Accomplished surgeon and scholar

Soft spoken and gentle in his manner, Dr Man Singh Nirankari, however, was firm in his convictions and opinions. He was equally at ease with the prefix and suffix to his name and the different spheres of life they both signified his eminent professional life and his heritage. He passed away in Chandigarh the early hours of May 11.

From Website

Dr Man Singh Nirankari, MBBS, FRCS (Edin) DO (London), was born on December 8, 1911, in a small village called Meki Dhok, Campbellpur, district of joint Punjab, now in Pakistan, renamed Attock. His father, Hara Singh (1877-1971) was the leader of the Nirankari movement, active in northwest Punjab then. It was in Rawalpindi that the young Man Singh studied at Khalsa High School and Garden Mission College, (for FSc), King Edward Medical College, Lahore (for MBBS). He became FRCS in 1937.

In 1942, he married Phool, the daughter of Sant Singh Lyallpuri, who served as Indian Ambassador to Ethiopia from 1950-1953. She had studied English Honours at Government College for Women, Lahore. It was an Anand Karaj marriage; something the Nirankaris had played a significant role in popularising.

From Website

After Partition, the couple settled down in Amritsar. They had three children, a son Dr Verinder Singh Nirankari, an ophthalmologist who lives in Maryland, USA, and daughters, Aruna Singh who lives in Delhi and the prominent theatre personality, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry.

Recognised as one of the most prominent ophthalmologists in the region, Dr Man Singh became the Principal and Head of the Department of Ophthalmology, Government Medical College, Amritsar, a position from which he retired in 1971. Among his students are many famous surgeons.

A prominent citizen of Amritsar, he was active in the educational, cultural and religious fields, and friend to many prominent political and religious leaders. He served as a Syndic and Senator of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar; he was an adviser to the SGPC’s Dharmam Prachar Committee, and member of the committee to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Amritsar.

After he and Phool moved from Amritsar to Chandigarh in 1998 to be with their daughter Neelam and son-in-law, Pushi Chowdhry, he often attended various literary and cultural events, and spoke on a variety of issues at various functions. A prolific writer, he published articles and wrote books in Punjabi in a variety of genres, including poetry, history, divinity and Sikh issues. He also wrote Katha Kahani, his autobiography. Phool Man Singh passed away on May 7, 2006.

Many of those who came to the Electric Crematorium in Chandigarh on Tuesday afternoon remembered that this was the man who had constructed a similar facility in Amritsar, the first in Punjab. Many also remember the strong voice and emotional Ardas of Dr Man Singh when he prayed, at this very spot, four years ago, for the peace of his wife’s soul. Now, he was joining her.

This obituary was published in The Tribune on May 12, 2010

THE LAST WORD:

This Singh is not king, as yet

Roopinder Singh and Ajay Banerjee

He loves the good life, yet is equally at home in the rough and tumble of politics. The Akali Dal engineers his expulsion from the House, he makes headlines outside it. The Congress has not made him chief of the state party, people take him to be one anyway. Reams are written about his extra-curricular activities, yet he shrugs them off and they don’t seem to affect his political fortunes.

In his crisp white kurta pajama, equally in his blue blazers, he fills the room with his presence, and floors the audience - there is always one - with his span of information and the felicity with which he cites facts and figures, switching between English and Punjabi as the occasion demands.

Whether he is on the political throne of the state or not, he is called “Maharaj”, even by his detractors - a reflection of both his lineage, as well as his personal style. Yet, right now, there is no throne (read official position) for this king, who is seen as the tallest leader that the Congress can field in the political arena of Punjab.

Leadership, and the lack of it, has been preoccupying his mind. He finds it in Maharaja Ranjit Singh, on whom he has just written a book, and the lack of it among the present rulers of Punjab, especially his arch rival Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal, who he says, “can’t govern” and is only good at “campaigning and distributing largesse”. “Punjab can’t be in a worse state than it is today,” he adds, citing the lack of a dynamic industrial policy, budget deficit, lack of progress and other issues.

When Akalis hit back, they attack his personal lifestyle, not his administration. His “culture of leisure and pleasure,” provides much fuel for the rumour mill, and figured prominently in the election meetings during the last polls, when the Akali refrain was: “He is not a man of the people, he has a raja-like style. By the time he gets up Badal Sahib has already visited half a dozen villages!” Amarinder Singh is also facing various corruption cases in courts, filed after the Akali Dal government came into power.

