The Most Innovative Companies in India

1. Aravind Eye Care System: With time-saving and cost-cutting measures and a business model that lets the poor pay little to nothing, the 2008 Gates for Global Health award recipient has been instrumental in lowering blindness rates in India's rural areas.
2. Bharti Airtel: The telecom company won two World Communication Awards last year for services aiming to improve rural life -- such as free voice messages with weather updates and other crucial info for farmers.
3. Narayana Hrudayalaya: The hospital performs more than 20 heart surgeries a day at low cost and high quality -- including the first artificial heart implant in Asia, last April.
4. MeritTrac Services: The HR-assessment firm's programs provide high-tech education and testing of employees and job candidates for an impressively expanding array of clients: Google, Honeywell, HP, IBM, Microsoft.
5. Dr. Reddy's Laboratories: Among the new products from the first non-Japanese Asian pharmaceutical company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange is a generic version of the migraine medication Imitrex.
6. Infosys: One of India's top IT outsourcing firms, Infosys maintained its status with deals like a five-year multimillion-dollar contract to provide services to AstraZeneca.
7. Comat Technologies: The social enterprise partnered with satellite provider Hughes India to provide 10,000 broadband satellite terminals in rural areas, making vital citizen records more accessible in underserved areas.
8. Wipro: In 2008, the IT provider launched Wipro HIS Lite -- a pay-per-use system that helps small medical facilities efficiently manage patient data.
9. Tata Group: There were delays building its $2,500 Nano car, but the conglomerate's auto business launched redesigns and boosted sales for Jaguar after it acquired the luxury brand from Ford.
10. UB Group: The parent group of Kingfisher Beer and Kingfisher Airlines saw a fruitful year, developing a diet whiskey and flying its inaugural international flight.

http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_09/lists/the-most-innovative-companies-in-india.html?nav=inform-rl

Incredible India

US House passes resolution on Mahatma's influence on King

The United States House of Representative on Wednesday unanimously passed a resolution recognising the influence Mahatma Gandhi [Images]had on Martin Luther King Jr, the great civil rights leader of America, who has been a source of inspiration to President Barack Obama [Images].

Passed by a roll call vote of 406 to 0, with 26 abstaining, the resolution commemorates the 50th anniversary of King's visit to India in 1959. It was introduced by Congressman John Lewis and co-sponsored by five other lawmakers -- John Conyers, Jim McDermott, Robert C Scott, Henry Johnson and Adam B Schiff.

The resolution urged all Americans to commemorate King's trip to India in 1959 to know more about Mahatma Gandhi and the influence his study of Gandhian philosophy had in shaping the US Civil Rights Movement, in creating political climate necessary to pass legislation to expand civil rights and voting rights for all Americans.

Observing that the great American leader was tremendously influenced by the non-violence philosophy of Gandhi, the resolution says King encountered this during his study of Gandhi, and was further inspired by him during his first trip to India. King successfully used this in the struggle for civil rights and voting rights, it says.

A US delegation, including several lawmakers, are scheduled to visit India later this month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the visit of Martin Luther King to India from February 10, 1959 to March 10, 1959. During his month-long stay, King was accompanied by his wife Coretta Scott King, and Lawrence Reddick, then chairman of the History Department at Alabama State College.

King visited various places associated with Gandhi. He met then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, land reform leader Vinoba Bhave and other influential leaders to discuss issues of poverty, economic policy and race relations. All this deepened King's commitment to nonviolence, and revealed to him the power that nonviolent resistance holds in political and social battles, the resolution says.

"The trip to India impacted Dr King in a profound way, and inspired him to use nonviolence as an instrument of social change to end segregation and racial discrimination in America throughout the rest of his work during the Civil Rights Movement," the Congressional resolution says.

Congressman John Lewis is part of the US delegation to visit India this month to commemorate the visit. Others are Martin Luther King III and legendary jazz musician Herbie Hancock. The delegation will meet in New Delhi [Images] with government leaders, social activists, and youth, and will travel around India to some of the principal sites associated with Gandhi.

Two special musical performances featuring Herbie Hancock and others will be organised by the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In Chennai, Indian musicians will conduct a special tribute, including performances of music on the theme of non-violence created by leading composer A R Rahman.

Quotes about India

Albert Einstein, American Scientist: "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made!"

Mark Twain, American Author: "India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most astrictive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!"  "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." "In religion, India is the only millionaire... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined."

