts out of the total 28,000 manuscripts till now from Sanskrit, Prakrit, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Devnagari, Kannada, etc. Ten thousand rare books, over 100 years old, and the digitised manuscripts will be available to the public on its official website.

Its noteworthy that this treasure will now be open to the public. People can access it in the library section of BORIs website. This online platform is a first of its kind experiment, said Bhupal Patwardhan, chairman of BORIs executive board. The institute has over 1.50 lakh books on various subjects.

Shailesh Kshirsagar, a researcher of history of Vedic science, has been studying Vedic mathematics over the last few years. He and a group of researchers often visit BORI to study and take notes from rare books and manuscripts on the subject.

Now we will have direct access online, which will help us study at any time and from anywhere, said Kshirsagar.

While some courses are free, others will come at a small fee.

Some of the institutes oldest rare books are from 1813. Apart from this, there is the first edition of the Rigveda Samhita, translated by philologist Max Muller, into German, he added.

We want to reach out to people across the globe who are interested in studying and researching our culture and its diversity. The courses run for around 100 hours. We had the content, which had to be edited curated and validated for the online platform, Patwardhan said.

Excerpt from:
Pune-based BORI offers online access to rare ancient books - Hindustan Times

A tour of Brantfords former Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School and interviews with five survivors from the institution are part of a virtual event offered Friday through Woodland Cultural Centre and Welland Public Library.

The cultural centre offers a variety of tours, education programs and workshops that allow visitors to learn about an assortment of topics covering the past, present and future of southern Ontarios First Nations peoples, the library said in a release.

The virtual tour of the former residential school in Brantford will give the history of the institution over its 140 years, and viewers will see rooms inside, including the girls and boys dormitories, the cafeteria and the laundry room.

Registration is required as space is limited, the library said. It asks people to register at their earliest convenience by calling 905-734-6210 or at wellandlibrary.ca.

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Virtual tour of Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School offered through Welland library - St. Catharines Standard

Kettering University today officially opened its new Learning Commons, a $63 million, 105,000-square-foot building designed to facilitate optimum collaboration and transform the social and academic life for students and faculty.

We see the Learning Commons as a revolution in how universities conceptualize space, howthey fashion space to create and support behavior and a collaborative model, said Kettering University President Dr. Robert K. McMahan. To learn more about it and its purpose, you mustfirst suspend everything you think about university spaces. The Learning Commons is unique. There is no building on a college campus, or anywhere else, quite like this.

The one-of-a-kind building has spectacular collaborative and social spaces that bring togetherstudents, faculty and staff, and reflect Ketterings commitment to creating a campus that bestprepares students for future careers.

Featuring wide-open, technology-enriched spaces, the Learning Commons encouragescollaboration and innovation, attributes fundamental to Ketterings 103-year history and itsvalues as a cooperative learning model today and in the future.

The facility includes a digital library, a 200-seat auditorium described as a mini IMAX theater,dining facilities, media resource centers, outdoor patios with seating, multiple collaborationspaces and a suite for guest professors and lecturers. There is also a reflection space wherepeople can have privacy.

The natural light throughout the building is welcoming, which energizes people and makes themexcited to work. The study spaces have incredible views of the campus.

McMahan said the Learning Commons is the first new building on Ketterings campus in 20years and features architectural elements from numerous buildings hes visited.

I would pay close attention to a small area or aspect of a building and how people interactedwithin the space, he said. This building brings together a number of those aspects in an artfuland functional way that promotes collaboration among students and faculty. The open meetingspaces with comfortable furniture and meeting rooms with glass walls allow people to seewhats happening inside and encourage them to participate.

The building is designed so people can stand on one side and see through to the other side withunobstructed sightlines. In addition, stairways to each floor are not stacked, forcing people tomove laterally before they can move vertically, encouraging movement throughout the building.

This is a museum-caliber environment in terms of construction quality and systems, saidMcMahan. It can be modified and expanded and will last 50 to 60 years. The only thing you cando is build something thats flexible enough to let people define the building.

The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation granted $25 million to support construction of the building.

The Mott Foundation is pleased to support the Kettering Learning Commons, said MottFoundation President and CEO Ridgway White. We believe the building represents theingenuity that Kettering and its students embody, and we look forward to seeing future Ketteringgraduates learn and excel in new ways that will propel Flint and Michigan to be leaders in fieldsof work and study that have only begun to be imagined.

