In about the tenth century, groups of people began to leave northern India and to travel all over Europe. Being very independent, they kept their original language to a great extent – this is what we now call Romany, and it is a descendant of a form of Sanskrit. Gipdies’ beliefs are basically Christian, but they also have a very …

When Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic in 1942, he thought that the Earth was much smaller than it actually is. As a result, he believed that he had reached India and that the people in the Caribbean islands were Indians. In fact, the ancestors of these people came from north-eastern Asia, perhaps 40,000 years ago. They spread southwards and …

Mother Teresa was born in Skopje, Yugoslavia (which is now Macedonia) in 1910 and died on September 5, 1997. Her parents were Nikola and Dronda Bojaxhiu. They named her Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, but she changed her name to Teresa on May 24, 1931. Mother Teresa taught geography at St. Mary’s School in Calcutta, India from 1929 to 1948. When she …

Buddhism is not a religion so much as a way of life, as it has no god and no prayer. Buddha, which means ‘the enlightened one’, was Gautama Siddhartha who founded the religion about 528 BC. He came from an aristocratic family in northern India. Having decided that worldly success meant nothing, he had a vision one night, as he …

Hermann Kallenbach (1871–1945) was a South African architect who is best known for being a very close friend of Mahatma Gandhi, starting from the latter’s early days in South Africa. Kallenbach was born in 1871 in East Prussia to a German-Jewish family. He went to study architecture in Stuttgart and Munich. In 1896, he went to South Africa, where he …

Amit Jethwa (1975 – 20 July 2010) was an Indian environmentalist and social worker, active in the Gir Forest area near Junagadh, Gujarat. He had filed several court cases against illegal mining in the protected area, naming Bharatiya Janata Party member of parliament, Dinu Solanki as one of the respondents. On 20 July 2010 he was shot dead by two …

The officer, Sanjiv Chaturvedi, belongs to 2002 batch of Haryana Cadre, who joined the State , in September, 2005, after the completion of training at IGNFA, Dehradun, where he got two medals from President of India for excellence in the training. In the state the officer was deliberately kept without any posting for whole one year despite availability of cadre …

A former Supreme Court judge and eminent criminal law expert, he was appointed as the chairperson of Justice Mukherjee Commission of Inquiry (JMCI) in 1999. His name was recommended by the then Chief Justice of India. Mukherjee’s inquiry was lauded by all those who had stakes in the matter in any way. He conducted his inquiry strictly in accordance with …

Binayak Sen MBBS, MD – is an Indian pediatrician, public health specialist and activist found guilty of sedition. He is the national Vice-President of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL). Binayak Sen originally started working as a doctor extending health care to poor people in the rural-tribal areas of the Chhattisgarh state, doubling up as a human rights activist. …

Anna Hazare is one of India’s well-acclaimed social activists. A former soldier in the Indian army, Anna is well known and respected for upgrading the ecology and economy of the village of Ralegan Siddhi which is located in the drought prone Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra state. The erstwhile barren village has metamorphosed into a unique model of rural development due …