Austrian political scientist Anton Pelinka's book Democracy Indian Style says that present day India is more Subhas Chandra Bose's dream than Gandhi's vision.

"It is industrial, it is modern, it is socialist, it is change driven, it walks the secular tightrope. It has put aside Mahatma Gandhi's tenets of non-violence and is a nuclear power," Pelinka said.

He said the country was more "Bose's India" by virtue of its being a nuclear power as "Bose was not convinced that the best way to fight British colonialism" was by non-violence. He wanted to wrest freedom from the colonial rulers.

Pelinka's book explores Bose's impact on India before and after independence and how the controversial leader of the 1940s shaped this nation's political culture.

Speaking at a lecture at the Asian College of Journalism, organised by the Madras Book Club in Chennai, Pelinka drew parallels between Gandhi's proteges Nehru and Bose, calling the former "Gandhi's good son" and Bose, the "prodigal son".

Pelinka, a professor at the University of Innsburk and director of the Institute of Conflict Research in Vienna, researched extensively on the life and times of Bose in Austria, Kolkata and Washington.

Bose, he said, "was a secular nationalist and a socialist moderniser. He understood that Indian identity was above religion, caste and language."

Bose led the Indian National Army (INA), formed by Indian nationalists to win India's independence from the British Empire.

"He maintained a certain balance of power even in his INA by having one Sikh, one Hindu and one Muslim general," said the author.

The book has been published by Transaction Publishers and translated by Rene Schell.

In a potentially conflict-ridden report submitted here, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has concluded that a Hindu temple existed under the debris of the razed Babri mosque in Ayodhya.

The ASI submitted its 574-page report, on the vexed question of whether a temple existed at the site of the 16th-century Babri mosque, to the special bench of the Allahabad High Court here Friday, but the report was opened only Monday.

Said ASI counsel Ravi Mehrotra: "It was amply clear from the report that a huge 10th century structure with features resembling Hindu temples existed at the disputed site before the Babri mosque was erected in the 16th century."

The report stated, "... taking into account the archaeological evidence of a massive structure along with the yield of stone and decorated bricks as well as mutilated sculpture of divine couple and carved architectural members... are indicative of remains which are distinctive features found associated with the temples of North India."

"It was over the top of this construction during the early 16th century the disputed structure was constructed directly resting over it," the report added.

The special bench -- comprising Justices Rafat Alam, Bhanwar Singh and Khem Karan - gave all the parties six weeks to file their objections, following which hearings would resume in the half-a-century old litigation.

While the Hindu rightwing Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) welcomed the report, the Babri Masjid Action Committee (BMAC) was highly critical.

Rejecting the findings of the report, BMAC convenor and counsel for Sunni Central Waqf Board Zafaryab Jilani said: "I find the report self-contradictory and erroneous."

Jilani had expected the report to contradict the Muslim claim and had already started preparing his objections well before the findings were made public.

"Our experts are already on the job and we will file our objections to the report," he told IANS.

But the VHP was jubilant.
"The ASI was assigned to carry out a fact-finding mission, which has proved our contention that a temple did exist well before the mosque was built by Mughal emperor Babur," said VHP counsel G.P. Verma.

Verma went on to add: "With this foolproof evidence, Muslims ought to abdicate their claim to the site as the holy Quran itself does not permit construction of a mosque on any disputed site."

The ASI had undertaken the excavations from March 12 under the court's directions essentially to determine "whether there was any temple/structure which was demolished and a mosque was constructed on the disputed site".

The excavations were finally concluded on August 7. The ASI submitted its report before the special court bench on August 22. However, the report was formally opened in the open court on Monday noon.

Read on..
Sudarshan Reddy has theoretically proven the existence of a sub-atomic particle, which can travel at speed greater than that of light, thereby challenging one of the fundamental postulates of the "Theory of Relativity".In his recent research paper submitted to the "Institute of Advanced Physics (IAP)" at Trieste, (Italy) Sudarshan has proved the existence of a class of sub-atomic particles called 'leptons', which can travel faster than light.The international physics community has been shell shocked by this discovery.