Will Durant, American Historian: “It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.” "India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings." "India is the motherland of our race and Sanskrit is the mother of Indo-European languages. She is the mother of our philosophy, of our mathematics, mother of ideals embodied in Christianity and mother of our democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all." (‘Story of Civilization’)

Henry David Thoreau, American Thinker /Author:Whenever I have read any part of the Vedas, I have felt that some unearthly and unknown light illuminated me. In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climbs, and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge. When I read it, I feel that I am under the spangled heavens of a summer night.

R.W. Emerson, American Author: In the great books of India, an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence, which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the questions that exercise us.

William James, American Author: "From the Vedas we learn a practical art of surgery, medicine, music, house building under which mechanized art is included. They are encyclopedia of every aspect of life, culture, religion, science, ethics, law, cosmology and meteorology."

Max Muller, German Scholar: "If I were to look over the whole world to find out a country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that nature can bestow – in some part a very paradise on earth – I should point to India." "There is no book in the world that is so thrilling, stirring and inspiring as the Upanishads." (‘Sacred Books of the East’)

Romain Rolland, French Philosopher: If there is one place on the face of this Earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest day when man began the dream of existence, it is India.

Apollonius Tyanaeus, Ancient Greek Traveler: "In India, I found a race of mortals living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it, inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them, possessing everything, but possessed by nothing."

Dr Arnold Toynbee, British Historian: “It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in the self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in history, the only way of salvation for mankind is the Indian way.”

Hu Shih (Former Chinese Ambassador to USA): "India conquered and dominated China for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across its border." (Bhavan Journal 15.05.1999)

Swami Vivekananda, Indian Philosopher: "Civilizations have arisen in other parts of the world. In ancient and modern times, wonderful ideas have been carried forward from one race to another...But mark you, my friends, it has been always with the blast of war trumpets and the march of embattled cohorts. Each idea had to be soaked in a deluge of blood..... Each word of power had to be followed by the groans of millions, by the wails of orphans, by the tears of widows. This, many other nations have taught; but India for thousands of years peacefully existed. Here activity prevailed when even Greece did not exist... Even earlier, when history has no record, and tradition dares not peer into the gloom of that intense past, even from until now, ideas after ideas have marched out from her, but every word has been spoken with a blessing behind it and peace before it. We, of all nations of the world, have never been a conquering race, and that blessing is on our head, and therefore we live....!"

Shri Aurovindo: "India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples. And that which must seek now to awake is not anglicised oriental people, docile pupil of the West and doomed to repeat the cycle of the occident's success and failure, but still the ancient immemorable Shakti recovering her deepest self, lifting her head higher towards the supreme source of light and strength and turning to discover the complete meaning and a vaster form of her Dharma."

Sir William Jones, British Orientalist: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either."

Republic Day 2009 - Few Glimpses

Netaji

Today is the 112th Birth Day of Netaji. 

Subhas Chandra Bose born January 23, 1897; presumed to have died August 18, 1945 although this is disputed, popularly known as Netaji (literally "Respected Leader"), is one of the most respected politicians of modern India.

Bose was elected president of the Indian National Congress for two consecutive terms but resigned from the post following ideological conflicts

 with Mahatma Gandhi. Bose believed that Mahatma Gandhi's tactics of non-violence would never be sufficient to secure India's independence, and advocated violent resistance. He established a separate political party, theAll India Forward Bloc and continued to call for the full and immediate independence of India from British rule. He was imprisoned by the British authorities eleven times. (Check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subhas_Chandra_Bose for more info)

The Indian National Army (INA) or Azad Hind Fauj was revived by Netaji in 1942 in South east Asia during World War II.

The aim of the army was to overthrow the British Raj in colonial India, with Japanese assistance. Initially composed of Indian prisoners of war captured by Japan in her Malayan campaign and at Singapore, it later drew large numbers of volunteers from Indian expatriate population in Malaya and Burma. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army)

Initially formed in 1942 immediately after the fall of Singapore under Mohan Singh, the first INA collapsed in December that year before it was revived under the leadership of Subhas Chandra Bose in 1943 and proclaimed the army of Bose's Arzi Hukumat-e-Azad Hind

For unknown reason or very well known reason , this country is very passive about Netaji and He has not been given his due regards ever. Let us just remember him. If we can not honour him , let us ensure at least our children should not forget him. 

I am proud to take birth in a country where Netaji was born. I pray to almighty that time and our future generations will forgive us for this henioue crime. 