The Learning Commons was also the centerpiece for the Universitys Boldly Forward CapitalCampaign, which raised $155 million from July 2012 through December 2021. Of that total,$45.4 million went toward the facility. Kettering received funds from more than 6,000 donorsthrough the capital campaign, which will provide scholarships and upgrades to several buildings.

Many of us owe our success to what we learned at Kettering, and many alumni chose to giveback to the university through the Boldly Forward Capital Campaign, said Gary L. Cowger,chair of the Boldly Forward Capital Campaign and a graduate of General Motors Institute (nowKettering University). Along with alumni, many companies, foundations, and individuals viewKettering as a leader in co-op education that graduates students ready to enter the workforcewith years of experience. Their dollars will make a huge difference to the university and itsstudents today and in the future. We greatly appreciate the support of all donors.

Cowger retired from General Motors after a 45-year career as group vice president of globalmanufacturing and labor relations and was president of GM North America before taking overglobal operations. He is now chairman and CEO of GLC Ventures, LLC. He received abachelors degree in industrial engineering from the university in 1970 and an honorary Doctorof Engineering from Kettering in 2007.

The Learning Commons was designed by world-renowned architectural firm Stantec, which hasdesigned academic facilities in 37 states and provinces across North America.

The Learning Commons is expected to have a positive effect on Kettering students and facultyfor decades to come.

Officials broke ground on the Learning Commons on Feb. 5, 2020.

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Kettering University Opens State-of-the-Art Learning Commons on its Flint Campus - Kettering University

Ward: Theres a pretty clear trajectory from the 2018 brawl at the Metropolitan Republican Club to Trumps stand back and stand by comment during the presidential debate in September 2020 to, ultimately, the Jan. 6 insurrection. Did anything really surprise you about their role on Jan. 6?

Campbell: I was turning in the final chapters of the book when the original conspiracy charges came down against them, which were not surprising. The 1776 Returns document showed that the Proud Boys didnt just have an outsize role in Jan. 6, but that they may have had a role in planning it, too. Leading up to January 6, the Proud Boys were prepping for civil war, and they were getting super excited for their last stand for Trump.

But I was absolutely surprised that the [other] architects of Jan. 6 would put any sort of trust in the Proud Boys to pull this thing off, because any big event that theyve been involved in over the years has led to mass arrests. The Proud Boys are terrible with their information security, and theyre constantly being watched by the feds and by journalists. So it was absolutely surprising to me, when that 1776 Returns document came down, that they had such a big role in [planning] it.

And then theyve continued to surprise me with their resiliency. A number of people wrote them off after Jan. 6, saying, Oh, the Proud Boys are imploding, or theyre gonna dissolve after this, and sure enough, theyre still in action.

Ward: Early in the book, you cite McInnes claim that Fighting solves everything, and you argue that the GOP more or less tacitly endorsed that point of view when the Republican National Committee classified the violence of Jan. 6 as legitimate political discourse. How much credit or blame, depending on your point of view do the Proud Boys deserve for the GOPs decision to endorse some forms of political violence?

Campbell: I think they have [played] a huge role. I mean, they were showing up at events big and small at the behest of Trump and the GOP grievance machine for years and fighting it out in the street. Over time, the goalposts have been moved to the degree that political violence, as a justified response to the things that the [GOP] is mad about, is totally normal now.

Whats scary about the Proud Boys is that the playbook that theyve helped create under Trump is such that everyday Americans think that they can go out [into the streets] and fight for the things that theyre mad about. Youve got regular people joining extremists at abortion clinics and at Boston Childrens Hospital and at drag queen story hours. Theyre threatening and intimidating people, and theyre looking at the Proud Boys, whose leaders have seen very few consequences until Jan. 6. Certainly, [McInnes] has never seen any real legal consequences for fomenting all of this.

[Look at] Libs of TikTok. All these right-wing loudmouths are looking at the Proud Boys and saying, Hey, as long as I couch everything that Im saying in political speech, I can say whatever I want people can go out and murder, and Im never going to see any consequences for it. And at least legally, thats largely true. So, while you cant say that the Proud Boys are the arbiters of all political violence, you can certainly draw a line between this sort of stuff and these small events [where] theyve been fighting and fighting and fighting over the years. And its not just Proud Boys events anymore where violence happens. Every facet of American life is overrun by political violence now, and I think the Proud Boys are a big part of that.

