62 items in this section. Displaying page 4 of 7
Bhagat Singh
March 23 is the death anniversary of one of the most heroic figures of the Indian freedom movement. Few people remembered it, though. Forget the rest of India, even the children of the village where he was born, do not know anything about him. And to think that the young man in question, Bhagat Singh, gave up his life for the ideal of a free and better India! Today, over 50 years after Independence, the people of his village still do not have access to drinking water and a tap, writes The Indian Express newspaper....
Fidel Castro Ruz
Fidel Castro Ruz was born on August 13, 1926 (some sources give 1927), on his family’s sugar plantation near Biran, Oriente, Province. His father was an immigrant from Galcia, Spain. He attended good Cathotic schools in Santiago de Cuba and Havana, where he took the spartan regime at a Jesuit boarding school, Colegio de Belen. In 1945 he enrolled at the University of Havana, graduating in 1950 with a law degree. In 1948, he married Mirta Diaz-Balart and divorced her in 1954....
Ali Sardar Jafri
He was a poet who spoke out for the poor. He was also one who truly believed that India and Pakistan could be friends, if the countries tried hard enough. From the time he was arrested for writing against British rule in India, to when he climbed onto the famous Lahore “peace” bus with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee last year, Ali Sardar Jafri spent his entire working-writing life speaking out for what he believed in....
Srinivasa Aiyangar Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of India’s mathematical geniuses. He made wonderful contributions to the field of advanced mathematics. Even today, his fascinating results and mathematical theories, and a number of unpublished notebooks filled with theorems, continue to baffle and enthrall mathematicians. Ramanujan was born in his grandmother’s house in Erode, a small village near Chennai in Tamil Nadu. While he was still a baby, his mother took him to Kumbakonam, near Chennai, where his father worked as a clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop....
Eleanor Roosevelt
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was a powerful voice on behalf of a wide range of social causes including youth employment and civil rights for blacks and women. The wife of a popular U.S. president, Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City on October 11, 1884 was a tireless worker for social causes. A niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she was raised by her maternal grandmother after the premature death of her parents. In 1905, she married her cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt; they had six children, one of whom died in infancy....
Vaikom Mohammed Basheer
We Indians are story-lovers. We were all, at one point or the other, children at our grandmother’s feet, listening wide-eyed to her tales of days long gone. And if we love to hear stories, there are many among us who love to tell them as well. Nowhere is this truer than in the world of Indian languages. India abounds in storytellers who write in their mother tongue. There are several reasons why such writers are special....
Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi, née Indira Priyadarshini Nehru (1917-1984), was born on November 19, 1917, in Allahabad, the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. A graduate of Visva-Bharati University, Bengal, she also studied at the University of Oxford, England. In 1938 she joined the National Congress party and became active in India’s independence movement. In 1942 she married Feroze Gandhi, a Parsi lawyer also active in the party. Shortly after, both were arrested by the British on charges of subversion and spent 13 months in prison....
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Roosevelt served longer than any other president and held office during two great crises: the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Roosevelt was born in Hyde Park, New York. In 1899 he entered Harvard College, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1903. In 1904 Roosevelt moved to New York City, where he entered the Columbia University Law School. While at Columbia, Roosevelt married his distant cousin Eleanor Roosevelt. Although he attended classes until 1907, he did not stay on for his law degree after passing the state examinations allowing him to practice law....
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
The 35th president of United States (1961-63) was at the age of 43, the youngest and the first Roman Catholic to be elected to the presidency. Rich, handsome, elegant and articulate, he aroused great admiration at home and abroad. His assassination in Dallas, Texas in November 1963 provoked outrage and widespread mourning. His term of office as president was too short. Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917, a descendant of Irish Catholics who had immigrated to America in the 19th century....
Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Born on September 5, 1888 in Tirutlani (now in Andhra Pradesh), Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan rose to become one of modern India’s most respected scholars and statesmen. He was born to teach as a major part of his life was spent as an academic. He taught philosophy at the universities of Andhra, Mysore and Calcutta. He also held a professorship in eastern religion and ethics at Oxford. His distinguished academic career included the Chancellorship of Delhi University and vice–chancellorship of Benares Hindu University....