Featured Post

Kashmir conflict-revisited

In early1980s, walking through the lush green fields, on crisp spring and summer mornings, on my way from the student hostel to the chemis...

Thursday, July 19, 2018

Emergency-an historical perspective

I have been reading Coomi Kapoor's book on emergency published in 2015 and it has proved to be more revealing than I had bargained for, but not in the manner I had expected. That period remains strongly etched in my memories, and I always have considered that act of Indira Gandhi as completely unconstitutional and constituted an unnecessary subversion of the entire system. Nevertheless, Coomi Kapoor's book has forced me to rethink the entire issue through an historical perspective. In the aftermath of the declaration of the emergency and the excesses carried out under its name, the true causality  had become and remains obscure until this day. 

What no one talks and that book, between the lines, reveals is that crescendo of opposition agitation prior to the emergency and its organization was under the complete control of RSS. Coomi Kapoor herself had been associated with RSS in many manners. The book has a foreword written by Arun Jaitely, who only sometimes back wrote one of the most shallow accounts of that era. 

More importantly, most of the leading lights of opposition were guided by RSS. Indira Gandhi might have had a purpose in declaring that emergency but its operations were taken over by thuggish Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie of Punjabi mafia. And the outcome was a horrible period in the Indian history. Curiously, many of the leading persons from that mafia later became part of BJP.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Validation of Einstein at universal scale

In the span of last one month, three separate reports validated different aspects of Einstein's theories on universal scale. One study, published in Science on June 22, showed bending of light as predicted in General Relativity at a galactic scale using two distant galaxies. Another study, published in Nature on July 5, validated the equivalence principle of universal free-fall, from General Relativity, using a three star system, two dwarfs and a pulsar, about 4.2 light-years away. And finally a study, published in Nature Physics on July 16, and based on two-year data analysis of atmospheric neutrinos from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory failed to find a violation of Lorenz symmetry. Lorenz symmetry forms the basis of Special Theory of Relativity.

That actual vindication of Einstein might come from another report indicating that quantum field theory might after all not be explaining the entire reality and discovery of phenomenon expounding the transformation of quantum fuzziness to 'realism' might be close. Einstein never was comfortable with quantum uncertainty.