Dr.Massimo Martelli, President of the IAP has this to say about the paper submitted by Sudarshan :" After a long, careful and critical analysis, I can confidently say that Sudarshan 's research paper show a tremendous leap in our understanding of physics as his investigation mounts up on 'leptons'. His work builds substantially on the work of Einstein and others in the field of relativity". When physicists from Princeton University tried to measure Sudarshan's IQ with an IQ-meter (at the American embassy in Delhi), the meter broke down, simply because it was not calibrated to measure such high IQ.

This was reported in 'Times of India'. Prof.Carl Uppsala, Chairman of the Nobel sub-committee for physics has confirmed that Sudarshan has been short listed for the Nobel Prize in physics for the year 2001. Sudarshan, incidentally, is the brother of Madhu Reddy, the Indian whiz kid who developed an operating system superior to Microsoft Windows. We should all be very proud of these boys.

There are 3.22 Million Indians in America.
(Total Population of Singapore is 3.2 million!!!)

• 38% of Doctors in America are Indians.
• 12% of Scientists in America are Indians.
• 36% of NASA employees are Indians.
• 34% of MICROSOFT employees are Indians.
• 28% of IBM employees are Indians.
• 17% of INTEL employees are Indians.
• 13% of XEROX employees are Indians.

For some time it has been established that there is a very high rate of birth defects and cancer in the area under construction. The levels of radiation there have registered so high on investigators' gauges that the Indian government has now cordoned off the region. Scientists have unearthed an ancient city where evidence shows an atomic blast dating back thousands of years, from 8,000 to 12,000 years, destroyed most of the buildings and probably a half-million people.

The Mahabharata [an ancient book] clearly describes a catastrophic blast that rocked the continent. "A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe...An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as 10,000 suns, rose in all its splendor...it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death which reduced to ashes an entire race. The corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out, pottery broke without any apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours, all foodstuffs were infected. To escape from this fire, the soldiers threw themselves into the river."

A HISTORIAN COMMENTS
Historian Kisari Mohan Ganguli says that Indian sacred writings are full of such descriptions...He says references mention fighting sky chariots and final weapons. An ancient battle is described in the Drona Parva, a section of the Mahabharata. "The passage tells of combat where explosions of final weapons decimate entire armies, causing crowds of warriors with steeds and elephants and weapons to be carried away as if they were dry leaves of trees," says Ganguli.

"Instead of mushroom clouds, the writer describes a perpendicular explosion with its billowing smoke clouds as consecutive openings of giant parasols. There are comments about the contamination of food and people's hair falling out."

Archeologist Francis Taylor says that etchings in some nearby temples he has managed to translate suggest that they prayed to be spared from the great light that was coming to lay ruin to the city...The radioactive ash adds credibility to the ancient Indian records that describe atomic warfare."

Housing construction in the area has halted while the five-member team conducts the investigation. The foreman of the project is Lee Hundley, who pioneered the investigation after the high level of radiation was discovered.

1. India never invaded any country in her last 10000 years of history.
2. India invented the Number System. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta.
3. The World's first university was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
4. Sanskrit is the mother of all the European languages. Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software reported in Forbes magazine, July 1987.
5. Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans. Charaka, the father of medicine consolidated Ayurveda 2500 years ago. Today Ayurveda is fast regaining its rightful place in our civilization.
6. Although modern images of India often show poverty and lack of development, India was the richest country on earth until the time of British invasion in the early 17th Century.
7. The art of Navigation was born in the river Sindh 6000 years ago. The very word Navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH. The word navy is also derived from Sanskrit >'Nou'.
8. Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. Time taken by earth to orbit the sun: (5th century) 365.258756484 days.
9. The value of pi was first calculated by Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century long before the European mathematicians.
10. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India; Quadratic equations were by Sridharacharya in the 11th century; The largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 10 6 (10 to the power of6) whereas Aryans used numbers as big as 1053(10 to the power of 53) with specific names as early as 5000 BCE during the Vedic period. Even today, the largest used number is Tera 1012(10 to the power of 12).
11. According to the Gemological Institute of America, up until 1896, India was the only source for diamonds to the world.
12. USA based IEEE has proved what has been a century-old suspicion in the world scientific community that the pioneer of Wireless communication was Prof. Jagdeesh Bose and not Marconi.
13. The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.
14. According to Saka King Rudradaman I of 150 CE a beautiful lake called Sudarshana' was constructed on the hills of Raivataka during Chandragupta Maurya's time.
15. Chess (Shataranja or AshtaPada) was invented in India.
16. Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted complicated surgeries like cesareans, cataract, artificial limbs, fractures, urinary stones and even plastic surgery and brain surgery. Usage of anesthesia was well known in ancient India. Over 125 surgical equipment were used. Deep knowledge of anatomy, physiology, etiology, embryology, digestion, metabolism, genetics and immunity is also found in many texts.
17. When many cultures were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5000 years ago, Indians established Harappan culture in Sindhu Valley (Indus Valley Civilization).
18. The place value system, the decimal system was developed in India in 100 BC.

