Category Personalities

Which Bengali poet’s work is “Gitanjali”?

Gitanjali is a collection of poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the English translation, Song Offerings. It is part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.

Rabindranath Tagore was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his many-sided literary activities, he managed the family estates, a project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. He also started an experimental school at Shantiniketan where he tried his Upanishadic ideals of education. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way; and Gandhi, the political father of modern India, was his devoted friend. Tagore was knighted by the ruling British Government in 1915, but within a few years he resigned the honour as a protest against British policies in India.

Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he became rapidly known in the West. In fact his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours and tours of friendship. For the world he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage; and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution.

 

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Who is popularly known as the “Nightingale of India”?

Sarojini Naidu was an Indian political activist and poet. A proponent of civil rights, women’s emancipation, and anti-imperialistic ideas, she was an important figure in India’s struggle for independence from colonial rule. Naidu’s work as a poet earned her the sobriquet ‘the Nightingale of India’, or ‘Bharat Kokila’.

This poet-freedom fighter born in 1879 was the first of several children to Dr. Aghore Nath Chattopadhyay, Principal of Nizam College, Hyderabad, and Barada Sundari Devi, a Bengali poet. As a student, Sarojini was bright and soon she excelled in many languages including Bengali, Urdu, Telugu and Persian besides English. The Nizam of Hyderabad on reading Sarojini’s Persian play, Maher Muneer, sent by her father was so impressed with the young woman he granted her a scholarship to study in King’s College and later she went on to Girton College in Cambridge.

She was introduced to Gopal Krishna Gokhale who in turn put her on to other prominent political figures of the time like Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, C. P. Ramaswami Iyer and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Sarojini famously referred to Gandhiji once as “Mickey Mouse”. She played a leading role in the Civil Disobedience Movement and was imprisoned thrice.

She worked alongside Nehru for the welfare of the Indigo workers of Champaran in Bihar and fought vehemently with the British for rights. Sarojini Naidu travelled all over the country and held forth on dignity of labour, women’s emancipation and nationalism.

Sarojini was made President of the Indian National Congress in 1925. She founded the Women’s Indian Association with Dr Annie Besant. She travelled to Europe, the US and UK. After Independence, she became the first woman governor of an Indian state, the United Provinces now known as UP.

 

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Who is Govind Swarup, and how is he connected to radio telescopes?

Govind Swarup was a radio astronomer and one of the pioneers of radio astronomy, known not only for his many important research contributions in several areas of astronomy and astrophysics, but also for his outstanding achievements in building ingenious, innovative and powerful observational facilities for front-line research in radio astronomy. He was the key scientist behind concept, design and installation of the Ooty Radio Telescope (India) and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) near Pune. Under his leadership, a strong group in radio astrophysics has been built at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research that is comparable to the best in the world.

Prof Swarup was born in Thakurdwara, now in the state of Uttar Pradesh, on March 23, 1929. He obtained his undergraduate education at Allahabad University and then joined the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi. After a stint in Australia building telescopes at Pott’s Hill near Sydney, Prof Swarup moved to the US, where he obtained a PhD from Stanford University. At the back of his mind, always, was the thought to return to India to establish the newly emerging field of radio astronomy.

Initially he joined National Physical laboratory for two years. Returning from Stanford to India in March 1963, he joined TIFR as a Reader at the request of Dr. Homi Bhabha. In 1965, he became Associate Professor, Professor in 1970, and Professor of Eminence in 1989. He became Project Director of the GMRT in 1987, Centre Director of the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics (NCRA) of TIFR in 1993 and retired from TIFR in 1994.

 

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Who is Jocelyn Bell, and how is she linked to Radio Astronomy?

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an astrophysicist from Northern Ireland who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967.[9] She was credited with “one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century”.

Burnell was a PhD student at Cambridge at the time and was working with her supervisor Hewish to make radio observations of the universe. She ended up discovering a pulsar using a vast radio telescope occupying an area of 4.5 acres that was designed by Hewish and joined him and the team of five when the construction of the telescope was about to begin. The telescope was built to measure the random brightness flickers of a different category of celestial objects called quasars.