See more here:

Jan. 6 Was Just the Beginning for the Proud Boys - POLITICO

Fiskes exoneration of Clinton enraged the right. At this juncture in history, the paranoid style was enjoying one of its sporadic revivals. On talk radio and in the halls of Congress, absurd theories linking the Clintons to Fosters death flourished. These years also witnessed a rising tendency led by Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia, soon to become speaker of the House to gin up claims of ethical impropriety to take down political foes. To Republicans unreconciled to the Democrats return to the White House, Clinton was inherently suspect. And so, that summer, a panel of three judges, led by Judge David Sentelle a protege of North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, who had been keen to go after Clinton since his election took it upon themselves to replace the impartial Fiske with the very partisan Starr, then working in private practice.

Ken Starr decided to extend his inquiry beyond Whitewater and, in early 1997, he and his team began poking around into the presidents sex life.|Doug Mills/AP Photo

It was an unconventional and consequential choice. For one thing, Starr lacked prosecutorial experience. Despite having been a judge for six years in the 1980s, he was also a known partisan, active in the Federalist Society and conservative circles. Having aspired as a youth to become a preacher, he sold Bibles while in college and taught Sunday school even while on the federal bench. His piety often blurred the lines between church and state. As independent counsel, he would promote stories like one in the conservative Washington Times headlined, Deeply Christian Starr Starts Day Jogging, Singing Hymns.

The biggest problem with his appointment, however, was a major conflict of interest: Earlier in the year, Starr had provided legal assistance to Paula Jones, an Arkansas woman who was suing Clinton over a vulgar sexual advance he had allegedly made to her as governor. Starr even drafted an amicus brief supporting Jones. But Starr didnt disclose those connections to the judges who appointed him, and later he would, against all ethical standards, make common cause with Jones team in his pursuit of the president.

When Starr began his investigation in mid-1994, Clinton seemed vulnerable. Despite passing some landmark legislation, he had failed to achieve his ambitious health care plan and was struggling over foreign policy messes in Somalia and Bosnia. But after November 1994, when the Republicans won control of the House for the first time in 50 years, Clinton found his footing and his fortunes revived. In response, Republicans launched new investigations into various matters and pressured Starr to find proof of Clintons wrongdoing. After several years, however, he couldnt find any, and Whitewater receded from the front pages. Clinton was destined to become the first Democrat to win two presidential elections since Franklin Roosevelt. Starr, it seemed, would have to close up shop.

But then Starr made a big decision to extend his inquiry. In early 1997, he and his team began poking around into the presidents sex life. Doing so might have been illegal, since it lay well outside Starrs mandate as independent counsel. In a few months time, the news of his fishing expedition broke. In a June 1997 Washington Post article, Arkansas state troopers spoke with concern about what was going on. In the past, I thought they were trying to get to the bottom of Whitewater, said trooper Roger Perry, whom Starrs staff had questioned. This last time, I was left with the impression that they wanted to show he was a womanizer. All they wanted to talk about was women. The plunge into sexual politics drew denunciations. Starr chose to ignore the warning lights. Moralism propelled him forward.

As Starr later admitted, his office soon opened a back channel also probably illegal to lawyers for Jones, whose harassment case was proceeding along independent lines. A gaggle of far-right attorneys helping her had learned about the presidents recent dalliance with Lewinsky and passed it along to Starrs staff. These attorneys called the Elves because one of their number, the polemicist-provocateur Ann Coulter, compared them to busy elves working away in Santas workshop then connected Starrs office with Linda Tripp, the Pentagon aide who posed as a confidante to Lewinsky, got her to confess details about the affair and secretly taped their conversations.

Starr made his next momentous decision in deciding to use the affair as part of the impeachment case he was building. In mid-January 1998, convinced that Clinton had lied about his relationship with Lewinsky in a recent deposition in the Jones case, Starr asked permission from Reno to formally expand his probe into Clintons sex life even though he had already done just that months before. Years later, he would admit that doing so had been a mistake. (Someone else should have led the Lewinsky inquiry, he conceded.) But in seeking his expanded mandate, Starr hid from Reno and the three-judge panel those back-channel contacts with the Jones team. Reno authorized the expansion, but when she learned months later about the concealment, she almost fired Starr on the spot.

News of Clintons affair with a former intern, many years his junior, generated a predictable storm of outrage. But in a short time a public consensus emerged that, however tawdry the affair, and however harshly people might judge Clintons character, this wasnt something to remove a president over. Washington pundits, in contrast, felt differently, as did a few well-placed reporters who, relying on a flood of selective leaks from Starrs staff (especially attorney Brett Kavanaugh), kept the story alive for months even as the presidents approval ratings stabilized north of 60 percent. Starrs hovered around 22 percent.