• Albert Einstein said: "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."
• Mark Twain said: "India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most constructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only."
• French scholar Romain Rolland said: "If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India."
• Hu Shih, former Ambassador of China to USA said: "India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border."

The “cyclic model,” developed by Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University’s Neil Turok, made its highest-profile appearance yet Thursday on Science Express, the Web site for the journal Science. But past incarnations of the idea have been hotly debated within the cosmological community for the past year — and Steinhardt acknowledges that he and Turok have an uphill battle on their hands.

“It will take people a while to get used to it,” Steinhardt told MSNBC.com. “This introduces a number of concepts that are quite unfamiliar, even to a cosmologist.”

Tinkering with the cosmos
Years ago, Steinhardt played a prominent role in formulating what is now the most widely accepted scientific picture of the universe’s beginnings, known as inflationary Big Bang theory: that a vanishingly small quantum fluctuation gave rise in an instant to an inflated region of space-time, kicking off an expansion that is now picking up speed.

The model has weathered repeated experimental tests, including studies of patterns in the microwave “afterglow” of the Big Bang.

“All the competing models were knocked off,” Steinhardt said. “So we had a situation where it looked as if we had converged on a single idea. But I was always disturbed by the idea that there were no competitors around.”

So Steinhardt, Turok and others began tinkering with alternate models. As successful as the inflationary theory was, there were some unexplained gaps: What sparked the universe in the first place? What is the role played by “dark energy,” a mysterious property that seems to be causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate? Is there any connection between the universe’s origins and a “theory of everything”?

Any alternate model should address such issues as well as explain the phenomena that the mainstream theory explains so well. The theorists came up with a doozy: Instead of one Big Bang, a succession of bangs could be sparked when rippling waves of space-time crash into each other in extra dimensions. It sounds like the cheesiest form of science fiction, but this scenario — dubbed the “ekpyrotic model,” which plays off the Greek word for “conflagration” — was put forward as the best rival to the mainstream model.

Responding to criticism
The theory touched off another kind of conflagration within the physics community. Some complained that the mathematical basis for the model was half-baked. Others said the theory depended on having just the right conditions to produce the desired results. Still others questioned why physicists needed to develop such a bizarre alternative.

“I was sharply critical of the ekpyrotic model,” said Andreas Albrecht, a cosmologist at the University of California at Davis. “I really do think it’s a step backwards. We could just declare that this is the state of the universe at the beginning. ... It’s a really hugely ambitious thing to do what inflation (theory) does, and it’s actually amazing that we can have something that can do that. So if we can do that, I don’t want to back off from that.”

Steinhardt and Turok took the criticism to heart, and their Science paper proposes a revised scenario called the cyclic model.

“I think now we’ve gotten into a situation where the model is much more ambitious, even more ambitious than the standard model,” Steinhardt said.

The revised theory still thinks of our universe as one of two multidimensional surfaces, or “branes,” separated by an extra dimension. Over the course of trillions of years, the surfaces bounce off each other, sparking a Big Bang. But in the cyclic scenario, dark energy plays an essential role.

At first, matter and radiation are dominant in a newly spawned cosmos. However, the accelerating dark energy gradually drives the expansion of the universe to such an extent that the cosmos is virtually cleared out. Then a weak force starts bringing the branes back together in the extra dimension, setting the stage for another bounce, or “Big Crunch,” that touches off the next Big Bang.

Even if the universe were disrupted from its periodic behavior, it would rapidly reconverge to the cyclic solution,” Steinhardt said, due to the clearing-out effect of dark energy. That means the cycles could continue without beginning or end.

The theorists acknowledge that their cyclic concept draws upon religious and scientific ideas going back for millennia — echoing the “oscillating universe” model that was in vogue in the 1930s, as well as the Hindu belief that the universe has no beginning or end, but follows a cosmic cycle of creation and dissolution.

