Gandhi Jayanti

Today is Gandhi Jayanthi.

For India today is a national holiday, while the world observes today as the "International Day of Non-violence".

Gandhiji and his ideas of non-violence is getting more relevant in this present world. In Trivandrum a course offered by Gandhi Smaraka Nidhi is having many takers from the young and the old but to the astonishment of many the majority is the young from communist Kannur District - known for its long history of political violence. This course is offered for a fee or 100 IRS and runs for 1 year. From Gandhiji’s principles to his messages of love and the hardearned lessons of freedom that the Mahatma taught using ahimsa would be part of the curriculum. They will also have a project at the end of the course.

Mahatma stressed that "literacy is not the end of education nor even its beginning. It is only one of the means whereby man and woman can be educated and that only those who receive a fulsome education of body, mind and spirit can play an effective role in resisting violence and fighting injustice and oppression. They alone can build a social order that promises human dignity". He stressed on character building and value education.

I think Gandhiji left us with a lot of valuable and timeless tools, but sadly it still remains in "quotes" and "speeches". Some political parties want only his name but forgets all what he stood for.


Is life relevant?
Is truth relevant?
Is morality relevant?
It has become a fashion to question the relevance of Mahatma Gandhi today. I suspect the people who ask this question are the ones who are convinced that he is irrelevant and useless. I want to ask them if they feel life, truth and morality are also irrelevant? Because the corner stones of the Gandhian philosophy are life, truth and morality.

See through Frogs!

I am sure everyone remembers their Zoology labs for one thing... dissection of frogs. I remember mine and how I detested the very act of cutting those poor souls. And then we had to pin them up for inspection. The smell of formaldehyde still lingers...ugh!

Maybe.. kids will not have to do that anymore.... The Japanese as usual let their gray matter to do some work... the See Through Frogs

September 28, 2007—For high school students everywhere, this revealing amphibian may be a cut above regular frogs.

That's because the see-through frog does not require dissection to see its organs, blood vessels, and eggs.

Masayuki Sumida, a professor at the Institute for Amphibian Biology at Japan's Hiroshima University, bred the frog to be a humane learning tool.

"You can watch organs of the same frog over its entire life, as you don't have to dissect it," Sumida told the news agency Agence France-Presse. The scientist announced his research last week at an academic meeting.

Dissecting animals for science has sparked controversies worldwide, even prompting some companies to create computer simulations as cruelty-free alternatives.

Researchers bred the sheer creature—a type of Japanese brown frog—for two recessive genes that make it pale.

Though not yet patented, the frog is the first four-legged, see-through animal to be bred by scientists. Some fish species are also clear.

Only 1 in 16 frogs end up see-through, and Sumida's team has not yet figured out how to pass on the transparent trait to offspring.