Clinton appeared to retire the whole business on Aug. 17, 1998, when he finally confessed to and apologized for the affair. Most of the public said it was time to move on. But again Starr along with Gingrich and the Republican House leadership refused to let up. With Whitewater a dead letter, sexual politics would be the grounds for impeachment.

During Clintons testimony before a grand jury, all the questions had been about sex, and when Starr sent his impeachment referral to Congress in September, it contained gratuitous descriptions of specific sex acts, pornographic in nature. The goal was to incite new public outrage and, perhaps, humiliate his nemesis. Like the classic small-town preacher who rails against sexual deviance precisely because he finds it so titillating, Starr was even more ardent than some of his advisers in favoring a narrative laced with explicit detail. I love the narrative! Starr told aides who counseled greater restraint.

Despite losing seats in the November midterm election historically an almost unheard-of development Republicans pressed forward with impeachment. Starr made yet another fateful decision by choosing, against precedent, to become an aggressive advocate for impeachment. (In 1974, Watergate prosecutor Leon Jaworski had stayed neutral, submitting a spare factual account and merely suggesting to Congress possible impeachable infractions President Richard Nixon had committed.) Starrs decision infuriated his ethics adviser, Sam Dash, onetime counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, whom Starr had retained early on to give himself some cover. He was a partisan Republican, Dash later said of Starr. But I really believed him when he said he could push all that aside. Having defended Starr for years, Dash now let it rip, quitting the team and publicly denouncing Starrs decision to openly throw in his lot with the House Republicans.

The Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently, Ken Starr piously lamented in then-President Donald Trumps defense. Indeed, we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the Age of Impeachment.|Alex Edelman/Getty Images

It was especially unnecessary because Clintons acquittal was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Even many Republican senators doubted that the charges amounted to constitutional crimes. But the GOP leadership, joined by Starr, pressed on. In the end, of the four charges that the Judiciary Committee reported, two failed to gain a majority even in the Republican-controlled House. The other two were rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate. But if the damage to Clinton was minor, the disruption to the country had been enormous. Starrs decisions over many years to take over from Fiske, to veer into sexual politics, to run with the Lewinsky affair, to make sex the centerpiece of his report which stemmed from his prosecutorial zeal, had helped poison the atmosphere in Washington and deepen the tendency to use sexual behavior as the basis for partisan warfare.

Ironically, it was already becoming clear that many of the presidents antagonists had their own sexual secrets to hide. House Judiciary Chair Henry Hyde was revealed to have had an affair in his 40s, which he tried to downplay as a youthful indiscretion. Gingrich, damaged by the GOP losses at the polls, was overthrown as speaker amid talk that he had been conducting his own extramarital affair. His intended replacement, Robert Livingston, declined the speakership when his past infidelities surfaced. The eventual speaker, Dennis Hastert, was later convicted and imprisoned for child sex abuse. And of course Starrs key aide Kavanaugh who pushed hard to grill the president and Lewinsky about the sexual details of their relationship was, as a Supreme Court nominee in 2018, alleged to have sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford while they were in high school. Even Starrs eventual successor as independent counsel, Robert W. Ray, was charged with stalking an old girlfriend.

Amazingly enough, it eventually emerged that Starr too, for all his moralizing, had carried on his own extramarital affair, with Judi Hershman, an adviser to the independent counsels office. More damningly still, Starr had to resign in 2016 as president of Baylor University after it was reported that he had covered up a string of sexual assaults, including rapes, by members of his football team. One victim had even sent him an email, while he was president, informing him that she had been raped. I honestly may have (seen it), he said of her message. Im not denying that I saw it. Her rapist was sentenced to 20 years.

Despite his essential role in the Clinton impeachment, Starr in 2020 not only defended President Donald Trump during his (first) impeachment trial, but somehow managed to summon the chutzpah to impugn the Democrats for bringing charges never mind that the charges against Trump, for conspiring with a foreign government to compromise the 2020 election, were far graver than those against Clinton. The Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently, Starr piously lamented in Trumps defense. Indeed, we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the Age of Impeachment.

Perhaps we are living in such an age. If so, the person most responsible for that sad state of affairs is none other than Ken Starr.

