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The Green Revolution Vikram Sarabhai Homi Bhaba Amartya Sen Mother Teresa Sri Aurobindo The Chipko Movement Ramanath Goenka Ela Bhatt Verghese Kurien Satish Dhawan Raja Ramanna Abdul Kalam Jadunath Sarkar
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This is the real story behind the Green Revolution. The most spectacular event in Indian agriculture during the current century -- perhaps this millennium -- has been the introduction of dwarf high-yielding varieties of wheat, Lerma Rojo and Sonora 64, on Indian soils during the mid-'60s. These two varieties of wheat were imported from CIMMYT, an international institute in Mexico devoted to research in maize and wheat. Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug fathered the high-yielding varieties and the world remains indebted to him for making food available to millions on this planet. India was in the grip of a food crisis in the mid-'60s. It was indeed a situation of a ship-to-mouth food economy. With domestic production of wheat hovering around 12 million tonnes, another 10 million tonnes were imported annually from the US under the infamous Public Law 480 during 196566 and 1966-67. The US administration often used this leverage of a life-saving handout to squeeze India. Besides, things looked so bleak that the Paddock brothers, William and Paul, declared India as an incurable case of a nation heading for a severe famine by 1975, which could claim as many as 10 million lives. They had a point. Efforts were being made in India to raise foodgrain production since the early 1950s, but without any major success. In March 1963, Norman Borlaug visited India and sent in 100 kg of seed for each of the four high-yield varieties (HYV) of wheat for trials. Lerma Rojo and Sonora 64 performed best. But these were experiments, and like many such experiments, there were several ifs and buts with research and policy. With the demise of Jawaharlal Nehru in May 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri became the prime minister. C. Subramaniam, the minister for steel, mines and heavy engineering in Nehru's cabinet, was now given agriculture, a sector which was weak and under severe pressure because of low-yielding varieties of seeds and an exploding population. Subramaniam began to systematically set the stage for an overhaul of the way foodgrain was grown, sold and distributed. He started off with a remunerative price policy for farmers, which gave birth to the Agricultural Prices Commission and Food Corporation of India in 1965. An officer, Ralph Cummings from Rockefeller Foundation met Subramaniam and told him about dwarf HYVS of wheat, but also conveyed that Indian scientists and bureaucracy were going very slow on these. So Subramaniam decided to reorganise agricultural research -- in other words, free it from bureaucracy -- and appointed Dr B.P. Pal, a renowned scientist, as director-general of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), got pay scales of scientists improved, and went in for targeted and time-bound research.
Grain of Truth
The Green Revolution

By Ashok Gulati Crack team steered India out of its food crisis. This is the real story about how it was done.
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In 1965, 250 tonnes of Sonora 64 and Lerma Rojo were imported for seed multiplication, a technique that is standard practice, which yielded about 5,000 tonnes of seed. Subramaniam was now ready for his Big Bang. But to play his final stroke, he wanted a greater quantity of these seeds than he had from domestic seed multiplication. He wanted to import a large quantity of these HYV seeds from Mexico to give the effort a single, massive boost. But there was severe opposition to his idea of importing these new varieties in Parliament as well as in public fora, especially from the Left parties, socio-logists, some economists and bureaucrats. And here lies the contribution of this man -- he steered through the political hurdles, the bureaucratic wrangles, and public debates, first with the support of Shastri and later with Indira Gandhi. Finally, 18,000 tonnes of HYV wheat seeds were imported in 1966 -- and about a thousand national demonstrations were held all over India over that year and the next. It all dissipated as quickly; the result was a miracle. The new varieties had more than doubled the existing yields. Farmers in Punjab lapped up the new seeds. There was such a scramble for seeds that in some places, farmers are said to have paid Rs 10 for a single seed. When they did not get the seeds, some even tried to steal them. India harvested 17 million tonnes of wheat in 1967-68, five million tonnes more than the previous best of 12 million tonnes. There was no place to store this sudden burst of grain. Schools in rural Punjab were closed down to store the new harvest in classrooms. A green revolution was ushered in. Indian scientists quickly got down to the job of indigenising these Mexican varieties, especially their colour and baking qualities. M.S. Swaminathan, G.S. Athwal, S.P. Kohli, V.S. Mathur, to name a few, took a lead in this daunting task. Athwal and his team in Punjab Agricultural University brought out a cross called Kalyan, named after Athwal's village. At the same time, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in Delhi, under the leadership of Swaminathan and Kohli, brought out Sona. Incidentally, Kalyan and Sona were from the same breeding material and therefore it was decided to release them together as KalyanSona. Sonalika was another wonder variety developed by Indian scientists from Mexican seeds. The rest is history, the present and the future. Today India harvests more than 70 million tonnes of wheat every year. Whom do we acknowledge for this wonder on the food front? There is no doubt that Subramaniam's vision, dynamism and design to launch what is now called the new agricultural strategy was unique. Alas, his contribution was acknowledged only 30 years later when he was honoured with a Bharat Ratna. Swaminathan is perhaps the only scientist who has been honoured with a number of awards, including the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan. This nation is yet to salute other scientists like Athwal, Kohli, Mathur and the like, who contributed in no less measure to this revolution that made India self-sufficient in food. But the real unsung heroes of this green revolution, as Subramaniam himself puts it, were Punjabi farmers. He said, "They were the pioneers in this technology and, but for them, I am convinced we would not have made a success of it ... They had developed into a very hardy lot of enterprising people ... And therefore when this new technology was offered to them they took to it like fish to water. Everybody vied with one another to demonstrate that he was best able to utilise the new technology." These are the real people behind the Green Revolution. Ashok Gulati is professor (NABARD chair), Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.
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To the generation now in their 50s Vikram Sarabhai was the father of our space programme. He was the man who not only developed and launched rockets, but who was passionately committed to use all aspects of science and technology in general and space applications in particular as "levers of development". This was particularly the case with regard to satellite-based remote sensing of natural resources, telecommunication and direct-to-village community "development TV". Sarabhai was much more than a highly talented scientist. He was a dreamer, creator and innovator, not only in science and technology, or in its organisation and management but also in a huge range of developmental institutions ranging from the Space Science & Technology Centre, Trivandrum, to the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and the Nehru Foundation for Development. I first met Vikrambhai in 1967 on one of his frequent visits to the Boston-Cambridge area in the US to pursue collaborative projects with MIT. He told me he had taken over as chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, and was looking for a special assistant. Would I be interested? I jumped at the offer. Over the next three years I assisted him on a host of policy and management issues relating to atomic energy, space and electronics. Vikrambhai has often been typified as a dove on nuclear weapons and missiles. This was not true. As far back as 1956, at a meeting of the governing body of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of which he was a member, he had called for the country to start R&D on "rockets and missiles". In the area of atomic energy he mounted programmes for capability and capacity building all across the chain from the mining of uranium ore at the Jaduguda mines in Bihar to the building of atomic power stations. He was disillusioned with the Non-Proliferation Treaty well before the government decided in 1968 not to sign it, and strove hard to make our atomic programme selfsufficient. Sarabhai had very definite views about the kind of role which scientists could and should play in building an independent and modern India. In a broadcast over air on August 4, 1965 he spoke of three goals. First, to foster creativity, an interest in getting to the core of problems and dedication to what one may call the "scientific method". Second, to provide experience on a wide scale whereby man can evolve values and ethics consistent with the real constraints imposed by his environment. Third, to apply their skills and knowledge to the diverse practical tasks of society like building of the economy, creating of a desirable social environment of policymaking in the areas of defence, development and social change.
