A Nobel within 5 years
I'm not flattered by the honour done to me. This is a small achievement. If there is anything that I aspire for, it is the Nobel Prize. You will find that I get that in five years.
I'm not flattered by the honour done to me. This is a small achievement. If there is anything that I aspire for, it is the Nobel Prize. You will find that I get that in five years.
You're the top, you're Mahatma Gandhi,
You're the top! you're Napoleon brandy,
You're the purple light, of a summer night in Spain,
You're the National Gallery, you're Garbo's salary,
You're cellophane!
When viewed in this light, the achievement of the unknown Hindu who some time in the first centuries of our era discovered the principle of position assumes the proportions of a world-event. Not only did this principle constitute a radical departure in method, but we know now that without it no progress in arithmetic was possible.
The 1934 musical, Anything Goes includes the hit Cole Porter song titled, You're the top which includes the following lines of praise:
You're the top, you're Mahatma Gandhi,
You're the top! you're Napoleon brandy …
India's highest military decoration, the Param Vir Chakra, was designed by Savitri Khanolkar, a lady who was born Eve Yvonne Maday de Maros in Switzerland and was of Hungarian-Russian ancestry. She was married to Major-General Vikram Khanolkar of the Sikh Regiment.
Fela Kuti, often called Africa's Bob Marley, had a spiritual advisor named Professor Hindu who had the power to "kill and wake"—to kill a man and bring him back to life. Kuti turned down a million dollar deal with an American record label on Hindu advice.
Aryabhata I, wrote his famous astronomical treatise, Aryabhatiya, in 499 CE when he was only 23 years old.
When the first edition of the American poet, Walt Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson commented that it read like “a mixture of the Bhagavat Ghita [sic] and the New York Herald”.
Reginald Dyer, the Butcher of Amritsar, of Jallianwala Bagh infamy, was the youngest son of one Edward Dyer, the man often credited with establishing India's first successful brewery at Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh. It would eventually become Mohan Meakin Breweries.
Akbar, the greatest of the Mughals, could not read or write and was possibly also dyslexic.
After his first glimpse of Nanda Devi in 1948, the American mountaineering pioneer, Willi Unsoeld, dreamt of having a daughter named after the peak. 28 years later, his daughter, Nanda Devi Unsoeld, perished while climbing her namesake.