IntelliBriefs

. Almost everyday I drive past a stone bungalow in the Bolarum cantonment  called "The Retreat" on which a large sign proudly maintains that Winston Churchill lived here. Our Army is still very proud of its colonial origins but I often think its pride in its antecedents are a bit misplaced. It still has a Plassey Gate in the Cantonment.  --Mohan Guruswamy Read: "Bengal Famine of 1943 - World War II Affected India Remembering India’s forgotten holocaust  The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the subcontinent in the 20th century.  Nearly 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine created by the British government, and yet it gets little more than a passing mention in Indian history books.  What is remarkable about the scale of the disaster is its time span. World War II was at its peak and the Germans were rampaging across Europe, targeting Jews, Slavs and the Roma for extermination.  It took Adolf Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 yea

Calculus is difficult because real numbers are wrongly believed essential to it. Reverting to the way calculus originated makes it easy. Axiomatic proofs (like Russell’s 378 page proof of 1+1=2) add zilch to the practical value of math in a grocer’s shop, but they make math excessively difficult. The purported “superiority” of axiomatic proofs is a church superstition which was politically convenient to the Crusading church in developing its rational theology which used proofs based on reason minus facts (or observations). Having stolen the calculus from India, Europeans eventually realized that they did not fully understand it. Hence, they invented “real” numbers, long after the purported “discovery” of calculus by Newton and Leibniz.  Real numbers add to the difficulty but not to the practical value of calculus . Real numbers are regarded as essential to define core calculus concepts such as derivative and integral, and to sum its infinite series. But they are not actually defined in

23 January, 17:55 Description  Bhangya Bhukya Manthan Scheduled for 23 Jan 2022 Cultural Heterogeneity and History: Reflections from Telangana #Telangana is known for its cultural heterogeneity from the early historical period. Being a gateway to south India, it witnessed many political and cultural invasions from north India, but it retained its core cultural ethos. Remarkably it was. The talk is based on my recent book, A Cultural History of Telangana (Orient BlackSwan), and it aims to raise some specific questions. How was the heterogenic environment of the region crucial to shaping its rationalistic #culture ? Why did Brahmanism not stay in Telangana and how was it largely free from the Gangetic Brahminic cultural onslaught? Why were heterodox sects such as Buddhism, Jainism, Vira Saivism and Sufism welcomed in Telangana? Was there a cultural synthesis in medieval #Deccan ? How did Telangana keep Deccani strands intact? How unique is Telangana personality?   BHANGYA BHUKYA   BHANGY

SOCIETY & CULTURE Society & Culture Chang Che Published January 13, 2022 Illustration for SupChina by Alex Santafé https://supchina.com/2022/01/13/china-looks-to-the-western-classics/ As American universities reevaluate the role of Western classical education, Latin and Greek courses are proliferating in China, where students see the Classics as a wellspring of wisdom that remains relevant regardless of hemisphere. A block east of Tiananmen Square, in a classroom last July, Chinese school children were singing the nursery rhyme “Old McDonald Had a Farm” in Latin: “Donatus est agricola, Eia, Eia, Oh!” The students, aged 11 to 17, were taking an introductory Latin class with Leopold Leeb, a professor of literature at the prestigious Renmin University. Every weekday during the summer, from nine a.m. to noon, Leeb holds a public class in a marble white church just a stone’s throw away from Beijing’s central government. On the day I attended, Leeb had given each student a Roman name

Jan 11, 2022  https://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/story/qa-cpd-dimitri-s-kerkentzes In this series, CPD interviews international thought-leaders as well as key practitioners of public diplomacy and related professional fields to provide our readers with insight into the inner workings of some of the world’s most thoughtful PD practitioners. Dimitri S. Kerkentzes is Secretary General of the Bureau International Des Expositions (BIE), the intergovernmental organization in charge of overseeing and regulating World Expos.   The World Expo began in 1851 at the height of the industrial revolution. All major industrialized nations have hosted the event. In recent times, the event is garnering growing interest beyond the Western world. For instance, the five candidate countries to organize World Expo 2030 are Russia, South Korea, Italy, Ukraine and Saudi Arabia. How do you explain the broadening appeal of the Expo in the 21st century? The five candidatures received to organize World Expo 2030 attes

Jan 4, 2022   In the latest issue of  CPD Perspectives on Public Diplomacy , CPD Research Fellow  Mafalda Dâmaso  analyzes the European Union's approach to international cultural relations (ICR). Dâmaso emphasizes the need to redefine the relationship between culture and diplomacy as a means to help practitioners respond to challenges likely to emerge during the implementation of ICR. Her research includes interviews with ICR experts, cultural actors, members of EU delegations and staff of cultural institutes involved in six European Spaces of Culture pilot projects in Benin, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and the U.S. (2019–2021) and concludes that successful delivery of the EU’s approach to cultural relations requires a combination of knowledge, skills and competencies that cannot be provided by either diplomatic or cultural management training alone. "Cultural diplomacy supports a traditional approach to diplomacy while cultural relations is