Space Voyager
Vikram Sarabhai
By Ashok Parthasarathi He devised India's space programme and defined the role of scientists and scientific institutions.
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However, Vikrambhai was equally forthright about the reciprocal responsibility of society towards scientists. As he put it, "We look down on our research scientists in national laboratories or our academics in universities if they engage themselves in outside consultation or if they choose to augment their income from task-oriented projects of a practical nature. We implicitly promote the ivory tower, the alienation of the persons of insight from those who do things." Sarabhai advocated a more decisive role for scientists in the promotion and application of science and technology to contribute to the attainment of socio-economic goals set by planners. Indeed, he called for and worked for scientists and technologists to be heavily involved in the policy and management aspects of science and technology-intensive areas of national endeavour, other than science and technology in a narrow sense. For instance he felt scientists and engineers, rather than judges, should be roped in to solve inter-state river water disputes. A similar proposal of his was the marshalling of resources to design an integrated development programme for the Brahmaputra-Ganga river system and to make this the basis of a new relationship between India and the then East Pakistan. He also gave us tools and techniques and above all a philosophy for organising and managing scientific institutions. To him these were not just the R&D agencies of atomic energy, space, electronics, CSIR, etc, but all organisations in which science and technology was involved. His testament was the document entitled Approaches to the Administration of Scientific Organisations. This document should be a primer not only for every R&D and science and technology manager but all civil servants. So far it has been Vikrambhai, the scientist, R&D manager, science and technology policymaker and planner. But he was a Renaissance man with interests in music, painting and architecture. He was a great creator -- of motivated people, of institutions and programmes. He was a scion of a wealthy business family but never let a peon carry his briefcase. "It is against my principles," he used to say. "We have to be constantly alert to see that long-inherited feudal reflexes do not seep back into our veins." That would be the greatest travesty of the new India. Ashok Parthasarathi is a scientific secretary to the Government of India. He will soon take up the position of professor at the Centre for Science Policy Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
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Sir C.V. Raman was not very charitable with praise for his fellow travelers in physics. Yet, he used superlative when it came to Homi Jehangir Bhabha: "a great lover of music, a gifted artist, a brilliant engineer and an outstanding scientist... The modern equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci". Curiously enough, Bhabha's Monalisa, if she ever existed, is as mysterious as Vinci's. Homi Jehangir, a Parsi by birth, was western in his upbringing-he was fed on a diet of Beethoven, Chopin, Shakespeare, a culture entailing the use of knives and forksbut he was a man of the renaissance that ushered independence to India. He always wore a double breasted suit, even when he launched his cosmic ray ballons in the swamps of southern India. And as Raja Ramanna recalls, he once attended a western music concert in Bangalore-he used to play the violin himself-dressed as if he were part of the opera. I met him once in his alma mater which happened to be my university at that time, Cambridge, Bhabha had come to meet the Indian students. I did not know then that he went through the engineering Tripos because of his father. His passion lay with physics but since his father believed it did not have any great prospects, he continued with his engineering. It was only after he completed it that he went on to do mathematics Tripos, finishing with a first on both occasions. All along Bhabha nurtured seemingly absurd dreams. When he floated his ideas on atomic energy, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru asked him, "How can we think of atomic energy in a country which is run by bullock carts?" It is the formidable personality of Bhabha and his close connection with the Tatas that persuaded him to see otherwise. Originality and inventiveness were the two greatest virtues of Bhabha and he pursued them with ruthless energy and devotion, possessed with an enormous vitality and purpose. When Bhabha was killed in an air crash in the Alps in 1966, J.R.D. Tata said he must have had a premonition. Only that, he felt, could have "driven him to a superhuman effort to achieve his goal, come what may". Indeed, Bhabha himself had written to a friend way back in 1934 saying, "Life and my emotions are the only things I am conscious of. I love the consciousness of life and I want as much of it as I can get. What comes after death no one knows. Nor do I care. I do have this one purpose: increasing the intensity of my consciousness of life." And through that consciousness he did wonders. I recall a paper Shankaranarayanan of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) published in 1964 with Bhabha. It was about the Lorentz pancake of a nucleus moving at high
Molecule Man
The Green Revolution ViKram Sarabhai Homi Bhaba Amartya Sen Mother Teresa Sri Aurobindo The Chipko Movement Ramanath Goenka Ela Bhatt Verghese Kurien Satish Dhawan Raja Ramanna Abdul Kalam Jadunath Sarkar
Homi Bhabha
By Bikash Sinha The father of India's atomic energy programme, his love for art was just as great, if not more
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energy. Thirty years later that paper remains a benchmark for researchers. Bhabha Bhabha also discovered the now famous hard component of cosmic shower in India while he was at the Indian institute of Science, Bangalore. And long before Lederman Steinberger and Schwartz received the Nobel Prize, he had discovered the "particles of second generation". Bhabha dreamt of an India which could be as good as any other country in the world. And his keen sense of aesthetics was evident in any task he undertook. When TIFR was set up, Bhabha, having recognized the potential of M.F. Husain, then relatively unknown, asked him to adorn the building with his works. Bhabha wanted to bring the Palace of Versailles to India by creating the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, now known as the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre. He believed that ambience played an important role in work place. As did organisation. Anything that was haphazard, casual or shoddy would make him passionately angry. While building Apsara, for instance, he ensured that his men who were working round the clock had a constant supply of food, with cars readily available. Interestingly, when Bhabha's request for these arrangements was initially rejected by the bureaucrats, he approached Nehru and sought his approval. Bhabha derived his energy from the arts, the music, the paintings, the trees and his beloved roses. Having attended Beethoven's Erotica at the London Symphony Orchestra, he wrote: "The Ninth Symphony is sheer greatness, the sublimest and most colossal achievement of the human mind." To him the arts were whtat made life worth living. Once when I was visiting Krakow in Poland for a conference, my host asked me if I knew of a gentleman called Homi Bhabha. The distinguished Polish professor recalled Bhabha's detailed knowledge about the museum at Krakow, his sense of history and art in general. Yet another instance to show that wherever Bhabha went, whatever he did, he made a lasting impression. Bikash Sinha is director, The Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta.
