Nehru's birthday, 2006 - and the day after

Nehru's birthday, November 14th

On November 14th, 2006, Nehru would have been 117 years old. His ideas are of course present in India in many ways to this day. Regarding Nehru's interest for the cooperative movement - where inspiration came to a not insignificant extent from this country (Denmark!) - the Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperation (IFFCO) has built on these ideas and created a widespread network of facilities and services all over India. In acknowledgement of the dependency on Nehru's ideas, IFFCO has institutionalized a series of "Nehru Memorial Lectures". This year, my father was given the honour to deliver this lecture and I had the pleasure to read it. The title of the lecture is "India going it alone", referring to the significance of India's own efforts when compared to Western aid during the difficult years of the "green revolution". The talk also touched on present day problems, especially related to the supply of energy. The accompanying ppt-slides with pointers to the text you find here, and the full text here (obs: 2.9, not 3.9 in Table 7).

It was a great privilege for me to be present on the occasion of IFFCO's 2006 Nehru Memorial celebrations, paying respect to the memory of a great Statesman. I enjoyed the beauty of the celebration filled with flowers and dominated by an open and friendly atmosphere from IFFCO CEO's as well as from the many representatives of IFFCO cooperatives. I am also thankful for the respect shown to the author of "India going it alone" and the many kind accompanying words.

The day after

The day after was, from lunch on, spent at IIT, Indian Institue of Technology with dr. Naresh Sharma as my host. I much appreciated that my old friend from my time in Cambridge UK, 1965-66, professor K.R. Parthasarathy, now from ISI, Delhi, Indian Statistical Institute, was also present. Slides from my lecture "Between truth and description" may be of interest to you. My talk was close to one held few months before in Prague, but, inspired by a visit the same morning to the "Lotus temple", I could not resist the temptation also to include some citations from the Bahai conception of the interplay between religion and science. After the talk, a habit only too seldomly followed, was practised admirably by prof. Parthasarathy who gave an informed presentation about views triggered by the talk, including pointers to possible ph.d.-projects for the young researchers to take up and, inevitably, to quantum information theory, a topic not covered in my talk, but possibly also ripe for the game theoretical approach - the approach which I applied during the talk to classical information theory.