“I didn’t start out liking this picture,” Steinhardt told MSNBC.com. “We’ve been led into this. All these concepts run into one another.”

Evolving theory
Albrecht admits that the idea of a bouncing universe is an improvement over the ekpyrotic model.

“The coolest thing about this idea is that they actually use the fact that the universe is accelerating today in an interesting way,” he said. “Today’s acceleration is the inflation for the next cycle.”

But he still thinks proponents of the cyclic model haven’t made their case.

“How do you actually make a collapsing universe bounce back? No one ever had a good idea about that,” Albrecht said. “What these guys realized was that if they got their wish for an ekpyrotic universe, then they could have the universe bounce back.”

Albrecht and other skeptics agree, however, that questioning the inflationary Big Bang model is a healthy process.

“Right now inflation has destroyed all its competition, so we need some competing ideas,” University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner told MSNBC.com. “These guys have set for themselves a very bold goal, which is to explain how it all began and make connections to superstring theory. And that’s something we should be engaged in. But I don’t think we’ve made much progress yet.”

Steinhardt expects the debate to continue for years and perhaps decades to come. “I don’t expect a debate to be decisive,” he said. “I expect observations to be decisive.”

What kinds of observations could determine whether the cyclic model is correct or cracked? In their paper, Steinhardt and Turok say that if scientists detect gravitational waves left behind by the inflationary Big Bang, that would disprove their theory. But if such waves are missing, that would strengthen their case.

"The villagers were converted into Islam by force a few centuries back and most of them were observing religious ceremonies of both the faiths," a VHP spokesman said in Ajmer.

"Now the villagers have joined back their original faith," he added.

The so-far unnamed world, which whizzes around mu Arae in just 9.5 days, is the smallest of the estimated 125 so-called extrasolar planets that have been detected so far.

"This new planet appears to be the smallest yet discovered around a star other than the Sun. This makes mu Arae a very exciting planetary system," French astronomer Francois Bouchy was quoted in a statement issued by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

With few exceptions, the extrasolar planets spotted so far have approximated the size of Jupiter, the giant of the Solar System.

But this latest find is far smaller, with a mass of only 14 times that of the Earth, which puts it in the same ballpark as Uranus for size.

The big difference, though, is that Uranus is an uninhabitable hell, a gassy planet on the far frigid fringes of the Solar System, whereas the new planet appears to be a rocky planet, as the Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury are, and orbits in a much balmier region.

It has a gassy atmosphere, amounting to about a tenth of its mass, although what this consists of is so far unknown.

The object qualifies "as a 'super-Earth," the ESO said.

Much about this enigmatic world remains to be uncovered, least of all whether it may be habitable.

However, there is the tantalising question as to whether it lies within the "Goldilocks Zone" -- a distance from its star that is not too hot, not too cold, just right.

In this zone, a planet would be close enough to the star to have liquid water -- yet not so close that its oceans would boil away -- and not so far that its oceans would freeze. That is one of the prime conditions for creating and sustaining life, according to a leading theoretical model.

The discovery was made thanks to a highly accurate spectrograph, a velocity-measuring instrument, on the ESO's 3.6-metre (11.7-feet) telescope at La Silla, Chile.

In a separate development, a team of American and Spanish astronomers, the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey (TrES), said they had found an extra-solar planet using a telescope with just a 10-centimeter (four-inch) diameter.

Telescopes of this size can typically be bought in department stores, so this is a remarkable technical breakthrough in planet-hunting.

The newfound planet is a Jupiter-sized gas giant orbiting a star located about 500 light years from Earth in the constellation of Lyra.

This world circles its star every 3.03 days at a distance of only 6.4 million kms (four million miles), far closer and faster than Mercury is in our Solar System.

To make the find, the astronomers used a network of small, inexpensive telescopes whose finds were then followed up and confirmed by the big lenses of the W.M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii.

Most known extra-solar planets have been found by using the "Doppler method" which measures changes to the composition of a star's light that are caused by the planet's gravitational tug.

In the US case, though, the astronomers looked for possible planets that were "transiting" their star -- that were in other words happened to be aligned between the star and Earth as they pursued their orbit. Such planets can then be detected indirectly because of the amount of light they block as they pass by.