Early Genius
S. RAMANUJAN (1887-1920): This mathemagician died young. But in a span of 33 years, he came up with his theory of divergent series, modestly filled in frayed notebooks, considered invaluable by mathematicians even today. It took G.H. Hardy, a professor at Cambridge University, to recognise his genius and provide him with an opportunity to pursue his interests -- Ramanujan spent four years in London honing his skills. His work, based on the number theory and probability theory, among others, has opened up avenues for further research in computer sciences, statistics and physics. And this man failed his matriculation exam, had his scholarship withdrawn and was constantly reprimanded by his father for scribbling on sheets . SATYENDRA NATH BOSE (1894-1974): When as a 22-yearold physicist he joined the University College of Science, Calcutta, he knew he had to do something different. He did. He worked on statistical, theoretical concepts that could explain radiation, followed up by discovering particles that confirmed them. They are called bosons after him. To this day, scientists refer to Bose-Einstein statistics, which explains the behaviour of small particles that are smaller than atoms. However, the greatest contribution of this man, who worked with Marie Curie and Albert Einstein for a year each, was the amount of time he ungrudgingly spent with students and researchers, and on taking science to the masses. C.V. RAMAN (1888-1970): Old Calcutta. 210 Bowbazaar Street. The Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science

was just a signboard to him when he went there first as an Indian Finance Service officer. But in 1930, his work here earned him the Nobel Prize. The Raman Effect as we know it today may basically be a concept of physics but its utility is as one of chemistry's favourite tools: to identify materials by measuring different kinds of light. Raman founded the fewfrills, world-class Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, a hub of research in areas like developing liquid crystals, theoretical physics and astrophysics. Subhadra Menon is a science writer, India Today
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Welfare Wizard
Amartya Sen
By S Subramanian 1933: Born in Santiniketan. 1943: Bengal Famine. Marks the beginning of a life-time commitment to the study of deprivation and disparity. 1956: BA, Trinity College, Cambridge. 1959: MA, Ph.D at Trinity. 1963: Professor of Economics, Delhi School of Economics. 1971-77: Professor of Economics, London School of Economics. 1980-88: Drummond Professor of Political Economy, Oxford. 1988-1997: Lamont University professor; Professor of Economics and Philosophy, Harvard. 1998: Master, Trinity College; Awarded Nobel Prize for Economics. 1960-1999: Major publications: Choice of Techniques, Collective Choice and Social Welfare; on Economic Equality, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation; Inequality Re-examined; Development and Freedom.
Amartya Sen is, inarguably, the most distinguished economist India has ever produced. Some of the major events of his career are highlighted in the accompanying box. If the list therein is exiguous, it's because life is governed by such unpleasant realities as word limits. An accurate and exhaustive catalogue would closely follow the contours of H. Hatterr's capacious fantasy: "... fellow of the royal geographical, humane, automobile, asiatic, astronomical and microscopic societies ..." With Sen, it has been a case of life imitating art. As part of the brief given to this writer, it was delicately suggested that he should steer clear of unrestrained panegyrics. Since one's objectivity is on the line, one takes it that some element of negative criticism of the subject is called for in the interests of completeness and balance. To this end, it may be useful to resort to Sen's own technique of enumeration. Firstly, for all of the wonderful lucidity of his exposition, some of his formal papers, with their trademark combination of fine-grained logic, minute differentiations, and trickily nuanced arguments, can tax the patience and stamina of even his most devoted students: indeed, a fellow-economist was one provoked to describing him, with some asperity, as "that distinguished distinguisher". Secondly, while Sen has always been a generous and courteous critic of the work of others, he has also been known to be a stubborn and at times prickly defender of his own viewpoint against the criticism of others (as opponents of his work on liberty, for example, will testify wryly). One is here reminded of the exhortation, addressed to an unyielding dissenter, by an ally of that redoubtable rhetorician h*y*m*a*n k*a*p*l*a*n: "Give an inch, Shimmelfarb!" Thirdly, and finally, I believe it would be a great kindness to Professor Sen to suggest that his handwriting is execrable. Surely nobody can now accuse this writer of bias. A remarkable facet of Sen's research output has been the range and versatility of its coverage. He has worked not only in economics but also in philosophy; and in crossing disciplinary borders, he has
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nonetheless managed to preserve a certain continuity and smoothness of transition whereby one is enabled to perceive his work as reflecting a seamless whole. Within economics, he has made original and critical contributions to development theory, planning, capital and growth theory, investment appraisal, the study of technology and employment, welfare economics, social choice theory, poverty and inequality measurement, issues in the causes and redressal of famines and destitution, and population policy. This roster naturally leaves out much else of interest. His philosophical work, insofar as it is possible to separate it from his economics, has made deep explorations into issues of justice, inequality, morality, liberty, freedom, rationality and objectivity. As a philosopher he has eminently fulfilled those requirements that have been laid down by Stendhal, and which Nietzsche held in such high esteem: "In order to be a good philosopher, one must be dry, clear, devoid of illusion." More recently, Sen has been concerned to be a committed commentator on issues of social and political salience, coming out strongly, as he has done, against religious fundamentalism and the bomb. Taking his work as a whole, one especially striking feature of it has been his capacity to systematically anticipate his own future concerns, so that seemingly disparate themes evolving over time are often tied together by a running thread which is part of one grand design: a testimony to both the precocity and prescience of the Sen of progressively earlier vintages. "And the end and the beginning," as Eliot said, "were always there." What commands the attention of the professional economist is the almost singlehanded effort undertaken by Sen to restore economics to the status it once enjoyed under the banner of classical political economy. His great achievement has been to re-establish both the centrality and the scientific validity of valueorientation in economics, to underline the necessity of seeing the subject as being concerned with normative ("ought-related") propositions as much as with positive ("isrelated") propositions. Like another great contemporary of his, Satyajit Ray, Sen has expressed himself firmly and unequivocally, but not stridently. His own standing and credibility in the world of scholarship have much to do with the deep responsibility he has shown in deferring to the demands placed by the harsh rigours of disciplinary protocol, and to the demands made by a just vision of life itself. What can one say of his impact? In his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee has warned against that ultimate instrument of a great person's emasculation: acceptance. Tokenism is the enemy of engagement. Amartya Sen's effort is awesome. One only has to look around to see that the mission to which his life's work points has scarcely begun to be addressed yet.

S.Subramanian is a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. He was taught by Professor Amartya Sen.