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Opinion | Ken Starr: The Man Who Created the Lewinsky Scandal - POLITICO

21 JULY 2022

Founder Chairman of SAIMS, Dr. Vinod Bhandari has been awarded by The Eminence Award 2022 for the Most Committed Hospital of Central India. It's another feather in the cap of SAIMS Fraternity. The Award was presented by Honble Minister for Road Transport & Highways in the Government of India Shri Nitin Gadkari on 21st July, 2022 at New Delhi.

07 JANUARY 2022

Governor of Kerala Hon'ble Shri Arif Mohd. Khan Visited Sri Aurobindo University

Hon'ble Governor Inaugurated the Ceremony organized in colloboration with Sri Aurobindo University & Free Press, on "NEP: A way forward to Medical Education"

21 DECEMBER 2021

Governor of M.P. Hon'ble Mangubhai Patel Visited Sri Aurobindo University

He started the "Sickle Cell Project" at SAU and inaugurated Ultrasound Simulation Lab, ECMO Academy & Advanced Central Laboratory at SAIMS.

Sri Aurobindo University Organizes International Conference on COVID

An International conference under the aegis of Indian Society for Rational Pharmacotherapeutics (ISRPT) was successfully conducted from 25th to 27th November, 2021 at Sri Aurobindo University Campus. Eminent scientists from the globe participated in this event.

INDO-UK FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

LECTURE & HANDSON ON DENTAL PHOTOGRAPHY CONDUCTED AT SRI AUROBINDO COLLEGE OF DENTISTRY, DEPT. OF PEDODONTICS ON 27 OCTOBER 2021

11th SEPTEMBER 2021

TEACHER'S DAY CELEBRATION AT SAIMS

15th AUGUST 2021

CERTIFICATE AWARDED TO SAIMS BY INDORE COLLECTOR FOR INSTALLATION OF OXYGEN GAS PLANT ON 15TH AUGUST CEREMONY

20.07.2021

Latest NGS Sequencing Maching for COVID-19 is at Indore

Sri Aurobindo Hospital has imported the latest Next Generation Genome Sequencing Machine from USA for characterization and early detection along with identification of various COVID-19 variants.

Sri Aurobindo College of Dentistry

On 25-26th June 2021, Career Guidance Counseling Cell, Sri Aurobindo Institute of Dentistry is hosting a webinar on "Career options after BDS" which focuses on providing assistance to the future dentists of intern batch and final year, in making informed educational choices with the guest speaker as honorable Dr. Saransh Malot.

INTERNATIONAL YOGA DAY MEET - 21ST JUNE 2021

International Yoga Day Meet was organised by Department of Public Health Dentistry, on 21st June 2021, based on the theme "Come Breathe In & Breathe Out With Us In Rhythm", with yoga instructors as Dr. Binti Chand and Dr. Anchal Sharma.

INVITATION & NOTICE

19th APRIL 2021

Hon'ble Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi Ji called a Virtual Meet with Renowned Doctors and Pharmacist of different States and discussed the COVID-19 Pandemic. From Madhya Pradesh, Founder Chairman of SAIMS Dr. Vinod Bhandari represented in the meet and shared their experience and gave suggestions sought by P.M.

5th APRIL 2021

Hon'ble Chief Minister of M.P. Shri Shivraj Singh Ji called a Virtual Meet with Directors of Private Medical Institutions to discuss the COVID-19 Pandemic. SAIMS Founder Chairman Dr. Vinod Bhandari & Managing Direcotr Dr. Mahak Bhandari attended the meet and shared their experience and gave suggestions sought by C.M.

13-14TH MARCH 2021

WORKSHOP ON THESIS PROTOCOL TYPING & BASIC RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3rd MARCH 2021

DR. MANJUSHREE BHANDARI APPOINTED CHANCELLOR OF SRI AUROBINDO UNIVERSITY

13TH FEBRUARY 2021

SAIMS-TIMES INAUGURATED

Inauguration of SAIMS Times, a magzine for all academicians, physicians, clinicians, students. Inauguration took place by IMA National President Dr. Jaylal

INAUGURATION OF COVID VACCINE AT SAIMS MEDICAL COLLEGE

Chief Guest Shri Shankar Lalwani, MP, inaugurated the COVID vaccination program at SAIMS MEDICAL COLLEGE CAMPUS

FIRST COVID VACCINE WAS ADMINISTERED TO DR. RAVI DOSI, HOD, DEPT. OF RESPIRATORY MEDICINE, SAIMS

14 JANUARY 2021

MAKAR SANRANTI CELEBRATION AT SAIMS MEDICAL COLLEGE CAMPUS

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Sri Aurobindo Institute of Medical Sciences, Medical College, Dental ...

