Posts

Showing posts from 2017

Invention of bus in London

Image
A brief history of bus service in London In England the first bus service which was launched in 1662 was more like horse carriages and was invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal. D ecades after this invention took place,  prototypical British gentleman scientist and inventor   Sir Goldsworthy Gurney designed the steam-powered bus in 1830. Blaise  Pascal named his public bus service in Paris ‘carriages’ but those buses ceased to operate after 15 years and they did not appear again until horse-powered multi-person carriages emerged in Paris again in about 1819 or 1820. "Omnibus" is a Latin word meaning "for all." They were more like modern-day buses custom made for passengers’ comfort, to transport multiple people along a route and allow them to board or debark at locations along the route without the necessity of having stations. The first regular bus route appears to have started from Manchester to Liverpool, beginning in 1824. ...

Dhananjay Chatterjee's Execution

Image
Criminal Justice Dhananjay Chatterjee was a guard in a building where a teen-aged girl named Hetal Parekh was found dead in March 1990. He was convicted of having raped and killed her and was hanged on his 39th birthday, August 14, 2004, protesting his innocence until the end. His execution followed a shrill campaign waged by the wife of the then West Bengal chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya. Chatterjee’s appeals were rejected by the then president APJ Abdul Kalam on the advice of arguably India’s worst home minister, Shivraj Patil, going by historian Ramachandra Guha’s estimation . In a similar situation, his predecessor in Rashtrapati Bhavan, KR Narayanan, had applied his mind wonderfully, as emerges from an anecdote narrated by his secretary, Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Delivering the People’s Union of Civil Liberties’ 35th JP Memorial Lecture in Bangalore on March 23 in 2015 earlier this year, Gandhi described how he had received a call late at night from Chennai regarding ...
Image
House pigeons in the neighbourhood.