Timesofindia.com: Lasers to beam solar energy from space to earth

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Lasers to beam solar energy from space to earth
Space engineers plan to put satellites into orbit that can collect large amounts of energy from the Sun and convert it into a infrared laser beam transmitted back to Earth as an alternative to the planet���s fast-disappearing energy sources.

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Timesofindia.com: Copenhagen accord doesn't affect sovereignty: Govt

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Copenhagen accord doesn't affect sovereignty: Govt
Jairam Ramesh rejected Opposition's charge of compromising with the country's interests at Copenhagen meet. He told Rajya Sabha that the provision for "international consultation and analysis" will in no way hit India's sovereignty.

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Timesofindia.com: India to question China on market access, balance of trade

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India to question China on market access, balance of trade
Commerce minister Anand Sharma is likely to question China���s purchasing efforts when it comes to Indian goods. He will also warn China that it should not take market access to India for granted unless it is ready to reciprocate.

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We will fight for water someday

Today, as we realize that water has become a precious commodity and we do not have an unlimited supply of fresh potable and usable water, we have started to understand its importance. After all 60% of living bodies are made up of water and we certainly can not make it with fruit juices or diet pepsi. We will require water and a lot of it.

In this situation we as humans will try to get the maximum that is possible. In future we may fight out each other for water. Till ten years back , we never felt that water will become a commodity. After all god had provided it free to all of us. Fresh air and water were the birthday gifts from god. Well, not for the childern who are coming to this world now.

It is not very difficult today to imagine that , humans and animals will fight someday for water. We will have to find new sources of water to survive further. Water will be scarce on this planet.

Strange it is, to think that someday water will be scarce on a planet which is 71% water. This is a watery planet. There is water everywhere. We need to learn to tap our oceans and get the water. And this should not be difficult at all. We have been able to dig in the center of earth and find the fuel. Water is present right in front of our balcony windows. There is unlimited supply of water for all of us, at least for now. Though I am not aware, what will happen to the salinity of ocean and marine life if we start drinking the ocean water but a believe in the law of conservation of mass. Water will remain on the planet , may be in some other form and eventually will return to sea to quench our thirst the next day.

We need not fight , at least on this issue.

The world sat up and took notice of the Tata Group in the first decade of the 21st century. How? A string of prestigious acquisitions

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abroad and an unimaginably cheap car, transformed the 140-year-old Indian business house into a global conglomerate. However, it will be interesting to see where the group heads for in the next decade when its charismatic chairman Ratan Tata makes way for a younger person to take over the reins.

Just imagine, at the beginning of the millennium, the Tata group was staring at two disappointments — a huge loss of Rs 550 crore at its flagship company Telco (now Tata Motors) and the financial mess at Tata Finance. However, after a decade, the group is a name to reckon with in the international corporate scene on the basis of Ratan Tata's daring acquisitions of coveted global assets, starting with Tetley in the fall of 2000 and moving to top gear with Jaguar Land Rover in June 2008.

Tata Steel's $13 billion Corus acquisition is the largest overseas deal by an Indian firm. The group's revenues have jumped nine times from Rs 35,937 crore in the late 90's to Rs 3,25,334 crore in 2008-09, with 65% of the revenues coming from overseas.

But apart from these big-ticket deals, what made the group tick was the creation of a business model that will tap the masses — a model that was inspired by the bottom of the pyramid theme. And here's where the Nano drives in — an almost impossible feat, a people's car with a Rs 1 lakh tag.

It was the brainchild of Ratan Tata, a Capricorn, who turned 72 a couple of days ago, became the group's chairman in 1991. According to a a Tata veteran, the group has gone through three phases since then. One, he established control over the group, which was then tightly managed by a few people. Two, he kicked off the restructuring and restrategising programme: He set a goal to be among the top three players in the businesses the group has a presence in, to increase the group's minuscule holding to a comfortable position; and formation of a common brand identity in the two-dimensional Tata blue logo.

Third, perhaps the most ambitious, was building a global empire. The group had some setbacks too during the decade. For example, the abandonment of the $3 billion investment in Bangladesh, pulling out the Nano project from West Bengal, the terror attacks on its hotel, Taj Mahal Palace and Tower, and the financial stress it experienced as a result of the global meltdown.

However, the next decade would see a major change in the Tata group. Ratan Tata would retire from Tata Sons in 2012, when he turns 75, to make way for a successor. However, he may continue to be the chairman of Sir Dorabji Tata Trust and Sir Ratan Trust — the two charitable trusts that hold a major stake in Tata Sons — a position his predecessor JRD Tata held till his death. He has built a global business empire. What's next for the Tata Group?

Our home is at risk

After three centuries of relentless damage to earth's delicately balanced ecology, humanity finally appears to be waking up to the havoc it has

wrought. The past decade saw the most clinching evidence ever - provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that human activity had pushed greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere to almost the tipping point. Another few decades of business as usual, and our planet will hit an irreversible slide into catastrophic climate changes, destroying civilisation as we know it today. The decade is ending with a failure to agree on an acceptable way out, but Copenhagen also marks the first glimmer of an awareness that time is running out for humanity.

The coming decade will thus be dominated by global efforts to cut emissions and change over to a life less rooted in the carbon economy. If an agreement is not reached in the next two to three years, and carbon emissions are not reduced from 2015 onwards , the target of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius by 2050 will not be achieved. Indeed, a confidential UN document that was leaked at Copenhagen shows that the world is headed towards a three degrees Celsius rise by 2050 unless the developed world takes much larger emission cuts than they have been promising so far.

