Day: May 2, 2024
Kalam: A remarkable People’s President
Dr Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam’s life as a student was very challenging, filled with hardships and struggles. There was a time when he had to sell newspapers from door-to-door to support his family and for his education. He came from a very modest background and journeyed from Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, and became the President of India. He was truly the People’s President. He contributed immensely to the development of the country both as a scientist and as a president. He was an exceptional teacher, an aerospace scientist and a staunch nationalist who was a great dreamer and visionary at the same time.
Get ready for summer madness
Summer is here, more or less. The next 100 days will be hot and hotter. I live in North India where — as I think an Englishman wrote in the 18th century — it gets so hot that when stray dogs chase each other, they prefer to walk. I have vivid memories of the North Indian summers in the 1950s and 1960s. They were extraordinarily cruel. Then came the afforestation programmes surrounding Delhi with lakhs of trees. That changed things. Thus, before the trees grew fully, there used to be very massive dust storms. The Arabic word for them is khamsin. There would be hot winds that would gust at about 100kmph, fully laden with billions of tonnes of dust. The entire sky would turn black-brown and the sun would vanish behind the swirling muck.
Rotary gifts a human milk bank in Aurangabad & Tirupati
When Amrut Dhara, a global grant project conceived and executed by members of RC Aurangabad West, RID 3132, to set up a modern, well-equipped human milk bank, was finally inaugurated at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar Government Medical College and Hospital in the city, it proved the tenacity of this bunch of Rotarians led by the club’s past president Hemant Landge. The project proposal had come to the club way back in 2018. Putting together a huge sum of $58,000 required, and then navigating through the challenges of the unprecedented Covid pandemic, during which medical services were not only overstretched but their priorities had also shifted, were no mean tasks. But team Amrut Dhara, led by project chair Landge, stayed focused on what they had to do to see this work through.