The telescope took over two years to build and the team started operating it in July 1967. As per Burnell, she had the sole responsibility of operating the telescope and analysing its data output, which amounted to 96-feet of chart paper everyday, which she analysed by hand.

In the 1977 article, titled, “Little Green Men, White Dwarfs or Pulsars?”, Burnell wrote that the story of the discovery of pulsars began in the middle of 1960s when the technique of interplanetary scintillation (IPS) was discovered. This technique involved the fluctuation in the emission of radio signals from a compact radio source such as a quasar and was chosen by Hewish to pick out quasars. While analysing the telescope’s output, Burnell saw that there were unexpected markings on the chart that were recorded approximately every 1.33 seconds.

 

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Who is considered to be the founder of the field called Radio Astronomy?

Radio astronomy is a subfield of astronomy that studies celestial objects at radio frequencies. The first detection of radio waves from an astronomical object was in 1932, when Karl Jansky at Bell Telephone Laboratories observed radiation coming from the Milky Way. Subsequent observations have identified a number of different sources of radio emission. These include stars and galaxies, as well as entirely new classes of objects, such as radio galaxies, quasars, pulsars, and masers. The discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, regarded as evidence for the Big Bang theory, was made through radio astronomy.

Radio astronomers use different techniques to observe objects in the radio spectrum. Instruments may simply be pointed at an energetic radio source to analyze its emission. To “image” a region of the sky in more detail, multiple overlapping scans can be recorded and pieced together in a mosaic image. The type of instrument used depends on the strength of the signal and the amount of detail needed.

Observations from the Earth’s surface are limited to wavelengths that can pass through the atmosphere. At low frequencies, or long wavelengths, transmission is limited by the ionosphere, which reflects waves with frequencies less than its characteristic plasma frequency. Water vapor interferes with radio astronomy at higher frequencies, which has led to building radio observatories that conduct observations at millimeter wavelengths at very high and dry sites, in order to minimize the water vapor content in the line of sight. Finally, transmitting devices on earth may cause radio-frequency interference. Because of this, many radio observatories are built at remote places.

 

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What did Tim Berner Lee do?

Early life

His parents worked on the world’s first commercially-built computer, Ferranti Mark-I. After graduating from school, Berners-Lee opted to study Science at Oxford University. He thought it might be more practical to study Science as it combined his interests in Electronics and Maths. In fact, it turned out to be more than just a pragmatic choice as it opened up a world of knowledge for him.

A love for trains

When he was 1, Berners-Lee went to a school located between two railway tracks. He used to encounter a lot of trains on his way, and he started trainspotting, an activity of watching trains and writing down the numbers each engine has. When he was in college, he even made a computer out of an old television set. He bought the set from a repair shop. And assembling the computer cost him only five pounds (approximately Rs 500.)

Bringing the world closer

While working at the European Laboratory for Particle-Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, a 25-year-old Berners-Lee began tinkering with a software programme to connect the world. He worked with Belgian systems engineer Robert Cailliau to refine the proposal for a hypertext system, which eventually led to the creation of the World Wide Web. He also created the first web browser and editor. The world’s first website, http://info.cern.ch, was launched on August 6, 1991. It explained the World Wide Web concept and gave users an introduction to getting started with their own websites. Right from the start, Berners-Lee recognized that the Web could either be a boon or bane. According to his website, Berners-Lee hopes that the web can be used as a communication tool and can help people understand each other.

The future is Solid

Over the last few years however, there have been many instances of big tech companies using the Internet to infringe upon the privacy of their uses. Disappointed by this, in November 2020, Berners-Lee announced his comeback with a project to decentralize the Internet and secure the users’ privacy. His new project, Solid, aims to restore the control of the Internet to its users and “redirect” the Web to his original vision of a democractic and equal network of information. He stated on his website that the current web had became “a driver of inequality and division”. He doesn’t like the fact that his invention is now being ruled by a handful of tech giants who demand personal information from users in exchange for their services.

Oh really?

  • Burners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004.
  • In college, Berners-Lee built a computer out of an old television set.
  • The first website was info.cern.ch, hosted by CERN, on Tim’s desktop computer.
  • It is estimated today that just under 40% of the world’s population has Internet access.
  • Berners-Lee worked as a teacher at MIT in Boston.

 

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