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India - News
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News Updates - 23
April 2001 India amongst forefront of wind power industry - San Francisco Chronicle Paes-Bhupati bag title - ESPN French honour for Arundhati Roy - Times of India India did a lot for Britain - Times of India Building for the Hindu deity Siva - Los Angeles Times The life and legacy of Gandhi - New York Times
Copenhagen, Denmark - Renewable, nonpolluting wind power has become the world's fastest-growing energy source in recent years. Worldwide growth in wind energy, averaged 24 percent during the 1990s, 37 percent in 1999 and 26 percent last year. Wind is now a $4 billion industry able to produce 17,000 megawatts of electricity, or enough to supply some 6 million U.S. homes.Top five nations in wind energy
"The last few years have seen tremendous growth," said Vicky Pollard of the European Wind Energy Association in Brussels. "With natural gas prices rising and costs falling, wind is competitive in many parts of the world." "I don't think we can save the world with wind energy," says Kjaer of the Danish Wind Manufacturer's Association. "But we can show the world that being environmentally conscious doesn't have to come at the expense of economic growth." Government policies are even more important, according to industry experts. Wind power has succeeded only where and when governments have provided tax or investment incentives or laws guaranteeing wind producers can sell electricity at an attractive price. "Conventional energy sources have benefited from years of government support and private investment," says Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute in Washington. "These laws are a way to allow renewables to get a leg up in the marketplace," benefiting society by reducing pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and dependence on foreign energy. Wind farms can be built in only two to three years, much faster than other power plants, according to AWEA. "We're the largest offshore wind park in the world," says engineer Hans Sorensen of the Middelgrunden Wind Farm Cooperative, who helped design the farm. "But we won't be No. 1 for long."
Atlanta: Fourth seeded Indian pair of Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes of India beat top seeds Rick Leach (USA) and David MacPherson (Australia) 6-3, 7-6 (7) in the doubles final of the Verizon Tennis Challenge in Atlanta. The Indians won the top prize of $ 26,000 for their efforts. Paes and Bhupathi were on a roll throughout the week long tournament and did not drop a set. French
honour for Arundhati Roy NEW DELHI: France has awarded Indian novelist Arundhati Roy the Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters. In a statement on Thursday, the French embassy said, “Ms Roy's talent and contribution to literature and the universality of her message find recognition in this French decoration.” This award is given to persons who have distinguished themselves by their creativity in the field of art, culture and literature, or for their contribution to the influence of the arts in France and throughout the world. French ambassador to India, Bernard de Montferrand, will confer this honour on Roy at a special ceremony next month. India
did a lot for Britain: Baroness Flather MUMBAI: "If we don't respect the achievements of our own people, nobody will respect us. Our armed forces have done us well, they are willing to lay down their lives for us," stated Baroness Shreela Flather, the first Asian woman in the House of Lords, currently in Mumbai. The baroness addresses a joint meeting of the Rotary club and the Ladies Wing of the Indian Merchants Chamber on Tuesday. Also present, were Rear Admiral, RC Kocha, Major General V S Yadav and Air Vice-Marshal H S Ahluwalia, representing the armed forces. Baroness Shreela Flather, spoke of a cause close to her heart, the Memorial Gates Trust, to the enormous contributions made during the World Wars by the people of the Indian subcontinent. The project costing 2.2 million pounds, will create four giant pillars of Portland stone topped by bronze urns, two on either side of Constitution Hill in London. There will be a small pavilion inscribed with the names of all the heroes along with the 69 Sikh holders of the Victoria Cross. Said Baroness Flather. "India became a huge provision factory to the war effort. There has never been any emphasis on this. We have to create a physical memory of that effort. A history book doesn't create the emotion of a living monument," she added. Baroness Flather also believes that this monument will give the Indians settled in England a greater sense of belonging. "It's important for people to realise what we did for Britain. There is no symbol more binding than a shared sacrifice," she concluded. Building for the Hindu deity Siva27 April 2001, Los Angeles Times, edhaffrey If you've taken a drive up Malibu Canyon Road recently, you may have noticed that the dancing ladies and ornately decorated elephants are multiplying at the Hindu temple in the Santa Monica Mountains. With a growing congregation and funds to match, the board that governs the Malibu Temple, as it is commonly called by adherents of Hinduism, decided it needed more room. So, last year, 14 artisans traveled from India to work on an expansion project that will nearly double the worship space, adding a Siva temple to the existing Vishnu temple. The $2-million cost will be funded through worshiper donations and, in true Hollywood style, location fees paid by production companies looking for a local stand-in for India. (Parts of the Chris Farley film "Beverly Hills Ninja" were filmed there.) Siva, known as the destroyer, is one of Hinduism's three primary deities, along with Vishnu, the preserver, and Brahma, creator of the universe. Hinduism has dozens of deities believed to be different aspects of one supreme being. The Siva temple should be completed by summer, said Nadadur Vardhan of Brentwood, board secretary for the Hindu Temple Society of Southern California. "This is a real Hindu temple like they have in India