Saquib Salim

At a recent seminar held at India Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi, Prof. Sanjay Dwivedi, Director General, Indian Institute of Mass Communication told the audience that a dearth of intercommunity dialogue is at the root of distrust among different religious communities in India. Taking his example, he said that on account of his primary education among Muslims, he is never afraid of people sporting Islamic symbols because he understands that they, like him, are normal Indian citizens.

The comment, though separated by more than six decades in time, resonated with what Ram Manohar Lohia wrote in his book Guilty Men of Indias Partition. Lohia, a socialist leader, and freedom fighter believed that a Hindu Muslim dialogue and understanding is the only remedy to religious antagonism in the subcontinent. He went to the extent that the partition of India could be undone if both the major religions interact healthily.

Lohia wrote, Partition can be undone only with increasing identification between Hindus and Muslims, the absence of which was the prime cause of partition A Hindu who is an enemy of the partition must necessarily be a friend of Muslims.

Lohia was not writing in thin air. In 1946, after the great communal disturbances in Bengal, he was asked by Mahatma Gandhi to camp in Kolkata. At that time, for almost a year, the city was divided into Hindu and Muslim regions with almost no physical interaction. Muslims would not go into Hindu settlements and vice versa. Gandhi asked him to visit the homes of his Muslim friends there.

Manohar Lohia with Jayprakash Narayan

Lohia recalled, Little did I realise what this meant when he said it. It was such a simple thing to do It is, however, such simple and concrete actions that pave the way for settlements that decide the destiny of mankind. There were, however, not many at that time who were eager to pave such a way.

Lohia and Barin Ghosh, brothers of Sri Aurobindo Ghosh, set out to meet a Muslim friend in the city. He lived in a hostel where most of the Muslim League activists were residing. No Hindu had visited the locality in almost a year. As soon as they reached, a group of Muslim League activists surrounded both of them.

They were served with tea and a lot of inconvenient questions on politics. Almost every student was complaining that the University Vice Chancellor and Congress Leaders had not visited them in this hour of need. On this Lohia, asked them if they fully realised the consequences of their wish, only to receive the reply that I was nevertheless alive. Lohia wrote, and so the conversation went on for nearly two hours.

Lohia broke the ice between the two religious communities during those horrific times by creating dialogue at several other places as well. His experience made him believe that partition can be undone in times to come with revolutionary zeal. He wrote, the opponent of Muslims in India is the friend of Pakistan and estrangement from each other (Hindus & Muslims) is the root cause of partition. If we can create an environment where this estrangement does not exist we can dream of a united India.

Read more here:
Can the Partition of India be undone? - Awaz The Voice

Rajpath, the 1911-vintage Kingsway built to welcome King George V, became Kartavya Path. A tall black-stone statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, described by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the first Pradhan of united India, was installed under the canopy where King George Vs statue stood. This is New Indias final push for dismantling colonial-era remnants. At the unveiling function, Modi described Rajpath as a symbol of slavery and hoped that Kartavya Path would motivate peoples representatives toward Indias democratic past and universal ideals.

Indias Independence movement was inspired not just by the desire to replace the British with Indian rulers but by the passion to return to its civilisational glory. Lala Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malviya, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, V D Savarkar, Sri Aurobindo and M K Gandhi many leaders were committed to that ideal. Even Jawaharlal Nehru, the Cambridge-educated young man whom Gandhi affectionately described once as our Englishman, was so determinedly anti-British that he threatened to resign from Congress in 1928 when the Nehru Committee, headed by his father Motilal Nehru, recommended that India may accept the British offer of dominion status. Nothing short of Poorna Swaraj total independence junior Nehru insisted.

Sadly though, those motivations waned when independence dawned. In 1948, India decided to join the so-called Commonwealth. Most of these Commonwealth countries have nothing in common except their colonial past nor any wealth yet India continues to be a member. The silver lining is that unlike countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, India didnt remain under British dominion after independence.

Some half-hearted efforts were made after Independence to remove the symbols of colonialism. Names of some roads and buildings were changed. But the statue of King George V remained on Rajpath for a full two decades until a public agitation forced the government in 1968 to shift it to another venue. The canopy remained empty because the leadership was undecided over who should occupy it. Gandhis name was proposed several times but turned down during the regimes of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.

