April 2006
Monthly Archive
Sun 23 Apr 2006
Posted by Gavin Flood under
NewsNo Comments
Dear All,
Welcome to week 1 of the Trinity Term. I know that some of you will be working hard for exams and others beavering away on your theses, but I hope you’ll be able to attend some of this term’s events that we have lined up. Firstly I’d like to extend a very warm welcome indeed to our two visiting, Shivdasani scholars, Professors Bose and Rukmani who are here with us for this term. Please don’t be timid and feel free to ask them questions and discuss topics with them.
As for our first week we have the following:
Monday 24th April, 1.00 – Sanskrit Lunch, Balliol College.
Tuesday 25th April, 2.00–3.30pm, OCHS library
Jonathan Edelmann (Harris-Manchester College) ‘A Way to Relate Hinduism and Science’.
Jonathan will be telling us about his research and interesting new developments in the science and religion area.
In case anyone wants to see me, I have to be away today (Monday) and then on Weds I have to give a talk in Lampeter so will be away from late morning.
Have a good first week everyone!
Gavin Flood
Fri 14 Apr 2006
Posted by Shaunaka Rishi under
NewsNo Comments
Summary:
This is a review of the evidence base relating to the demographic, socio-economic and cultural characteristics of ‘emerging’ faith communities, specifically the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh populations together with likely future trends within them. The evidence base that was reviewed was selected according to: its relevance to the ODPM’s strategic priorities of housing supply and demand, decent places to live, tackling disadvantage; delivering better services, and promoting the development of the English regions, and; its bearing on the relationship between faith and other equalities strands in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability. Only available online:http://www.odpm.gov.uk/index.asp?id=1165319
Department: Office of the Deputy Prime Minister
Date of publication: 12/04/06
Thu 13 Apr 2006
Posted by Shaunaka Rishi under
GeneralNo Comments
Our lecture and seminar list for Trinity term (April - June) has been posted on the web to: http://www.ochs.org.uk/edu_progs/index.html and has been emailed to those on our list.
We are honoured to host four senior scholars this term, including Prof T Rukmani and Prof M Bose, from Canada, Dr W Johnston, from Wales and Dr G Schweig, from the US.
Of particular note is the Workshop on Gender and Hindu Texts to be held on the 19th of May, lead by three distinguished women scholars.
Tue 11 Apr 2006
Posted by Jessica Frazier under
General1 Comment
Has anyone seen the “Past and Present: 1000 Years of Islam in Britain” exhibition at the New Walk Museum in Leicester. This sounds fascinating - people should be doing more to recognise how far back in time the presence of different cultures in Britain really goes.
The recent ‘Brick Lane’ documentary (BBC?) on television showed how the present Bengali community in east London is the latest in a succession of waves of different cultures, going back centuries and even including the exiled french. The same building has been used for worship by 4 different religions within the modern period. One can extend the same model back to include the Normans, the Romans, the Vikings…
I’m looking forward to getting to the “Chennai Excite: New Work from South India” exhibition in London also. Has anyone seen?
Fri 7 Apr 2006
Posted by Shaunaka Rishi under
News[2] Comments
www.csmonitor.com
DELHI, INDIA, February 9, 2006: India’s centuries-old traditional knowledge, preserved and orally passed down through generations of households, is now going digital. Over the coming months, India will unveil a first-of-its-kind encyclopedia of 30 million pages, containing thousands of herbal remedies and eventually everything from indigenous construction techniques to yoga exercises. The project represents a 21st-century approach to safeguarding intellectual property of the ancient variety. The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) aims to prevent foreign entrepreneurs from claiming Indian lore as novel, and thus patenting it. “We do not want anyone selling our own knowledge to us,” says Ajay Dua, a top bureaucrat in the Department of Industrial Policy and Planning, which oversees intellectual-property rights. “Also, we would like anyone using our traditional knowledge to acknowledge that it is from India.” These concerns are not unfounded. In the p ast decade, India has fought several costly legal battles to get patents revoked. The impetus for TKDL came in 1997, after India successfully managed to get a US patent on the wound-healing properties of turmeric revoked. “This patent claimed the wound-healing properties as a novel finding, whereas practically every Indian housewife knows and uses it to heal wounds,” says R. A. Mashelkar, chief of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
The innovative idea to translate and digitize all the available information on traditional medicine was a collaborative effort of bureaucrats, scientists, and intellectual-property lawyers. “It was a way to prevent more patents from being granted. Also, it was a way of throwing the information open to the public because this traditional wealth is for the benefit of mankind,” says Rajeshwari Hariharan, a partner at K&S Partners, the law firm that represented India in several high-profile patent cases, including its fight over basmati rice, turmeric, and the antibacterial properties of the neem [margosa] leaf.
Of about 5,000 patents on plant-based formulations granted by the US in 2000, 80 percent were on plants of Indian origin, says Vinod Gupta, with the National Institute for Science Communication and Information Resources. Mr. Gupta heads a team of 150 doctors, scientists, and information- technology experts who have worked on the TKDL project since 2002. Poring over ancient medical texts and punching code into computers in Delhi, they have already documented more than 110,000 formulations culled from some 100 texts belonging to the three principal systems of traditional medicine - ayurveda, unani, and siddha. Patent officers call this information “prior art,” or previously existing knowledge about the applications of a product.. Normally, a patent application is rejected if there is prior art on the product. But in the patent offices of the US, Europe, and Japan, prior art is recognized only if it has been published in a journal or database. Traditional knowledge and folklore passed down orally - or contained in ancient, inaccessible texts - are not prior art. “We therefore revisited the past and modernized it,” says Gupta. The TKDL uses complex computer software to translate formulations written in ancient and medieval Indian languages to English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.