INDIA TODAY

Once, on being asked whether the work had not been overextended, Mother Teresa laughed, "If there are poor on the moon, we shall go there too." Born an Albanian, Mother Teresa came to Calcutta at the age of 18, and in the course of her life's mission of caring for the poorest of the poor, straddled the Indian century. In the process she was revered almost everywhere. Two years after her death, the formal process of canonisation has begun, but in the eyes of much of the world, she was anointed as the Saint of the Gutters in her lifetime. Neither the highest honours that a conscience-ridden world could bestow, nor the barbs flung at her by a small but noisy band of detractors, could distract her from her chosen path. In spite of her early tribulations and, much later in life, her many near brushes with serious illness and death, she lived to complete much of her agenda. The major milestones in Mother Teresa's life are welldocumented. After almost two decades in Calcutta's Loreto Convent, where she taught geography and catechism, Mother Teresa was permitted to step into the world that lay beyond the security of convent walls to begin her mission which she said was an answer to a "call" that she received on a train journey to Darjeeling. She started with three saris and a five-rupee note. We know where she ended up. She persuaded Calcutta that leprosy was not contagious and got the leprosy-afflicted to build a self-supporting colony at Titagarh that she named after Mahatma Gandhi. She took in the dying and cradled them. One of her happiest memories was of the man who said as he lay dying in her lap, "All my life I have lived like an animal on the streets and now I am dying like an angel." Her prize children, often without limbs or with terminal diseases, were whom she would rescue from dustbins. One of her greatest concerns was for the unborn. In her Nobel Prize speech she called abortionists "murderers", incurring from feminists the title of "religious imperialist". From a single school which she started in a Calcutta slum in 1948, the Order grew into a multinational that continued to be run from a small office in Calcutta. In the year before her death, her Order ran 755 homes in 125 countries. During that year the Missionaries of Charity fed half a million hungry mouths in five continents, treated a quarter of million sick, taught over 20,000 slum children and ran homes for the mentally destitute, the leprosy-afflicted, aids patients, the crippled and alcoholics and drug abusers. They ran day creches, night shelters, soup kitchens and tb sanatoriums. When I once suggested that the Order might crumble after she passed away, Mother replied simply, "I have done for God, and to God and with God, and it is God's work. He is perfectly capable of finding someone when I am gone, somebody who is even smaller." I said to her that she was
Life Line
Mother Teresa
By Navin Chawla 1910: Agnes Goinxha Bejaxhiu born in South Yugoslavia. 1928: Joins congregation of Loreto nuns at Rathurnham in Ireland. 1929: Sails to Calcutta to join the Bengal Mission, a Loreto centre. 1942: Nursed the famine-ridden and the sick during the War. 1946: On a train she realises her true calling to help the poor and live with them. 1950: Starts Missionaries of Charity, Calcutta. 1962-83: Expands the Missionaries' work. 1979: Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 1997: Dies in Calcutta
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the most powerful woman in the world. She laughed, thought somewhat ruefully and said, "Where? If I were, I would bring peace to the world." I knew that everywhere she went, monarchs and statesmen received her with rare humility, and because she went in the name of the poor, seldom denied her anything. I asked her why she did not use her considerable powers to bring about peace by lessening war. "War is the fruit of politics, so I don't involve myself, that's all. If I get stuck in politics, I will stop loving," she replied. Horrified by the blood-letting of World War I, the responses of Europe's idealogues made this century one of rampant ideologies and consequently one of the most lethal in all of human history. In a world riven by schisms and one that had grown sceptical of master plans and utopian schemes, this small woman who never let ideology concern her, stood out as a beacon of humanity and compassion. She believed in taking one small step at a time but had the administrative capability of performing many tasks simultaneously. Because she saw her God in everyone, she was able to bring out the best in their responses, big or small, which itself wrought a human chain that went around the world and made the work of the Missionaries of Charity possible. As her biographer I confronted her with the hurtful criticism made by her detractors that she took money from dubious characters. Her reply was concise. She said she neither asked for donations nor took any salary, government grants or Church assistance, but that every one had a right to give in charity, and that she was no one to judge for only God had that right. On the criticism that she could have used her not inconsiderable resources to put up a first-class hospital in Calcutta, she replied that if she tied down her sisters to hospital work, who would care for those who fell by the wayside? On the charge that she converted the poor to her religion, she laughed, "I do convert. I convert you to be a better Hindu, a better Catholic, a better Muslim or Jain or Buddhist. I would like to help you to find God. When you have found Him, you will know what He wants from you." She never met Mahatma Gandhi but like him she chose to identify with the poorest of the poor, for in response to her special vow, this was her constituency. Like Gandhi who wore his dhoti as a loincloth, she wore a sari similar to those of Calcutta's municipal sweeper women, so that she could identify with the poorest of the poor. Later the saris worn by everyone in the Missionaries of Charity would be woven by leper's hands. She often made a distinction between being confused as a social worker, which while she never disparaged, she said she was not; and being religious. She was capable of doing what she could because she did it to and for Him. The mass she attended every day of her life was what sustained her. In the Eucharist she saw Christ in the appearance of bread. In the slums she saw Him in the distressing disguise of the poor and in their broken bodies. There was no difference between the Christ on her crucifix and the Christ that lay dying on the street; they were both one. Without ever deviating from her staunch Catholicism, her great strength lay in adapting herself to her country of adoption -- India. Although she saw her God in every one whom she met, she never made any distinction between religions or those who practiced none. One of her contemporaries at the Loreto Convent, Sister Marie-Therese Breen, spoke to me of their early days: "There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was a simple nun. Very gentle, full of fun. We never thought that this is where she would end up." With faith, compassion and good work, an ordinary girl became the 20th century's most extraordinary woman. Navin Chawla, an Indian Administrative Service officer, is author of Mother Teresa, a biography.
Crusaders
VINAYAK NARAHARI BHAVE (1895-1982): The boy who took a vow of celibacy at 10, the 21-year-old who decided to go to Surat to study scriptures mid-way through a train journey to Mumbai where he was to take up his intermediate exams, the self-taught polyglot -- there are many interesting faces to this social activist. But Vinoba Bhave (seen here with prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri) will be remembered most for his Bhoodan movement of 1951 under which millions of acres of land, donated by landowners, were distributed among the landless in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh -- it lost momentum later. As he will for his tireless campaign for the Harijans and the leprosy-afflicted. MURLIDAR DEVIDAS AMTE (Born 1914): He has seen beauty in the ruins of men laid waste by leprosy and battled against incredible odds to nurse them back to health. He has also thrown his might behind the Narmada Bachao Andolan. Having established Anandwan -- the giant rehabilitation complex for those afflicted with leprosy in Chandrapur, Maharashtra -- he is now camping in the submergence zone of the Sardar Sarovar project. Failing health hasn't deterred this 85-year-old, who says, "I have cured the leprosy of the body. Now I have to cure the leprosy of the mind."
INDIA TODAY

Sri Aurobindo was one of those unique figures who left an indelible stamp in two entirely different areas. Born in 1872, Sri Aurobindo was sent to England at the age of seven where he did his schooling and went on to a brilliant academic career at Kings College, Cambridge, before returning to India with Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad of Baroda in 1893. Already filled with patriotic fervour, considerably influenced by the Irish Sinn Fein movement and the Italian Risorogimento, Sri Aurobindo returned as a strong nationalist and almost immediately began writing on the political situation. His first series of articles in the journal Indu Prakash published in 1894 was so radical that the editor had to discontinue them after the first two were published. With the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885, two distinct streams had emerged, a so-called "moderate" stream led by Phirozeshah Mehta, Dadabhoy Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and others, and the "extremists" led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai. Sri Aurobindo immediately became a strong votary of the extremists' position and a staunch critic of the Congress which he accused of following a policy of "petition, prayer and protest" towards the British rather than aiming directly at full independence. As a result, all that the Congress had been able to achieve since its inception were a few reforms which he dismissed as crumbs from the imperial table. In touch with the radical wing of the Congress, as well as the revolutionaries in Bengal through his brother Barindra Ghosh, Sri Aurobindo spent 14 years in Baroda ostensibly as a professor of English in the State College but actually as the brain behind the emerging radical movement. In 1905 Lord Curzon went through his controversial measure of the partition of Bengal -- Banga bhanga. This led to a tremendous upsurge of patriotism. Sri Aurobindo then moved to Calcutta where for five years he shone like a meteor in the political firmament. His passionate editorials in the Bande Mataram and the Karmayogin became the inspiration for a whole generation of revolutionaries. The nationalist movement moved out of the conference halls of the elite and entered the streets and villages. Sri Aurobindo's philosophy at this point could be called spiritual nationalism. It revolved around the concept of India as the Mother, who was enslaved by foreign aggressors and had to be rescued by whatever means. He wrote: "We recognise no political object of worship except the divinity in our motherland, no present object of political endeavor except liberty, and no method of action as politically good or evil except as it truly helps or hinders our progress towards national emancipation." Along with the political goal of complete independence, Sri Aurobindo also developed a parallel programme of constructive action. His writings combined erudition with
