A space for the arts

InterArt 2009 is the 34th edition of the Vikram Sarabhai International Arts Festival in Ahmedabad, and Mallika Sarabhai, the director of Darpana Academy that organises the festival, says: “But, every time, it is different from the previous years.”

It was her parents — famed scientist Vikram Sarabhai and his bharatanatyam exponent wife Mrinalini Sarabhai — who set up the Academy, an arts and cultural institution. Held every year from December 28 to 30, the festival is celebrated in memory of her father — a great lover of the arts — who passed away on December 30, 1971.

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Notable Quotes about Indian Indepence Day

I wanted to know the best of the life of one (Muhammad) who holds today an undisputed sway over the hearts of millions of mankind. I became more than ever convinced that it was not the sword that won a place for Islam in those days in the scheme of life. It was the rigid simplicity, the utter self-effacement of the Prophet the scrupulous regard for pledges, his intense devotion to his friends and followers, his intrepidity, his fearlessness, his absolute trust in God and in his own mission. These and not the sword carried everything before them and surmounted every obstacle.

Mahatma Gandhi Young India (September 23, 1924)

“At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new…India discovers herself again.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (on Indian Independence Day, 1947)

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action–
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.

Mark Twain

“Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood… will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.”

Indira Gandhi

“We have believed – and we do believe now – that freedom is indivisible, that peace is indivisible, that economic prosperity is indivisible”

Indira Gandhi

Global warming lengthens day

GLOBAL WARMING caused by increasing manmade carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will lengthen the day, according to a study published in the journal, Geophysical Research Letters. Researchers at Belgium’s Royal Observatory and the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, led by Olivier de Viron, analysed the effect of adding one per cent more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, in order to reach a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration after 70 years.

Link to the article

4,694 confirmed A(H1N1) influenza cases around the world: WHO

The number of laboratory-confirmed cases of the swine flu or A(H1N1) virus has increased to 4,694 – double from the last Friday’s figure – and also claimed 53 lives around the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said.

According to latest WHO update, Mexico and the US have topped the list of 30 countries where laboratory-confirmed human cases of the virus have been reported. Mexico has 1,626 cases with 48 deaths while the US has 2,532 with three deaths.

“WHO’s pandemic alert level remains at Phase 5 – on a six-point warning scale – as it has for the past several days,” Dr Keiji Fukuda, WHO’s Acting Assistant Director-General for Health Security and Environment said.

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