The 68-year-old scion of the erstwhile royal House of Patiala is a man of many parts. He is proud of the rank Captain that replaces ‘Maharaja’ in politically correct environments, earned as an officer commissioned in 1963. His stint as Chief Minister from 2002-2007, punctuated Badal’s reign, and he is a powerful speaker of the state’s interest at national-level meets.

There is an element of noblesse oblige in Amarinder Singh, the politician. His unflinching stand on riparian rights of Punjab surprised many, especially his seniors in the party who took him to task, but he stuck to his guns. A bureaucrat cites the clarity of his orders and how meetings then were result-oriented. Another who worked with him closely describes him as “decisive” and “forward looking”. And yet he opposed the proposed Patran nuclear plant in an energy-deficient state. “I am not against nuclear power, but I am concerned about the fallout in a densely populated zone,” he asserts.

When Amarinder Singh entered public life 30 years ago and was elected Congress MP from Patiala in 1980, he owed it to his friend Rajiv Gandhi, a fellow Dosco. He, however, parted ways with the Congress in 1984 in protest against Operation Bluestar.

Consistent about the issue, even though he joined the Akali Dal, and was a Minister in the Surjit Singh Barnala government, he quit when, in May 1986, there was an armed action and NSG commandoes stormed the Golden Temple.

Yet, later, along with Badal and Barnala, he signed the 1994 “Amritsar Declaration” that endorsed the controversial 1978 Anandpur Sahib Resolution which demanded greater autonomy for Punjab.

Amarinder Singh wore the Akali Dal blue for 12 years before returning to the Congress white in 1996. His direct access to Sonia Gandhi has helped him weather many a storm, even as his detractors protested his inaccessibility to them.

The Akalis, with whom he had a cosy relationship till he filed corruption cases against the Badals, view him as a major threat even though his party has not yet asked him to spearhead its campaign in Punjab. But many see it as inevitable, given the TINA factor- there is no alternative.

When not otherwise engaged, he is still politically active. He has challenged his September 2008 expulsion from the state Assembly. “We are waiting for the Supreme Court’s judgement on the issue,” he says, sounding positive about its outcome.

He vociferously opposed the withdrawal of the so-called vendetta cases. He presented himself in a court for a hearing on the Ludhiana City Centre case on Saturday. At a press conference later, it was evident that state Congress leaders have begun rallying around him. Yet the polls are due in Punjab in February 2012 and the Captain and his team are waiting for a direction from the Congress chief regarding his role in the party. “… Madam (Sonia Gandhi) will decide,” Amarinder says, playing safe.

Congress rival Rajinder Kaur Bhattal, however, does not miss an opportunity to brief the media on how “Amarinder is promoting an un-Congress like culture and is inaccessible”. The former Chief Minister, however, is quick to defend himself. “How can I be inaccessible, I visit every block in Punjab…. These are stories planted by my detractors.”

Has the time out of power changed the Maharaja who is known as an epicure and an aesthete? In some regards, perhaps. For one, he has stopped taking his evening drink on medical advice. (His grandfather, Maharaja Bhupindra Singh, made Patiala a name saluted by whoever pours a large peg.) “I am an experienced man … things are different today,” he maintains.

How different, only time will tell. Controversies have cropped up around him from time to time, and many are about those with whom he associates himself - his friend of long-standing, IAS officer S. K. Sinha; media adviser B.I.S. Chahal, Patiala’s pilot Manpreet Kaur Sekhon, and Lahore’s journalist Aroosa Alam … all earned him miles of newsprint, yet the Teflon coating stayed intact, since he is “expected to be different from the common man”.

‘Maharani’ Preneet Kaur, his wife, is Minister of State for External Affairs in the UPA government. For decades, she was the person who interacted extensively with common people and nurtured his constituency assiduously. Well, she is said to be “peeved” at her husband, though she has maintained a stoic silence, which has earned her brownie points in the general public for “showing grace”. His son, Raninder Singh, lost the Bathinda seat to the Badal bahu, Harsimrat Kaur.

Proud to have served as ADC to the celebrated Lt-General Harbaksh Singh during the 1965 War, Amarinder Singh has been studying military history and has written well-received books like “Lest We Forget” that speaks about the battles fought in the 1965 War, and “A Ridge Too Far” on the Kargil conflict.

What has he learnt from his study of history? “People respond to leadership. A leader must have the courage to stand against the current if he is convinced that he is right.”

His vision for Punjab includes agricultural diversification and it becoming a commercial hub. Leadership. He wants to provide it, and has studied it in his latest book, “The Last Sunset: Rise and Fall of the Lahore Durbar”, which is already a best-seller and has received positive reviews.