Spiritual Revivalist
Sri Aurobindo
By Karan Singh Through his writings and teachings he linked a revolutionary appeal for India's independence with spiritualism that still stirs
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patriotism and created a tremendous stir among the intelligentsia and youth. As Rabindranath Tagore put it, he was the "voice incarnate free of India's soul". Sri Aurobindo was a thinker of great importance in modern Indian political thought, and his work laid the foundations for later movements led by Mahatma Gandhi which were to lead to Independence. For a person to have done this in the short period of hardly five years of active political life is an achievement of no mean importance. Even after 1910 his interest in India's freedom remained undiminished, and he lived to see the fruition of his work when India finally achieved Independence on his 75th birthday -- August 15, 1947. The most astounding part of his career, however, lay ahead. In 1910, following an adesh -- an irrevocable spiritual command -- he left Calcutta first for Chandranagore and then went down to Pondicherry where he lived for 40 years until his passing away in 1950. In that French possession, free from harassment by the British, he created some of the most remarkable spiritual literature of all times. His great works include the Life Divine, Essays on the Gita, The Human Cycle, The Synthesis of Yoga, The Ideal Human Unity and the epic poem Savitri -- the longest poem ever written in the English language. All of these works reflected his spiritual vision, and this phase of his life can be termed Spiritual Evolution. Briefly, Sri Aurobindo held that the human race was by no means the final product of evolution. Rather man today is an intermediate creature, half way between the animal and the divine consciousness. The evolutionary thrust would push forward inexorably with the difference that with the advent of the human race a species has emerged which is selfconscious and can therefore cooperate actively in the process of evolution. This cooperation involves what he called the integral yoga, which sought to bring together the various streams of the traditional Hindu yogas and add to them a major evolutionary thrust. Sri Aurobindo's collaborator Madame Alfasa, known as the Mother, met him first in 1914 and later joined him in the Yoga as well as in running the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry and in founding Auroville. It was a unique spiritual collaboration, the impact of which has been felt around the world. The fact that India achieved independence on August 15 is looked upon by his followers as a divine synchronicity. Indeed the message that he gave on his 75th birthday sums up his entire political work and encapsulates the impact that he had primarily upon India but in fact throughout the world. In it he speaks of his five dreams -- "a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India", "the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation", "a world union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind", "the spiritual gift of India to the world", and finally, "a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solution of the problems which have perplexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society". What an agenda for the 21st century. Dr Karan Singh is a former Union cabinet minister, governor and ambassador to the US. He writes on philosophy.
Sathya Sai Baba

(BORN 1926): For the thousands of devotees who gather every morning at Prashanthi Nilayam at Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh, a glimpse of 'Baba' is all that it takes to make a difference, erasing in that fleeting second the pain, the miseries of their mortal lives. But to the detractors of Sathyanarayana Raju -- at the age of 14 he claimed he was the reincarnation of Shirdi Sai Baba -- it is one of the most frequently enacted frauds. They are quick to recall the 1993

attempt to assassinate him, saying his miraculous powers stood exposed since he could not anticipate the attack. But whether he is supernatural or not does not matter. His extensive community work is what sets him apart. Besides schools and colleges, he has set up hospitals for the poor and helped transform entire villages.
Osho Rajneesh
(1931-1990): When history lines up the saints and mahatmas of India, Bhagwan Rajneesh-Zorba-Osho's name will go missing. When the rogues and charlatans are lined up, he will not be in the parade. He certainly won't be there in the long list of philosophers and thinkers this country will lay claim to. And yet, his is perhaps the most unavoidable of names in a list of Indians who mattered. The Bhagwan from Kuchwada, the King of Kooch-bhi-Nahi, the swami of self-indulgence, moved from Manali to Pune to Oregon and back to Pune just as easily as he moved between the thoughts of Lao Tzu, Mahavir and Buddha. Along the way he dissolved the pain and confusion of his followers. He turned himself into a sociobionic switchboard, taking people from Beverly Hills and Bandra to the doorstep of nirvana. When Rajneesh Chandra Mohan decided to market his dream, he used Plato as effectively as Khushwant Singh's jokes to win people. Hounded out of India for his unconventional ways, he built a fantastic commune in Oregon where he was finally booked on 35 counts by the law for immigration violations, conspiracy and other allegations. By the time he fled the US, he claimed he had been poisoned. In between, he had built an empire spanning discotheques, publishing, health-food stores and bakeries worth billions. In his time, Osho created a band of followers from across the world who brought him great riches, fame and comfort, not to speak of plentiful sex on the side. In return, he left behind a legacy that is difficult to explain. Osho may have tried to create a religion -- no one can be too sure. He left too soon for the scattered sex partners to become priests; and it is yet too early for his meditations to become rituals, for his RollsRoyces to become sacred talismans, for his word to become holy writ. He may have been a cult leader -- but every cult dies with its creator. And yet, something called the Osho legacy survives -- in Pune, organically growing worldwide. And is seeping across the Internet. His followers cling to every word he spoke on video, giving him the distinction of being the world's first VHS guru. One day, his following may reach critical mass to spawn a spectacle that none can imagine. Not even Osho in his life time. Arun Katiyar is chief operating officer, India Today group online
INDIA TODAY


The images were evocative, exotic and intriguing. Gandhian, non-violent and extremely moving. Deep in the Himalayan mountains of Uttar Pradesh, the poor women of Reni village, led by Gaura Devi, were giving the government an environmental lecture. This was 1974 -- at a time when hardly anyone had heard about the importance of the environment. And, to boot, the women were telling the government that it could cut the forests only over their dead bodies. They would hug the trees to protect them from the axe. Officialdom was totally confused. Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, the then chief minister of the state, himself a mountain man, had rushed to set up a committee to look into the scientific validity of the rustic claims. The committee had supported the villagers. For journalists like me who came to espouse the Chipko cause, the women of Reni had many subtle messages. And incredibly important ones. They were saying loud and clear that they were not greenies of the western kind. For them the environment was much more than pretty trees and tigers. Their cause had entirely to do with themselves. Their own lives were so intertwined with the existence of trees that their very culture and survival was at stake without them. Just two years before the Reni protest, I had heard prime minister Indira Gandhi tell the world's first international environment conference in Stockholm that "poverty is the biggest polluter". In other words, that poor countries must concentrate on becoming rich before they could start caring about their environment. But here in Reni the poor women were saying that when economic development comes with environmental destruction, it leaves them even more impoverished. That in poor countries, environmental destruction and social injustice are two sides of the same coin. The powerful social message of Chipko galvanised the existing civil society in India working with poor tribals, women and other marginalised groups like those displaced by dams to incorporate the environmental cause within their own work. It was not ecology but socioecology at work. As there were hardly any environmental movements in the entire developing world in the '70s, the Chipko movement stood out, attracting worldwide attention. Adding to the global green cause with the argument that the poor and poor nations, too, must be careful to take care of their environment. That environment and development must go hand in hand. It began to force Third World intellectuals overwhelmed by the western economic success to think afresh. By the late '80s Norway's prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland was to run with the humble message of Reni women worldwide -- sustainable development. And it was to be endorsed by all nations at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, some
Green Brigadet
The Chipko Movement

By Anil Agarwal Here the environment is more than just pretty trees and tigers. It's a concern that has to do with people's lives.