and the biggest on the West Coast," he said. "It's not simply a house used as a temple," which is common outside of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, where the world's third largest religion is chiefly practiced. Each weekend, more than 3,000 people gather to worship at the Malibu Temple , completed in 1984 for $4 million, at 1600 Las Virgenes Canyon Road, traveling from as far as Bakersfield and San Diego. The Santa Monica Mountains site was originally purchased by local Hindus for a temple because the terrain is similar to the seven hills in India's Eastern Ghat mountain range, home of Venkateswara's Tirupati Temple, one of the holiest pilgrimage places in the Hindu religion.Dilip Shah, founder of the Cerritos-based United Indian Chamber of Commerce, said the temple is frequently sought out by Indian tourists visiting L.A. "It is a very traditional temple in the southern India tradition," he said. "India is a vast country and America is far away. This temple is uplifting for those who are far from India." Standing, as it does, in sharp contrast to the Spanish ranch, Tudor and other architectural styles typically found in Los Angeles, the ornate, faceted, cream-colored Malibu Temple has long dazzled those who suddenly come upon it while traveling between the San Fernando Valley and Malibu. "This temple inspires the same awe that a temple in India would do," visiting artisan Kulandavel Shamplucanatha said through a translator. He has been working and living at the temple for the last year on a special religious visa, away from his family in India, to help assemble the Siva temple. Shamplucanatha learned to craft the concrete temples from his father, who learned it from his father, and so on, as is the custom. Shamplucanatha and other artisans are busy putting the temple together according to the instructions of renowned southern Indian temple designer Muthiah Sthapathy, who visits from India every six months to check on the construction. The process involves creating dozens of 2-foot-long concrete and plaster friezes of dancing ladies and elephants, among other images and decorations, and affixing them to the concrete-based temple. "When people from India come here, they want to see Hollywood and they want to see this temple," he said. "So we wanted to make this an all-inclusive place." Weddings, blessings, funerals and community meetings are among the activities commonly held at the holy site. The two temples are being put together according to the rules of Vastu, which is similar in concept to Chinese feng shui. For good energy, for example, the entrance to a Hindu temple always faces east to catch the rising sunlight. Even as the expansion project is being finished, the temple's board is drafting more designs for the property. "We want to put a fiberglass dome over the whole thing," Vardhan said while standing on the outdoor plaza where Hindus kneel and pray, "so we can worship in all types of weather."
In 1894, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi arrived in South Africa as a young shiftless lawyer from India. He planned to spend a year; he ended up spending two extraordinary decades during which he moved from being the resentful victim of local racial humiliations to the initiator of a wholly new kind of political activism based upon nonviolence. When he finally left South Africa in 1914, after having organized a small and frequently trampled-upon Indian minority into a significant political force, his greatest Afrikaner adversary, Gen. Jan Smuts, was relieved enough to write to a friend, ''The saint has left our shores, I hope, forever.'' More than 30 years later, a few months after India's long-delayed independence in 1947, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu Brahmin named Nathuram Godse, who turned out to have been one of the many rationalists exasperated and bewildered by Gandhi. In a remarkably coherent statement in court, Godse explained that he had killed Gandhi in order to cleanse India of such ''old superstitious beliefs'' as the ''power of the soul, the inner voice, the fast, the prayer and the purity of the mind.'' He had felt that nonviolence of the kind Gandhi advocated could only ''lead the nation toward ruin.'' With Gandhi out of the way, Godse said, India would be ''free to follow the course founded on reason which I consider to be necessary for sound nation-building''; it would ''surely be practical, able to retaliate, and would be powerful with armed forces.'' It was the nuclear tests, and the euphoric reaction to them, that shocked Stanley Wolpert, an emeritus professor of South Asian history at the University of California, Los Angeles, into writing ''Gandhi's Passion.'' Wolpert had previously published biographies of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi is also written about more widely and diversely than any other South Asian leader. India, he believed, must find its own way. To attempt to beat the West at its own game, as Japan was then doing, was already to admit defeat. Wolpert mentions Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela as having drawn inspiration from Gandhi's methods. Disappointingly, he doesn't go into the manifold ways Gandhi's distrust of modernity has found echoes among many political and environmental movements around the world. Gandhi's opposition to the railways seemed absurd in the early 20th century. But his argument that the railways encouraged grain owners to sell their wares in the dearest markets and thereby undermine local small-scale economies would make sense to the anti-globalization protesters of today. Far from being a lone gunman, Godse spoke for millions of educated Hindus, including some of Gandhi's closest disciples, who felt that the ''father of the nation'' was a burden upon a country that now had to be governed in modern, rational ways. There can be little doubt that if Godse had lived to see India's nuclear tests of 1998, he would have been among the middle-class Hindus who cheered the prime minister's announcement that ''India has the capacity for a big bomb.'' |
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