In the 75th year of independence, Modi is giving a new thrust to that effort. The new parliament building, Kartavya Path, National War Memorial and the statue of Netaji are all the new symbols of a decolonising India.

Some found the installation of Netajis statue on Kartavya Path less convincing. Indias identity from its Independence was that of non-violence, they argue. It is precisely that narrative which needs to change. Indias independence movement had many strands, the non-violent one led by Gandhi being the most prominent. But Netajis contribution was no less significant.

In fact, Netajis Azad Hind Fauj or Indian National Army (INA) had hit the last nail in the British coffin in the penultimate years of the Independence struggle. Netajis scintillating address at a rally in Burma, in which he gave the thunderous appeal, Give me blood and I promise you freedom, led to a tectonic shift in that struggle.

INAs adventurous battles and the capture of Moirang in Manipur under the leadership of Lt Col Shaukat Ali on April 14, 1944, had triggered a wave of enthusiasm among the masses of India, who were disappointed by the failure of the Quit India Movement. This enthusiasm turned into anger when the British brought 11 INA soldiers to Red Fort for a trial in 1945. The fire lit by the INA was so fierce that rebellions broke out in the Royal Indian Navy with Indian soldiers, who constituted the majority in the force, refusing to obey the orders of their British officers.

The rebels, who started calling themselves the Indian National Navy on the lines of Netajis INA, mutinied initially at Bombay in 1946, but the unrest soon spread from Karachi to Calcutta. It involved over 20,000 sailors and 78 ships. At the peak of the revolt, sections of the Royal Indian Air Force and Royal Indian Army too joined the revolt. There were incidents of unrest in the army cantonments of Madras and Poona. The Indian soldiers started defying their British superiors and saluting with their left hand as a mark of revolt.

Although ideologically opposed to violent struggles, the Indian National Congress leadership too saw in the INA trials an opportunity to re-ignite the spirit of freedom among the masses and came forward to defend the INA soldiers. The defence team deployed by the Congress included prominent legal luminaries like Bhulabhai Desai, Asaf Ali, Sarat Chandra Bose, Tej Bahadur Sapru, Kailash Nath Katju and Lt. Col Horilal Varma. Even Jawaharlal Nehru scrambled for the black coat that he relinquished in 1922 and jumped to the defence of the INA soldiers at the Red Fort.

The British were rattled by these revolts and the massive popular support they received. Debates in the British House of Commons in the second half of 1946 stand testimony to it. Prime Minister Clement Atlee decided that it was time to quit India. He gave two principal reasons for his decision: One, that the Indian soldiers of the Royal Indian Army were no longer loyal to the crown, and second, that the British Army could no longer afford to send a large contingent of British soldiers to India, especially after the bloody experience of the Second World War.

Netajis and INAs contribution to the independence struggle thus becomes no less important than that of Gandhi and Congress. The Modi government has used Amrit Mahotsav to accord appropriate recognition to that and many such contributions. A grateful nation should cherish the memories of all those great freedom fighters.It is important to remember that all contributions were great. Nehru wont become small by making Patel big; Gandhi wont be dwarfed by making Netaji prominent.In their lifetime, those leaders had probably disagreed but never hated each other. In fact, it was Netaji who gave Gandhi the title of the Father of the Nation in a message from Burma in 1944 on his 75th birthday. Why then should we politicise Modis sincere efforts to accord a place of glory to all the freedom fighters?

The writer is member, board of governors, India Foundation

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Netaji's contribution to the freedom struggle is no less than that of Gandhi and Congress - The Indian Express

In the heart of Viluppuram district, Tamil Nadu, the Auroville foundation claims to educate around 800 children through different models of schooling. From outreach schools, to transitional schools and skill based learning centres, Auroville aims to create a holistic education system for the children of locals and the foreign residents. Our vision is to promote the overall development of children which is guided by the Mothers (Mirra Alfassa) vision, Antim Singh, an Aurovillian under the foundation, told FE Education Online.

According to the residents FE Education Online met and spoken to, Auroville has different kinds of schools based on the needs of students and the vision of the community. Much like other parts of the country, the town follows a primary, secondary and higher secondary education system. However, each school seems to be dedicated to a purpose. For example, the transition schools in Auroville aim to convert students into mystic beings. Similarly, the Deepam schools in the town are meant for students with special needs. Auroville further offers regular learning to students through the New Era Secondary School (NESS) a Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) affiliated school. The school follows the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) syllabus. Students who wish to study outside the town under the state board, are free to do so, Parthasarathy, working committee member, Auroville, said.