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20 years after Stockholm. The Chipko movement itself was never an organised protest. It was largely a series of discrete protests by separate Himalayan villages like Reni, Gopeshwar and Dungari-Paitoli. In some cases it was villagers fighting the government and in some cases it was village women fighting their men who would rather cut the trees and see some money without worrying where the firewood would come from. But this amorphousness of the movement was given a unified vision and leadership by the Gandhian social worker, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, a resident of Gopeshwar, who had seen trees disappear, local village industries erode, and women's work burden go up. Bhatt worked closely with the village women and encouraged them to assert their environmental rights. He organised them to take up aforestation work in the degraded Alakananda Valley. "How many trees are you going to leave behind for your daughter-in-law," he would repeatedly ask the elder women trudging along the mountain slopes. A question that still needs to be asked in thousands of villages. Anil Agarwal is director, Centre for Science and Environment, Delhi.
Sunderlal Bahuguna
If work on the Tehri hydel project in the Tehri Garhwal region in Uttar Pradesh has not made much headway, it is largely because of this man's anti-dam campaign. For him, the struggle has a mystical dimension, the thought that the Ganga could be dammed hurts his religious sentiments. But long before he undertook his marathon fasts to save those displaced by the project, he was part of the Chipko movement, walking barefoot from village to village, mobilising public opinion. He travelled round the year, covering even Nepal and Bhutan. On behalf of the Save Himalaya Movement, he is currently fighting for some 2,000 school- children who have to travel a distance of 44 km each day since their schools have been shifted from Tehri to New Tehri.
INDIA TODAY
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Ramnath Goenka combined in his person all the contradictions that characterise exceptional men. Strangely, Raghupati Sahai Firaq, one of the greatest Urdu poets of this century, comes to mind when one considers comparable contemporaries. They came from vastly different disciplines, yet the contradictions in their make-up was a common thread. Firaq could, surrounded by some of the finest literary critics, sustain a parallel quarrel with his young wards about missing carrots and potatoes from the kitchen basket. He would then, quite effortlessly, resume his discourse on metaphysics, romantic poetry, comparisons between Wordsworth and Shelly. The life of his mind was completely out of synch with the texture of his own life. Likewise, Ramnath Goenka -- RNG -- could be mean and magnanimous to a fault. He would quibble over 100 rupee increments for his sub-editors and yet take voyeuristic delight in enabling his editors like Frank Moraes and S. Mulgaokar live like princes. Since Moraes did not have Mulgaokar's guile, he fell from Goenka's favour. RNG was ruthless in discarding friends for whom, until just the other day, he appeared caring beyond distraction. For this turn there was sometimes no other reasons than that the "friend" had outlived his utility. His capriciousness was, again, in stark contrast to his many consistencies. For instance he had a vision of an independent India and in it, an independent press: to these his commitment was unshakable. He was also a deeply religious man. Daily at dusk, he would drive his Fiat (yes, he would drive himself with someone like me, on occasion, seated with him) to the temple opposite the Red Fort. He had contrived his own Chennai-Bangalore route: always via Tirupati. But even in dealing with the gods he created room for the exercise of power. A correspondent was posted at Tirupati to facilitate darshan for Ramnathji, his family and friends, ahead of the queue of regular devotees. Power was something he enjoyed exercising although that was not his own assessment of his instincts and impulses. Lord Thomson's dictum that editorial matter was the "stuff you put between the ads" was not an article of faith with RNG. When he embarked on a campaign supporting Jayaprakash Narayan's Bihar movement, demolishing chief minister Antulay, taking calculated sides in corporate wars, cutting Indira Gandhi down to size, the advertisement department took a back seat. Even though he was very much in the Gandhian mould, extremely proud of his khadi and generally homespun demeanor, the pre-Independence milieu (his formative years) made him aware that he had missed out on western social graces which he thought were a gift of public schools and
The Baron
Ramnath Goenka
By Saeed Naqvi 1904: Born in a Marwari business family in Bihar. 1926: Becomes a member of the Congress. 1932: Starts a printing press in Chennai; launches the Free Press of India (Madras) Ltd; and The Indian Express. 1940s: Consolidates empire with 35 newspaper editions, magazines. 1975: Press censorship with Emergency. Resists attempts to take over his newspaper. Campaign against the Congress continues till the end. 1977: He helps the Janata Party in its election strategy. 1991: Dies in Mumbai.
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British universities. "He is from Doons," he would repeat, "from Doons". Which was his way of saying that the candidate he had hired for a senior editorial slot was from a "good" background. Doon school was "Doons". This lack of the "Anglaise" in his make-up was made up by hiring editors who were in that mould. Mulgaokar, more than any other editor, understood this weakness in the great newspaper baron. His projection of himself as a plausible English country esquire, keeping Oxford and Cambridge cricket scores (he had never been to college), playing bridge with the gentry RNG considered culpable, went a long way in ensuring Mulgaokar's longevity with his mercurial master. Mulgaokar was possibly the most brilliant writer in Indian journalism, but it was this, combined with his simulated aristocracy, that went down extraordinarily well with RNG. The genius of RNG lay in the fact that the management of this category of people he hired or interacted with was only a tiny strand in his incomparably rich experience of India, district by district and, in some instances, village by village. That is where his countless "mofussil" correspondents and stringers came from. It was stunning how well he knew many of them, just as he knew which almirah in his numerous editions housed the nuts and bolts required by one of his ageing pressess in, say, Kochi. In a flash he could grasp complexities which his editors would grapple with for days. This placed them at a great disadvantage, particularly during the 1977-80 Janata government which owed so much to RNG. The Janata government, after all, was a direct reaction to Mrs Gandhi's imposition of the Emergency during which RNG staked his whole empire. It was almost a matter of protocol that every cabinet minister, except, of course prime minister Morarji Desai, Jagjivan Ram and Charan Singh visited RNG at his apartment on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. RNG's patronage of the Janata government gave him access to information, his editors sometimes did not have. The situation induced in him not so much a sense of power as childlike amusement. RNG, the prankster, privately laughed his head off at the discomfiture of his editors. His razor-sharp mind, a capacity to gauge even the most complicated characters in a jiffy, extraordinary courage, resided quite comfortably with the child inside him, naive and sometimes very lonely. Many of his angularities could be put down to his relatively humble background. He was born in Darbhanga district of Bihar. One of the great ironies in the life was that the founder of the largest English language chain -- it is another matter that each edition of The Indian Express had an attached regional language edition -- was appointed a life trustee of the Hindi Prachar Sabha when still in his 20s. At 22, he was nominated by the British government to the membership of the Madras Legislative Council. In 1932 he embarked on The Indian Express. The defining moment in RNG's life was the Emergency. That is when he fought on an epic scale like someone whose place in posterity was assured. It is conceivable that during this combat a personal element crept into his even otherwise combative attitude towards Mrs Gandhi. Jawaharlal Nehru had asked him to employ Feroz Gandhi and he was brought in as general manager. That Feroz was Sonia Gandhi's father-in-law just shows the complicated, cavernous ways in which contemporary public life in India is still tied up with Ramnath Goenka. Former editor of The Indian Express in Chennai. Saeed Naqvi is a columnist and TV personality.