Jai Hind

Interesting facts about India

# India never invaded any country in her last 100000 years of history.

# When many cultures were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5000 years ago, Indians established Harappan culture in Sindhu Valley (Indus Valley Civilization)

# The name 'India' is derived from the River Indus, the valleys around which were the home of the early settlers. The Aryan worshippers referred to the river Indus as the Sindhu.

# Chess was invented in India.

# Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus are studies, which originated in India.

# The 'Place Value System' and the 'Decimal System' were developed in India in 100 B.C.

# The World's First Granite Temple is the Brihadeswara Temple at Tanjavur, Tamil Nadu. The shikhara of the temple is made from a single 80-tonne piece of granite. This magnificent temple was built in just five years, (between 1004 AD and 1009 AD) during the reign of Rajaraja Chola.

# India is the largest democracy in the world, the 7th largest Country in the world, and one of the most ancient civilizations.

# The game of Snakes & Ladders was created by the 13th century poet saint Gyandev. It was originally called 'Mokshapat'. The ladders in the game represented virtues and the snakes indicated vices. The game was played with cowrie shells and dices. In time, the game underwent several modifications, but its meaning remained the same, i.e. good deeds take people to heaven and evil to a cycle of re-births.

# The world's highest cricket ground is in Chail, Himachal Pradesh. Built in 1893 after leveling a hilltop, this cricket pitch is 2444 meters above sea level.

# India has the largest number of Post Offices in the world.

# The largest employer in the world is the Indian Railways, employing over a million people.

# The world's first university was established in Takshila in 700 BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.

# Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to mankind. The Father of Medicine, Charaka, consolidated Ayurveda 2500 years ago.

# India was one of the richest countries till the time of British rule in the early 17th Century. Christopher Columbus, attracted by India's wealth, had come looking for a sea route to India when he discovered America by mistake.

# The Art of Navigation & Navigating was born in the river Sindh over 6000 years ago. The very word Navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word 'NAVGATIH'. The word navy is also derived from the Sanskrit word 'Nou'.

# Bhaskaracharya rightly calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the Sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. According to his calculation, the time taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun was 365.258756484 days.

# The value of "pi" was first calculated by the Indian Mathematician Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century, long before the European mathematicians.

# Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus also originated in India. Quadratic Equations were used by Sridharacharya in the 11th century. The largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106 whereas Hindus used numbers as big as 10*53 (i.e. 10 to the power of 53) with specific names as early as 5000 B.C. during the Vedic period. Even today, the largest used number is Terra: 10*12(10 to the power of 12).

# Until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds in the world (Source : Gemological Institute of America).

# The Baily Bridge is the highest bridge in the world. It is located in the Ladakh valley between the Dras and Suru rivers in the Himalayan mountains. It was built by the Indian Army in August 1982.

# Sushruta is regarded as the Father of Surgery. Over 2600 years ago Sushrata & his team conducted complicated surgeries like cataract, artificial limbs, cesareans, fractures, urinary stones, plastic surgery and brain surgeries.

# Usage of anaesthesia was well known in ancient Indian medicine. Detailed knowledge of anatomy, embryology, digestion, metabolism, physiology, etiology, genetics and immunity is also found in many ancient Indian texts.

# India exports software to 90 countries.

# The four religions born in India - Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, are followed by 25% of the world's population.

# Jainism and Buddhism were founded in India in 600 B.C. and 500 B.C. respectively.

# Islam is India's and the world's second largest religion.

# There are 300,000 active mosques in India, more than in any other country, including the Muslim world.

# The oldest European church and synagogue in India are in the city of Cochin. They were built in 1503 and 1568 respectively.

# Jews and Christians have lived continuously in India since 200 B.C. and 52 A.D. respectively

# The largest religious building in the world is Angkor Wat, a Hindu Temple in Cambodia built at the end of the 11th century.

# The Vishnu Temple in the city of Tirupathi built in the 10th century, is the world's largest religious pilgrimage destination. Larger than either Rome or Mecca, an average of 30,000 visitors donate $6 million (US) to the temple everyday.

# Sikhism originated in the Holy city of Amritsar in Punjab. Famous for housing the Golden Temple, the city was founded in 1577.

# Varanasi, also known as Benaras, was called "the Ancient City" when Lord Buddha visited it in 500 B.C., and is the oldest, continuously inhabited city in the world today.

# India provides safety for more than 300,000 refugees originally from Sri Lanka, Tibet, Bhutan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, who escaped to flee religious and political persecution.

# His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, runs his government in exile from Dharmashala in northern India.

# Martial Arts were first created in India, and later spread to Asia by Buddhist missionaries.

# Yoga has its origins in India and has existed for over 5,000 years.