Hot places
Prior to Tuesday's announcement at a NASA press conference, Marcy detailed the pair of discoveries for Space.com.
One of the planets orbits the star 55 Cancri, already known to harbor three gas giant planets. Its fourth known world is 18 times as massive as Earth, just slightly more massive than Neptune, Marcy said. It completes a year in a mere 2.81 Earth-days, circling just 3.5 million miles (5.7 million kilometers) from the star.

Another Neptune-sized planet orbits the yellow, sunlike star 55 Cancri. Astronomers previously found three other planets around this star, lying further out.

"It could be made of gas, rock and iron, or rock and ice, and there may or may not be an atmosphere," Marcy said. "We don't know."

The discovery resulted from measurements taken by Lick Observatory. Barbara McArthur at the University of Texas helped pin it down with more observations from the ground-based Hobby-Eberly Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope. The other newest known planet is about 25 times as hefty as Earth. Its circular orbit is tight, too, a mere 2.64 Earth-days long, around the star Gliese 436. Marcy speculated that this world, too, could be gaseous like Saturn or Jupiter.

"But with a mass near that of Neptune, it could have a rock-ice core and a thick envelope of hydrogen and helium gas," he said. "Alternatively, it could be made of only rock and iron, like Mercury."

The Gliese 436 planet is probably tidally locked, Marcy said, always showing the same face to the star — just as our moon does with respect to Earth. If rocky and barren, the lit surface would be about 710 degrees Fahrenheit (377 degrees Celsius), and the back side far below zero. If the planet has a thick atmosphere like Venus, however, then the entire surface would be hot. The discovery was made with the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Next up: Other Earths
The Doppler method was used to find the first planet beyond our solar system in 1995. Initially it found only Jupiter-sized planets very close to stars, because those had the greatest gravitational influence on the stars being surveyed. The technique was later refined to spot large planets in more distant, Jupiterlike orbits and also less massive, Saturn-sized objects. "We had found Jupiters and Saturns, and now we've found Neptunes," Marcy said. "The next destination is other Earths."

It is not clear just how long that breakthrough will take or who will do the finding, however.

The "super Earth" announced last week, by a competing team based in Switzerland, is just 14 times the mass of Earth and also in a tight orbit, around a star called mu Arae. It is almost surely rocky, experts say. The Europeans may have an edge in finding something smaller.

The European program "should be able to push down to masses of, say, eight Earth masses — twice Earth-size — for the shortest-period orbits, those of just a few days," said Alan Boss, a planet-formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington."There could be claims of planets with masses of about eight Earth masses within the next year or less."

Migrating planets
All three discoveries illustrate a wide range of solar systems. The mu Arae planet found by the Europeans is bounded well to the outside by a Jupiter-mass planet. It must have formed inside the orbit of the larger planet, and theory suggests that it would have developed as a rocky world. It might have a thin atmosphere.

Boss does not think the two planets found by the U.S. team are made primarily of rock. They likely formed much farther out and migrated inward to their present orbits, Boss explained in an e-mail interview prior to the press conference.

"Hence the Gliese 436 and 55 Cancri Neptune-mass planets might actually be more like Neptune in composition as well as mass, with significant ice and gas in addition to rock," Boss said.

All this depends on how planets form and migrate, two things astronomers know surprisingly little about. Inward migration has also been used to explain the dozens of "hot Jupiters," the most massive gas planets found in orbits that last just a few days.

"Understanding planetary migration is now a major challenge for theorists," Boss said.

Leap of technology
Prior to Tuesday's announcement, the 55 Cancri system was seen as one that would, mathematically speaking, allow the presence an Earth-sized planet in a habitable, Earthlike orbit. That possibility seems less likely now. While such a planet could have a stable orbit, Boss said, "it is highly unlikely that it would have survived the orbital migration of the inner planets through this region."

The discovery of potentially habitable planets — roughly Earth-sized and in wider orbits — will require a leap of technology, one that's already planned. A pair of soon-to-launch space observatories will soon race to find planets just like Earth in size and orbit.

NASA's Kepler observatory is slated for launch in 2007. The European Space Agency's COROT mission will launch in 2006 under current plans. Both missions will survey large numbers of stars and are expected to detect several rocky planets, at least.

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.

In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.

"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.