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In many ways Elaben is an enigma and an anachronism in today's world. A favourite on the international lecture circuit, she is particularly sought after by those groups who are considered radical, progressive, liberal and antiestablishment. By those who challenge the high and mighty economic monoliths, the lovers of "small is beautiful", those who make themselves feel good as people with the right kind of conscience. The Gandhian's soft voice, traditional simplicity and stories of how one or the other sister gained empowerment in a village community make the sterile auditoriums and lives of western liberals gain meaning through their vicarious association with her grassroots work. How has the world benefited from Elaben's contributions? Has India done its bit for her and dropped her? Has the media decided that Gandhian workers are not glamorous enough to match neo-celebrities like Bina Ramani and Nafisa Ali? Is society uncaring or does Elaben's work lack the punch that makes people sit up? An honest answer is a bit of both. Best known for founding the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), her pioneering work has been in creating institutions through which the lowest rungs of working women become self-reliant. The idea of trade unionism in the self-employed sector is difficult enough as it is. To be a woman breaking away from the grip of an established trade union in which men ran the show was a bold step by which she created her own paths and methods of organisation. That she did it without militancy and aggressive rhetoric was unusual in itself and that these became models for international institutions and NGOs is further proof of the efficacy of her actions. Bhatt received much recognition for her work between 1977 and 1987. In India and around the world, democracy in its purer form, idealism in world politics, moral values in political strategies were still around. Those years in India covered the post-Jayaprakash Narayan phase when volunteerism was a new form of social work. NGOs were expected to raise awareness, lobby for people's rights, do constructive work for development and, most importantly, were not expected to buck the system beyond a point. The establishment was supposed to respond to them positively out of the goodness of its non-existent heart. Elaben's trade union work seemed more akin to NGO activity and was therefore found more acceptable to those who wielded power. In fact, she became a showpiece for the establishment. She created new spaces and terms for women's work without really pushing the vested interests out of business. At the same time she did not extend herself or her agenda beyond a limited horizon. In the early '90s when the so-called developing nations of Asia and Africa succumbed to the prescriptions of GATT and
The Force of One
Ela Bhatt
By Jaya Jaitly 1933: Born in Ahmedabad. 1972-96: Founder and general secretary of SEWA, Ahmedabad. It began as a trade union and grew into a women's movement. 1974: Starts the SEWA bank and pioneers the micro-finance programmes in India. The bank grants women low-interest loans for entrepreneurial activity. Since 1985: Chair, Women's World Banking, New York. 1990: Receives Women in Creation Award, Alliance de Femme, Paris. Since 1992: Member, executive committee, International Union of Food and Allied Workers, Geneva. 1994: Care Humanitarian Award, Washington, DC. 1995: Hillary Clinton visits SEWA, Ahmedabad, to gain insight into its functioning.
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a more heartless economic order, Elaben stayed away from the unified protest actions of both the trade unions and the NGOs in India. SEWA women did not participate in these "people's movements", which was a setback for them. Elaben's work and her institutions have been models that have been replicated only half-heartedly, with no effective results. Her involvement and contribution to the preparation of the Shram Shakti report in the mid-'80s on working women all over India is an invaluable reference document which now needs updating. Instead of using the political system to effectively lobbying or struggle for better rights for working women, Elaben has chosen to limit her field of action even while she shares her ideas and experience across the globe. The relevance of her work is even greater now, yet most chose to applaud but not to imitate her. In a world where the politics of power dominates, Elaben's woman-power needs to move back centrestage and play a more challenging rather than a demonstrative role. Jaya Jaitly is secretary, Samata Party. She is also a women's rights activist and president, Dastkari Haat Samiti.
INDIA TODAY
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For some, Friday the 13th can actually prove lucky. Way back in 1949 it was on this day that Verghese Kurien, a selfassured 27-year-old engineer from Michigan, had thrown up his hands, disillusioned with a shabbily run dairy institute he was to serve in dusty Anand. He even put in his papers but circumstances forced him to stay on, and emerge as the father of the country's "white revolution". Daring the Indian farmer to dream, Kurien showed him how to make it a reality. He ushered in a concept of cooperatives where dairy farmers could own and manage profitable agribusiness enterprises with their produce, however small it may be. It was Tribhuvandas Patel, assigned by Vallabhbhai Patel the task of "making the Kaira farmers happy", who had persuaded Kurien to stay on, telling him how badly the dairy institute needed him. Says Kurien: "Without Tribhuvandas, there would not have been a Kurien." As a man he is considered self-centred, authoritarian, even offensive, but he is a thorough professional. As head of the National Dairy Development Board, he was the boss. A rank outsider with a sophisticated lifestyle who didn't speak the language of the locals. Yet the farmers regarded him as their "Dudhwallah", the "milk man" who built a model institution of economic democracy. Kurien often bordered on abusing the bureaucracy but could secure maximum support from it when in difficulty. He was a great strategist and believed people wanted good service, not cheap service. He had a unique ability to conceptualise and communicate, making an impact on farmers, national leaders, the scientific world, consumers and the international community. Through his Anand model, Kurien provided great promise. He made a point that development policies could flow from such models, and if lessons could be generalised, the country could transform itself from a deficit to a surplus state. Dairy technology had earlier revolved round processing cow's milk, and not buffalo milk. But considering millions of farmers owned buffaloes, Kurien showed how buffalo milk could be used for making milk powder, baby food and condensed milk. He established brands which became household names. Kurien provided a model of rural development not only for the country but also for the world community. A model where a strong, even arrogant, leader, a skilled technocrat, a professional manager and a hardworking small farmer could become a team to reckon with through the simple process of organisation. P.M. Shingi is professor, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He has co-authored Agri-Business Cooperatives.
Dudhwallah
Verghese Kurien
By P.M.Shingi He Changed th face of India's dairy industry with a model cooperative programme
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Indians are very proud of the "constellation" of some dozen Indian satellites in orbit, a feat performed on a "shoe-string" budget (which only recently crossed US$300 million or Rs 1290 crore). Indeed, one more successful launch no longer causes national euphoria. The Indian space programme owes its birth to Vikram Sarabhai, but the technology development organisation behind them is the creation of Satish Dhawan. He showed how technology can be built in India, by Indians, working within the same bureaucratic setup that all of us so love to curse. The principles that Dhawan formulated and applied (but, characteristically, never stated) can be easily inferred. First of all he devised a programme that was societally conscious, with objectives that could be widely understood. He had supreme confidence in the ability of Indian engineers and managed technology development work with a group of able directors and young whiz-kids. He maintained accountability through peer pressure but shielded engineers from blame for honest failures. Dhawan as the creator of the superb machinery of designing, building and launching rockets and satellites is so well-known that his academic side is almost forgotten in spite of the fact that even when he was running the country's space programme he took only one rupee for the job, preferring to be paid by Indian Institute of Science for directing it. When he came to the institute in the 1950s -- from the California Institute of Technology, he was immediately a star; tall, handsome, cheerful, brilliant, running the country's first supersonic tunnels, he could not be missed on the campus. His labs were little treasure-houses, filled with lovingly crafted "gizmos" , built by uneducated but skillful mechanics. As a student at Caltech, he left a glow of fond memories behind him -- for here was an Indian who was better at gadgeteering than they were, but could also pursue hypergeometric functions, quote Shakespeare and regale them with stories about the camel answering to the name of Greta Garbo in the Khyber Pass. The combination was overwhelming to both sexes, especially as it was accompanied with an Indian sense of modesty. A few more leaders like him, and India would be transformed. Prof. Roddam Narasimha is director, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore.