Further, the town which runs in the form of a socialist economy, claims to offer free education to children upto a certain level. However, formal education is not compulsory in Auroville as per the residents. Parents can home school children. Nevertheless, the town has the arrangement of pre-schools such as crche and kindergarten for the early development of children between 2.5 to 7 years of age. Besides, Auroville is said to have a higher education system in place which is claimed to be funded by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, among other international bodies. In addition, Auroville has several research bodies such as Auroville Consulting which works towards building policies of sustainable development.

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The medium of instruction in schools in Auroville is said to be multilingual. According to the foundation, teachers in Auroville use Tamil, English, French, or Sanskrit depending on the language diversity of the classroom. Special efforts are made to remove the language barrier between the locals and the foreign residents to facilitate learning as well as community living in the town, the foundation said. Earlier, the education system here was not so developed. However, now they have all sorts of arrangements which are further getting better, Jaya, Auroville Town Development Council, said.

Auroville is an experimental township in the state of Tamil Nadu founded by Mirra Alfassa, a spiritual guru, occultist and collaborator of Sri Aurobindo referred to as The Mother by the followers. The town houses around 3,000 residents from around the world including France, Germany, Italy, among over 50 other countries. Educational development is claimed to be an important aspect of this community which aims to raise the spiritual consciousness of students along with imparting general education. Auroville is based on the philosophy of unending education, be it spiritual or skill based. And we are tirelessly working for it, Muriel, researcher, content creator, Auroville foundation, said.

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Auroville, the Utopic township in Tamil Nadu and its education system - The Financial Express

BROOKFIELD, Wis.A tennis coach in Brookfield is one of the most well-known coaches you've never heard of. He is also one of the most expensive and yet inexpensive coaches in the U.S. He is Ian Westermann.

Westermann posts free tennis lessons to his YouTube account Essential Tennis for his 250,000 subscribers. In total, he has created more than 10,000 pieces of content for his YouTube account and his website, Essential Tennis.

"The 21st century is just all about content and distribution. And so the more helpful, the more relevant, the more authentic I can make my written, my audio, my video stuff, the more people engage with what we do, and the more people we can serve, and help them reach their goal," Westermann said.

He hopped on the YouTube trend back in 2009 and was able to leverage the power of the internet to be one of the most popular and sought-after tennis coaches in the world. He films his videos inside the Elite Sports Club-Brookfield. His team includes multiple coaches and a production staff.

However, he isn't just a YouTube and online personality. Westermann also does in-person lessons but he only offers that a few times a month.

James Groh

"So I only spend about five or six days on average a month on the court interfacing with a student," he said.

The cost isn't what you'd get with your standard one-hour tennis lesson at your local tennis club. He has three levels of in-person lessons: three hours for $1,000, six hours for $2,000, or two days for $6,000. The $6,000 package includes hotel accommodations, dinners, in-depth analysis, and a video of the lesson from trained production staff.

"I charge a lot of money for that because I could be spending my time creating a course or YouTube video or something that would make a really huge impact on tennis and/or on our business," he said.

He always films students during the lesson to show them their form, how they can improve, and to compare themselves to what the pros are doing. It's an intense few days, but for those that can afford it, Westermann said they are getting a lot of value for the time spent.

"My goal is basically to give people a year's worth of progressions and training and insight and revelations in a day or two."

The majority who do the in-person lessons aren't from Wisconsin. They are flying in to see Westermann. So to make things easier on his clients, he offers clinics in places like Los Angeles. What's more, he hosts week-long clinics in Hawaii and Costa Rica. Those cost $11,000 and $13,000 respectively.

"People come out here and work with us when they have discovered that they cant get what they need from anybody else in their local area," he said.

Westermann will tell you he isn't a world-class player. While he did play four years of college tennis at Ferris State University in Michigan, he isn't a pro. If he was, you probably would have seen him at Wimbledon. However, he has made coaching his life's work. When it comes to teaching others the game, there isn't much better than him.

"Every time I step out on the court, I learn something myself. A little bit different angle or perspective of looking at something. Over time I work with a student, I have to come up with a slightly different way of explaining something or a slightly different process of leading them through drills, so they can understand how to move their body correctly."

Westermann loves tennis and coaching is his passion. Even though he has made thousands of videos, he doesn't see himself running out of ideas anytime soon, which is great news for all of us - with pockets big and small.

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A Milwaukee man created Essential Tennis and became the most popular tennis coach you've never heard of - TMJ4 News