Scientists are agreed that at the present level of warming, extreme weather events, rising sea levels and shrinking glaciers will increasingly become evident in the coming decade, with severe consequences for agriculture, health and the global economy.

The big hope lies in increasing use of emission-reducing technology. Reaching the 2°C target will require a broad portfolio of possible technological pathways , says Brigitte Knopf of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, who is associated with the IPCC. "There is no silver bullet of one technology that does the job. However, for ambitious mitigation targets, some technologies become very important: bio-energy use, carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), and renewable energy," she told TOI-Crest .

The bill for these efforts will come to a few percentage points of global GDP. If technologies do not become available, either costs or temperature will go up, says Knopf. Several breakthroughs have been made in green technologies for automobiles, and these will get commercialised soon. A big push towards use of solar, wind and geothermal energies can also be expected.

Happily, progress has been made in containing or reversing some aspects of environmental damage in the past decade. Deforestation, which was as high as 8.9 million hectares per year in 1990-2000 , dropped to about 7.3 million hectares per year in the past decade. This has happened because of serious forestry initiatives by several countries including China, India, US and several South American countries. However, in some of the top deforestation regions like Indonesia and Brazil, the rate is still high. Deforestation contributes about a quarter of annual carbon emissions , so efforts to check it are being accorded top priority.

But there's bad news when it comes to endangered species. Advancing urbanisation, deforestation and poaching are destroying other forms of life at an alarming rate. In 2000, the Red List prepared by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had 10,533 species listed as threatened. In 2009, this number had risen to 17,291. Several threatened animal species became extinct in the past decade, including the Baiji dolphin (China), the West African Black Rhino, the Golden Toad (Costa Rica), the Spix's Macaw (Brazil) and Po'o-uli bird (Hawaii, US). The coming decade will be a test of survival for many threatened species, including the royal Bengal tiger. It will also determine whether we can save the earth itself from devastating climate change.

Yogi

Paramahansa Yogananda is recognized as one of the greatest emissaries to the West of India's ancient wisdom. His life and teachings continue to be a source of light and inspiration to people of all races, cultures and creeds.

Birth & Childhood: He was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh on January 5, 1893, in Gorakhpur, India, into a devout and well-to-do Bengali family. From his earliest years, he developed a depth of awareness and experience in the spiritual. In his youth he sought out many of India's sages and saints, hoping to find an illumined teacher to guide him in his spiritual quest.

Spritual Search : It was in 1910, at the age of 17, that he met and became a disciple of the revered Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri. In the hermitage of this great master of Yoga he spent the better part of the next ten years, receiving Sri Yukteswar's strict but loving spiritual discipline. After he graduated from Calcutta University in 1915, he took formal vows as a monk of India's venerable monastic Swami Order, at which time he received the name Yogananda (signifying bliss, ananda, through divine union, yoga).

Beginning of World Mission: Yogananda began his life's work with the founding, in 1917, of a "how-to-live" school for boys, where modern educational methods were combined with yoga and spirituality. In 1920, he was invited to serve as India's delegate to an international congress of religious leaders convening in Boston where he presented his discourse "The Science of Religion." For the next several years, he lectured and taught on the East coast and in 1924 embarked on a cross-continental speaking tour.

Pioneer of Yoga: Over the next decade, Yogananda traveled and lectured widely, speaking to capacity audiences in many of the largest auditoriums in the US - from New York's Carnegie Hall to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He emphasized the underlying unity of the religions, and taught universally applicable methods for attaining personal experience of God. To serious students of his teachings he introduced the soul-awakening techniques of Kriya Yoga, a sacred spiritual science originating millenniums ago in India.

Among those who became his students were many prominent figures in science, business, and the arts, including horticulturist Luther Burbank, operatic soprano Amelita Galli-Curci, George Eastman (inventor of the Kodak camera), poet Edwin Markham, and symphony conductor Leopold Stokowski. In 1927, he was officially received at the White House by President Calvin Coolidge, who had become interested in the newspaper reports of his activities.

Return to India: In 1935, Yogananda began an 18-month tour of Europe and India. During his yearlong sojourn in his native land, he spoke in cities throughout the subcontinent and enjoyed meetings with Gandhi, C. V. Raman, Ramana Maharshi and Anandamoyi Ma, among others. In this year his guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar, bestowed on him the title of “paramahansa” (supreme swan - a symbol of spiritual discrimination), that signifies one who manifests the supreme state of unbroken communion with God.

Books and Literature: During the 1930s, Yogananda began to withdraw somewhat from his nationwide public lecturing so as to devote himself to the writings that would carry his message to future generations. Yogananda's life story, "Autobiography of a Yogi", was published in 1946 and expanded by him in subsequent editions. A perennial best seller, the book has been in continuous publication since it first appeared and has been translated into 18 languages. It is widely regarded as a modern spiritual classic.

Final Years: On March 7, 1952, Yogananda entered mahasamadhi, a God-illumined master's conscious exit from the body at the time of physical death. His passing was marked by an extraordinary phenomenon. A notarized statement signed by the Director of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park testified: "No physical disintegration was visible in his body even 20 days after death.... This state of perfect preservation of a body is… an unparalleled one.... Yogananda's body was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability."

On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of Paramahansa Yogananda's passing, India issued a special commemorative stamp was issued in his honor, together with a tribute that read, in part: "The ideal of love for God and service to humanity found full expression in the life of Paramahansa Yogananda....Though the major part of his life was spent outside India, still he takes his place among our great saints."

Based on Yogananda’s biography at yogananda.com