Today’s Motto: ‘Potential has a shelf life’

This is Your Day:  TODAY:  Take a Determined Step Forward and Make History!

On this day, 20 Mar….

1815 – Napoleon enters Paris after escape from Elba, begins 100-day  short  rule.

1916 – Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was published as an academic paper.

1934 – The first test of a practical radar apparatus was made by Rudolf Kuhnold in Kiel Harbour, Germany, Chief of the German Navy Signals Research Department.

1945 – British troops liberate Mandalay, Burma from the Japanese. The Japanese had captured Mandalay in May 1942 and given to Netaji’s Azad Hind Fauz for offensives against British Indian  teritories.

1954 – 60,000 Viet Minh with heavy artillery surround 16,000 French troops, but the french held out for a further 6 weeks before being overcome by the greater numbers and defeated.

1959 – For the first time, officials of the Indian government confirmed reports of widespread resistance to the Chinese occupying forces in Tibet. Open warfare erupted in the capital city of Lhasa.

1977 – Prime Minister  Indira Gandhi loses Lok Sabha  election from Rae Bareli and Sanjay Gandhi from Amethi.

1997 – Maharashtra (like H.P.) proposes to make caring for aged parents mandatory.

1999 – Bertrand Piccard of Switzerland and Brian Jones of Britain complete non-stop balloon circumnavigation around the world.

2017 – Indian rivers Yamuna and the Ganges declared “living entities” by court in the state of Uttarakhand.

2019 – South Sudan is world’s least happy, according to annual World Happiness Report (map credit-dreamstime.com).

2020 – Four men who had gang-raped and murdred a woman on a bus in New Delhi in 2012, are hanged. This was country’s first hanging since 2013.

2023 – UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says world has less than a decade to stop catastrophic warming: must reduce greenhouse gases by half by 2030, and cease adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by early 2050s.

Born….

1952 – Anand Armitraj, top tennis player and elder brother of Vijay Amritraj. Both paired togather to win Davis Ciup for India  against South Africa in 1974.  Their youngest brother Ashok and cousin Prakash  also played international tennis. Stephan Amritraj, son of Anand  lives in California and  plays plays for  America (pic credit-tennisusa.com).

1966 – Alka Yagnik,  popular  singer of many younth  romance, passion songs of 1980s onwards like Ek Do Teen…… etc.  Alka has sung over 2500 songs in 45 years of  musical journey including pop, devotional bhajans  etc.  She has won 2 National Film, 2 BFJA and 7 Filmfare awards including 37 nominations. (video credit-TIPS)

RIP….1727 – Sir Isaac Newton. English physicist and mathematician who made seminal discoveries in several areas of science, and was the leading scientist of his era. His study of optics included using a prism to show white light could be split into a spectrum of colours. The statement of his three laws of motion are fundamental in the study of mechanics. He was the first to describe the moon as falling (in a circle around the earth) under the same influence of gravity as a falling apple, embodied in his law of universal gravitation.

2000 – Unidentified militants gun down 35 Sikhs in the south Kashmir village of Chatti Singhpora in one of the worst incidents of violence in the State.

Titbits…. 1966 – The World Cup was stolen while on display at Westminster Hall in London (pic credit-besoccer.co.uk).

You may have known….

India has three of the world’s top ten megacities – one more than China. According to the UN, Delhi is now the second-largest urban agglomeration in the world, with Mumbai ranked seventh and Calcutta tenth.

 {Compiled by Lt. Gen. (R)  Raj Kadyan}