The launch of “Rise and Fall…” was much talked about because of those who attended it, especially a glamorous Pakistani journalist and her entourage. The launch at Chandigarh, a week or so later, was talked about because of who did not attend it - Praneet Kaur, the ‘Maharani’ of Patiala. Sometimes substantial achievements are eclipsed by the flashes of controversy, but that’s an old story for Captain Amarinder Singh.

The article was published in The Tribune on March 30, 2010

Ramu Gandhi was a brilliant philosopher, a mentor and a guide. He was also the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi. I met Ramu when I was a student at St Stephens College, Delhi and he influenced my life in many ways.
In college, we studied Ramu’s book on A N Whitehead, a slim volume whose importance was inversely proportional to its size. It was Ramu’s venture into fiction, Munniya’s Light that made me write about him, and for this interview I met him in Delhi. Please click here to read it.

Last year, I was to write an obituary when I found that Ramu had passed away. Please click here to read it.
Mahatma Gandhi was a great man who did not devote much time to his family. His children were not chips of the same block, but the grandson that I met had many qualities of a great man, and a formidable intellect. As the world remembers Gandhiji, my thoughts go to the only tangible link I had with him, Ramu Gandhi.

Guru Granth Sahib—The Guru Eternal by Dr Mohinder Singh is a magnificently produced volume and with impeccable it has been released by the Vice President of India at a time when the Sikhs worldwide are celebrating the ‘Gurta Gaddi Divas’.

Please click here to read my review of the book.

I had written, in 2004, an exhaustive article on Guru Granth Sahib, which you may be interested in reading. You can access it at this URL.

Let’s rededicate ourselves to following the teaching of the great Gurus on this occasion and follow the path they have shown us.

“Excellence among Sikhs”, was the theme of a function held some time ago at the Taj hotel in Chandigarh, and it seems that I forgot to post anything about it. It was organised by Rajwant Singh of Washington DC, an old friend and I was happy to be a part of the event that celebrated the success of achievers. Please click here to read more.

India breaks the supercomputer glass ceiling

It is indeed a proud moment for India as Tata’s Eka supercomputer has made a spectacular entry as the most powerful computer in Asia. It has also been ranked as the fourth fastest in the world in the Top 500 ranking of supercomputers.
What exactly is a supercomputer, you might well ask. Well, it is a computer that works at many times the speed of normal computer and has immense power compared to the normal computers that we see.
The main use of supercomputers is to perform highly calculation-intensive tasks. They would include problems involving quantum physics, analysing data to forecast weather, research on climate and global warming, molecular modelling, etc. No wonder such computers are to be seen at top universities, or with the defence services, or at research laboratories.
In fact, the Top500 list is released twice a year by the University of Tennessee, USA; Mannheim University, Germany, and at NERSC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory which together rank supercomputers worldwide. The test is based on the well respected Linpack N*N Benchmark, which checks processor speed and scalability.
The computer was built by Tata engineers at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) in Pune. It cost Rs 118.11 crore ($30 million). The supercomputer was designed by Tata engineers and built with off-the-rack hardware sourced from Hewlett Packard that helped keep the cost of the supercomputer relatively low.
Eka performs at 120 teraflops (trillion floating point calculations). The speed of floating point operations, or FLOPS, is of significance in scientific calculations, since it involves numbers with a floating or decimal point.
The top supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene/L, which has been installed in the US, beat others by a tremendous margin; it was almost three times faster than any other machine and four times faster than Eka. It performed at 478.2 teraflops. While American supercomputers have dominated the world, now there is a change in the pecking order, and India’s entry into the elite list is a matter of considerable significance.
Of course, a computer is only useful if it has applications that harness its power productively. It is here that Tata’s software muscle comes into play. CRL has said it is developing applications in as diverse areas as neural simulation, molecular simulation, computational fluid dynamics and crash simulation. S. Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL, highlighted the role of the system in earthquake and Tsunami modelling, as well as its usage in understanding the economy and designing drugs.
Earlier, Param supercomputers, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), also in Pune, had propelled India’s entry into the supercomputer arena and Param Padma was ranked No. 171 on the Top500 list in 2003.
The network-centric storage architecture of Param computers is based on state-of-the-art Storage Area Network (SAN) technologies that ensure high performance, scalability and reliable storage.
There was a time when the US had refused to allow a Cray supercomputer to be sent to India. Today, India is in a position to not only make supercomputers but also export them, if it desires to do so. Eka means one in Sanskrit. It is the one that has showcased of India’s growing computer power to the world.

This article was published in The Tribune on November 16, 2007.