India’s Answer to M.I.T. Presents 268 Free Online Courses (in English)

in Online Courses, Technology | August 22nd, 2012 

During the 1940s, when India won its independence from Britain, the leaders of the newly-formed nation began imagining the Indian Institutes of Technology, otherwise known as the IITs. Much like MIT in the US, these schools would cultivate some of the world’s top scientists and engineers. And they’d make technology key to the future of India’s economic development.

Today, the IITs stand atop the Indian educational system and, like their peer institutions in the US, they’re making a point of putting free courses on the web. Rather quietly, they’ve amassed some 268 courses, giving anyone with an internet connection access to 10,000+ video lectures. As you might expect, the course lineup skews heavily toward science and technology, the stuff that contributes to India’s industrial base – Introduction to Basic Electronics, High Performance Computer Architecture, Space Flight Mechanics, Steel Making, and all of the rest. But they’ve also added a few contemplative courses to the mix, courses like Contemporary Literature, Quantum Physics, the History of Economic Theory, and Game Theory and Economics.

You can start rummaging through the complete list of IIT courses on YouTube here, or you can access them via this IIT website, which gives you the ability to download videos straight to your computer. Naturally we’ve added many essential IIT courses to our list of Free Online Courses from Great Universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, Oxford, the list goes on.

Related Content:
Yale Introduces Another Seven Free Online Courses, Bringing Total to 42
Harvard Presents Free Courses with the Open Learning Initiative
MIT Introduces Complete Courses to OpenCourseWare Project

by Dan Colman

Read other articles at Open Culture

The Birth and Partition of a Nation: India's Independence Told in Photos

Aug 15 2012, 3:05 PM ET

August 15th, 1947, inaugurated one of the cruelest and most enduring ironies of decolonization. India, a British property with over 4,500 years of civilization and a population of 415 million, finally achieved independence. But it was a triumph that opened a social, historical and geographic wound that has yet to fully heal: the new Indian state was partitioned into two. Violent divisions between the subcontinent's Hindu and Muslim communities, and Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah's longstanding campaign for an Indian-Muslim political entity in the event of a British withdrawal, made partition the expedient choice for a weary and overextended post-war British government. On June 3rd, 1947, British Viceroy Lord Louis Mountbatten announced that, as of August 15, India would be split between separate majority-Hindu and majority-Muslim countries.
The border between the future modern states of India and Pakistan was created under the supervision of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a London barrister who was given only five weeks to draw the new borders. The resulting armed conflict persists today, from Hindu-ruled yet majority-Muslim Kashmir, to the bifurcation of Pakistan into remote eastern and western haves that later waged war. Millions of Pakistani Bengalis lost access to Kolkata, a regional metropolis that now sits on the Indian side of the border. As political scientist Lucy Chester recounts, the Radcilffe Line was "a failure in terms of boundary-making, but a striking success in terms of providing political cover to all sides."
India was independent, India's Muslim minority had its own independent state, and the British were in a position to leave their troublesome colonies behind. They were incomplete victories: up to 17 million people were eventually displaced, and 1 million killed, in the sectarian violence that followed partition. Mohandas Gandhi, the leader of India's independence movement, was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist in January 1948 over his perceived sympathies toward India's Muslims. A devastating civil war in East Pakistan resulted in the creation of Bangladesh in 1972. India and Pakistan fought wars over Kashmir in 1947, 1965, and 1999. The Kashmir conflict still serves as an ostensible justification for Pakistan's support of anti-Indian terrorist groups -- as well as for both countries' development of nuclear weapons.
Today, democratic India is a regional power, and Bangladesh is an emerging democracy -- even troubled Pakistan boasts one of the world's top 30 economies. Still, even 65 years later, the full cost of partition has yet to be fully paid. Here is the story of that fateful day, and the days immediately before and after, told in photos.
Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi in 1944. Gandhi opposed partition, while Jinnah's Muslim League lobbied for some kind of autonomous Muslim political entity in the event of a British withdrawal. He was briefly speaker of Pakistan's National Assembly before his death in 1948. (Wikimedia)

Read rest of article in the Atlantic,  Thursday, August 16, 2012

Captain Lakshmi

Lakshmi Sehgal (“Captain Lakshmi”), doctor and fighter for Indian independence, died on July 23rd, aged 97

Aug 4th 2012 | from the print edition

AS SHE moved, pert and bird-like, round her tiny rented clinic in industrial Kanpur in northern India, Lakshmi Sehgal made her patients feel completely safe in her hands. Lightly but firmly, her fingers moved across the swollen bellies of pregnant women, or felt for a pulse, or probed a wound. Her sister said she had always had the technique to reassure. Those same hands, in West Bengal in 1971, had massaged the scrawny limbs of Bangladeshi refugees, and in December 1984 had soothed the burning eyes of victims of the explosion at a chemical factory in Bhopal.

They also knew how to fire a revolver and prime a grenade, change the magazine on a Tommy gun and wield a sword. They were as skilled and ruthless as any man’s, for Dr Lakshmi had been trained beside the men to become a killing machine. From 1943 to 1945, in the jungles of Singapore and what was then Burma, she commanded a brand-new unit of the Indian National Army in the hope of overthrowing the British Raj. The Rani of Jhansi regiment, set up by the independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose (left of her, above), was for women only, the first in Asia. It was named after a heroine of the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny against the British, a widowed child bride who cut her saris into trousers to ride into battle. For Dr Lakshmi, another rich tomboy who had married too young, a rider of horses and driver of cars who had eagerly thrown her foreign-made dresses on a nationalist bonfire, the rani made an irresistible model.

Bose, too, was irresistible. She had first seen “Netaji” at 14, in 1928, when she was taken to Calcutta to the assembly of the Congress party by her activist mother. He strode in uniform at the head of his party volunteers, bravely rebellious, his owlish glasses glinting in the sunrise. Fifteen years later, when she had fled to Singapore with a new lover to set up a free clinic for Indian migrant workers, they met again. Bose persuaded her to recruit Indian women from the diaspora in Malaya and Singapore to fight for the cause: to link up with the Japanese, invade India through Burma, and seize the capital. He made her a colonel, although she was always “Captain”. A fine singer, she had already recorded the army song: Chalo Dilli, “On to Delhi!”

Read the full article of Aug 4th 2012 | from the print edition, The Economist

శ్రీ కౌముది ఆగస్ట్ 2012