Thursday, September 25, 2008

Role of mandir in Indian society

Indian society had unique value based system which was evolved through family-gurukul-mandir over the time. Destruction of all of these axes in modern life due to various reasons leads to demoralization of Indian society on each step. Mandir was very active in maintaining live communication and played a pivotal role in continuation of idea called India over the period. Hence we still exist in spite of Semitic onslaught all over the world.

Political system was never a backbone of our society and today we seek solution to each and every problem through political system where it is easy to play blame game and our social responsibility is limited only for casting a vote. Systematically common man is kept away from the governance and only few inspired are following the path of social work in their capacity. There are innumerable NGOs and other religious/cultural organizations which are working along with governmental system but the fact remains that average citizen is indifferent towards the situation. He expects someone else should take care of his social/cultural problems. By and large our education and modern social system has failed miserably to involve each and every citizen in the nation building.

Our educational system is the mix of worst from the both the worlds. It is only utilitarian and does not inculcate any social responsibility. Compulsory social or military service in western world after schooling ensures more responsible citizens. Even though the system was applied due to complex family and political problems, it is proved beneficial for disciplined and organized urban society. Indian society never faced a need for such system due to its healthy family structure. But rapid westernization and urbanization of India is making things beyond control of any governmental set up, especially if one considers the size of the population it has to deal with.

Population is our strength if we would able to channelize the resources. We need energetic youth as well as experienced citizens to participate for social well being without political or cultural prejudices. A society can flourish only when the basic needs of all the people are addressed and not when a certain section is exploiting the rest. By and large a common Indian is attached to a place of worship irrespective of his faith. Mandir could play very effective role in organizing the society. There is hardly any possibility that mandir will turn in to power center due to hindu mindset. But we cannot keep this experiment restricted to it. We have to involve worship places of other faiths as well to ensure effective internal security. Assertive and caring majority will help so called minorities to get internalized in to mainstream and not the politics of appeasement.

At educational level, we should make one year compulsory social work for everyone anytime before getting degree with his/her convenience in his/her area of interest. Taxpayers should pay for that service. We can easily devise mechanism to make this functional.
At social level each citizen should be attached to local mandir/ gurudwara /vihar mosque/church. Each one should get registered at the nearest place of worship and should spend at least one hour per week for social cause in his/her area of expertise.

We have to solve our problems necessarily with Indian perspective. Existence of Indian society since time immemorial proved that we have this inherent capacity to mould ourselves as per the situation. We should believe in our values and stop copying western model of development but at the same time we should be open to all beneficial aspects of other cultures. But it cannot be a one way process. We too have something to offer to mankind.
Mandir revolution will help Indian society to come out of the inferiority complex which is systematically inculcated by the British education system over the years.

Let Swami Vivekananda’s inspiring words guide us in our endeavor
Arise! Awake! And stop not till the goal reached

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Indian connection behind big bang experiment

IBNLive, 10-09-08
Of the three main past and present physicists behind the landmark proton-smashing experiment in Geneva on Wednesday 10th sept 08, one has a Nobel Prize, the other is waiting to find out if he has one, and the third never got one.

The third man is the Bose of the Higgs-boson experiment - Satyendra Nath Bose.

It is Bose after whom the sub-atomic particle ‘boson’ is named - probably the only noun in the English language named after an Indian (and therefore never capitalised).The $10 billion Large Hadron Collider experiment in Switzerland on Wednesday could not have happened without Bose and Albert Einstein. In 1924, Bose sent a paper to Einstein describing a statistical model that eventually led to the discovery of the Bose-Einstein condensate phenomenon.
The paper laid the basis for describing one of the two categories of the elementary particles that make up an atom - one was boson, and the other came to be known as fermion, after the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. Einstein had already won the Nobel in 1921 for services to theoretical physics and the discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect, and Fermi won it in 1938. Decades later, in 1964, the British scientist Peter Higgs returned from a walk in the Scottish mountains to tell his colleagues that he had just experienced his “one big idea,” which could hold a clue to how matter in the universe got its mass in the billionth of a second after the Big Bang. Higgs eventually came up with his theory of the Higgs boson, a boson that gives mass to all other subatomic particles that happen to interact with it in a ‘Higgs field’.The more they interact, the heavier they become. And the ones that don’t interact don’t gather mass.The theory could not only throw further light on the creation of the universe, but also help explain the shape of it.

Wednesday’s experiment at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, where protons will be smashed against each other at great speed, will be the first attempt to actually observe the Higgs boson - nicknamed the ‘God particle.’ So far, it is the last undetected elementary particle, also called a fundamental particle, going by the standard theory of particle physics.

Higgs, who is professor emeritus at Edinburgh University, is now widely tipped to win the Nobel, particularly if the Higgs boson is detected. The first Nobels for physics in the 21st century went jointly to three Americans - Eric Cornell, Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle. The won it for creating the ‘condensate’ - a new type of matter - that Bose and Einstein had postulated. According to Bose’s grandson Falguni Sarkar, six other physicists have won the Nobel for work in the area of Bose statistics.

However, for some reason, Satyendra Nath Bose himself never won the Nobel.

Sharon Ann Holgate, a British science writer and broadcaster who made an acclaimed radio documentary on Bose for the BBC some years ago, said she had no doubt the Indian deserved a Nobel. “I certainly do think he deserved the Nobel. When I was researching my documentary I was outraged that this man was so brilliant, yet so overlooked, perhaps because of institutionalised racism. No one gave a damn because he was an Indian,” she said.