Satish Dhawan
Satish Dhawan
By Roddam Narasimha He Showed how space technology could be built in India by Indians
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Ou phrontis. It is a phrase that Raja Ramanna is fond of. It is Greek for "who cares" and implies a certain insouciance. It may seem irresponsible. But it is also a refusal to follow convention. Ramanna has always had an air of ou phrontis about him. A streak of daring. There would be far greater physicists than him in India. Even managers of science. But Ramanna could lay claim to being the father of India's atomic bomb. It is a moniker that is a cause of much fission among the scientific community. And Ramanna himself shrugs off the debate saying, "The genetics of the bomb is not relevant." But like Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan project that built the world's first atomic bombs, for India the mantle of leadership fell on Ramanna. And he was not found wanting. When Ramanna put the bomb team together in the late '60s he had the legacy of Homi Bhabha -- by then a giant nuclear estate sprawled across the country -- to assist him. Before Bhabha died in 1966, he had chosen Ramanna to head a team to explore peaceful nuclear explosions. Bhabha had always been impressed by the witty young man who played music with the same passion with which he spoke on physics. Even as his reputation grew as a physicist, Ramanna never gave up playing the piano. Science, he believed, would cease to be exciting the moment all the fundamental laws of nature were discovered. Whereas music for him is essentially an exploration of human consciousness which, "has no limits. It is totally free". Appropriately, a musical phrase best describes Ramanna's contribution to the making of the Indian bomb. He orchestrated the effort superbly and conducted it with such a degree of secrecy that when the explosion happened in 1974 it caught the world by surprise. The task was made more difficult because India had remained politically ambivalent over possessing the bomb. Many Indian leaders including Mahatma Gandhi thought it blasphemous for India to even think of designing such weapons. Unperturbed and at times even defiant Ramanna secretly told his small team to go ahead with the programme. He had sensed the nation's need to have an atomic halo as an insurance against India ever being militarily colonised again. Ramanna's abrasive personality saw him come into conflict with many of his colleagues. Just before he retired, he had a stormy relationship with prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who, unlike his mother, disliked his style. He would be charged with being "a scientist politician" and the "splitter" of organisations he headed. He remains better known, however, for splitting atoms and as India's bombmeister.
Bombmeister
Raja Ramanna
By Raj Chengappa He effortlessly orchestratd the making of the Indian atomic bomb
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July 18, 1980: On an island teeming with magnificent migratory birds off the Andhra coast, a tiny pencil-shaped rocket lifts off and heads to the heavens. India becomes only the sixth country in the world capable of launching satellites. A hippie-haired scientist who headed the project team is felicitated. February 25, 1988: A phallus-shaped missile takes off from the coast of Orissa and blazes across the firmament. India joins the select club of nations capable of making ballistic missiles. The scientist, the long hair now a trade-mark, is triumphantly carried on the shoulders of his colleagues.
Techno Yogi
A.P.J.Abdul Kalam
By Raj Chengappa The guidling force behind India's missiles and nuclear weapons
May 11, 1998: A Gorkha hat hides his long hair in his disguise as an army officer in the Rajasthan desert. Then the earth shakes and with it, the world as India conducts a series of underground tests. The scientist is lauded as the guiding force behind the nuclear- weapons programme. Dreams are important for the scientist whose name is as long as his achievements: Avul Pakir Jainulabddin Abdul Kalam. He says simply,"Dream dreams because dreams lead to thought and thought leads to action." In his case it has always led to extraordinary action. Many of his peers twit him for bombastic statements and for shifting targets in whatever he achieved. They question both his scientific and intellectual acumen. Or scoff that all his doctoral degrees are honorary. But science is not all about formulas and test tubes. Or just plain genius. It's also about converting ideas into concrete realities that revolutionise the way we live or think about ourselves. However illogical this may seem, it is also about instinct, innovation and sheer perspiration. Kalam is an inspirational figure not just because he demonstrates that merit can succeed and thrive amidst so much cynicism and nepotism. Or that among a people riven with religious strife, a Muslim could head India's most sensitive defence projects. More important Kalam's achievement is of an integrator of science who from an apparently mediocre team churned out awesome excellence. In short, he delivered. His life and mission is a vindication of what a determined person can achieve against extraordinary odds. Born to a poor boat-owner's family in Ramnathapuram, Kalam sold newspapers to pay his fees and pawned his sister's jewellery to complete a diploma in engineering. Early in life he demonstrated a capacity for hard work and a will to succeed. It is exhausting to track Kalam's progress. In the '60s and '70s he was a trail blazer in the space department. In the '80s he transformed the moribund Defence Research and
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Development Laboratory in Hyderabad into a highly motivated team. By the '90s Kalam emerged as the czar of Indian science and technology and was awarded the Bharat Ratna. Now 68, his lifestlye remains frugal. He is indefatigable and dreams of making India a technological superpower. More important, he is still capable of acting on it.
INDIA TODAY
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As a historian Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958) is a study in himself. Though born and bred in the liberal high culture of Hindu Bengal, the influence of the liberal high culture of Britain and its empiricist thinkers, from Locke to Burke and Bertrand Russell, often moulded his judgement of men and events. Sarkar's multi-volume history of the fall of the Mughal empire was marked by its sweep and clarity. It took him the best part of his working life and the labour entailed was formidable. First came the learning of languages: Arabic, Persian, Marathi, Rajasthani, French and Portuguese. Then followed the relentless search for manuscripts and documents and every other source that is vital for the historian's craft. Finally, came the years of study, of collation and the distilling narrative. Sarkar was deeply moved by the anarchy and violence that consumed India in the 18th century. He was shocked by "the imbecility and vices of our rulers, the cowardice of their generals, and the selfish treachery of their ministers. It is a tale which makes every true son of India hang his head in shame". Scrupulous in acknowledging the Mughals' contributions to India's political and cultural development, Sarkar perceived that, like the kindred Ottomans, also a people of the Central Asian steppe, the Mughals were nomads at heart sitting atop a military administration. Sarkar did not live to read Lapidus, but he well understood from his own exhaustive study of the Mughal polity that the civilisation it represented was spent. His mind operated within broad parameters. He admired Britain but was critical of the constricted vision and selfish workings of British imperialism in India. He was scornful of an ossified Hinduism dreaming only of the past. "Give up your dream of isolation, standardise and come into line with the moving world outside, or you will become extinct as a race through the operation of relentless economic competition in a world that has now become as one country," he once wrote. This was globalisation before it became common currency. Sarkar argued for an India receptive to the most creative ideas from abroad; yet he also envisioned an India that would be an independent centre of learning and enlightenment, not a supplicant forever knocking on the doors of Oxford and Cambridge, Paris and Vienna and, more relevantly today, Harvard and Yale and Princeton. Sarkar's place as scholar and historian will survive postmodernist confection -- and attempts of constructionists and discourse analysts of subalternity, colonialism and gender to dethrone him.
Global Indian
Jadunath Sarkar
By Premen Addy His narrativs argued for an India as an independent centre of learning, yet open to outside influences.
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Premen Addy is a historian and editor, India Weekly, London.
D.D.Kosambi
(1907-1966): Depending on how you see it, this former professor of mathematics at Pune University revolutionised historiography in India -- or subverted it. To generations of academics, it is obviously the former. Before Kosambi, history was little more than a narrative of names and dynasties at best and a melange of myths at worst. That's when Kosambi (An Introduction to the Study of Indian History, 1956) brought a scientific temper, the analytical tools of Marxism and created an entire tradition of social history. Suddenly, the past had a new future.
INDIA TODAY
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