Creating a culture of accelerators in varsities
A.S. Prashar
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 5
Prof H.S. Hans may be 80 but he is certainly not out. A former Professor and Head of the Physics Department at Panjab University here, he remains as passionately committed to his love for nuclear physics as ever.

Professor Hans turned 80 today, and as he sat back in his drawing room, he reflected with a great degree of satisfaction on the efforts he has made over the past five decades for nurturing a “culture of accelerators in the universities across India” for fostering research in nuclear physics. Although no longer in the best of health, he makes it a point to visit his room in the science laboratory in the Department of Physics at the university two or three times a week to apprise himself of the latest in the field.

Although he is no longer officially associated with the university, he continues to help the authorities in planning and providing for future expansion of research activities in nuclear physics in the department. It is because of his efforts in association with Dr I.M. Govil, present head of the Physics Department, that the Government of India is now considering a proposal to set up a second and more modern accelerator in the department. He is confident that it will be sanctioned by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India.

Professor Hans recalls how, way back in 1980, he embarked on a project of creating a world-class accelerator facility in the universities and wrote to the UGC on behalf of the entire nuclear physics community in India, for which a special meeting was called in the Department of Atomic Energy. It took four years, and the involvement of many physicists at the national level for the Nuclear Science Centre to be established in Delhi at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1984. Interestingly, the Department of Physics at Panjab University is today perhaps the biggest user of this facility. Professor Hans established one of the first accelerators at Aligarh University in 1958.

He was offered the post of a Professor and Head of the Department of Physics at Kurukshetra University in 1965, which he joined, and immediately set about the task of bringing the cyclotron to India. It took him some time to convince the Government of India to fund the project. Finally, in 1967, Dr I.M. Govil and Professor Hans went to Rochester and brought the cyclotron to Kurukshetra. Dr Govil had done his Ph.D. with Prof Hans earlier at Aligarh and had joined the Department of Physics at Kurukshetra. It has now been upgraded to the Centre of Advanced Studies — one of the five in the whole country.

No more science seats in model schools
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 5
Admissions to the science stream in the 12 government model schools got over today at a cut-off percentage of 65.8 while two ordinary schools of Sector 20 and 27 still have a few seats left between them.

On the fourth day of centralised admissions for Class XI at Government Model Senior Secondary School (GMSSS), Sector 23, seats were exhausted in six more model schools. The highest cut-off percentage of 71.4 for the day was recorded in government school of Sector 10. The last student to be admitted to a model school was in Sector 18, where admissions closed at 65.8 per cent.

Admissions also closed in the three schools in Sector 16, Sector 35 and Sector 40 for commerce. The cut-off percentages for Sector 16 and 35 was 71.2, while in Sector 40 it was 66 per cent.

As many as 827 students were admitted today. Out of these, 481 opted for science, 230 for commerce, 76 for humanities and 40 students for the vocational stream. Cases of students with 60 per cent marks and above would be taken up on July 7. 

CBSE to hold compartment examinations
Our Correspondent

Chandigarh, July 5
CBSE compartment examination 2003 of the All-India Senior School Certificate (Class XII) and All-India Secondary School (Class X) will start on July 29. The Class XII examination will be held on July 29, while Class X examination will continue till August 5 under the Chandigarh region. As per a note issued by the Regional Officer, CBSE, Mr P.I. Sabu, a total of 6,166 candidates will appear for Class XII examination and 14,332 candidates for Class X.

The admit cards of all regular students have been dispatched to the respective schools and the private candidates will get their cards on the address mentioned in their application forms. Regular candidates could collect their admit cards from their schools after July 15. Private candidates, who failed to receive admit cards by July 23, can contact the Regional Office, CBSE, Sector 32-C, here.

20 PNB cases settled
Our Correspondent

Chandigarh, July 5
Twenty cases were settled and Rs 7.96 lakh was awarded as compensation to litigants in the Special Lok Adalat organised by the State Legal Services Authorities (SLSA) on its premises in Sector 9, here today.

The Judge, Permanent Lok Adalat, Mr Sant Parkash, along with Dr Ramneek Sharma and Mr R.L. Sabharwal, both members of the SLSA, participated in settling cases relating to Punjab National Bank. While giving details about the facilities being provided to the litigants, Mr Parkash said: “A Permanent Lok Adalat is also functioning daily on the district courts premises in Sector 17, where all civil cases, including matrimonial disputes, bank loan matters, land acquisition cases, matters relating to industrial disputes, landlord-tenant disputes, revenue matters, motor accident claims and criminal cases of compoundable nature, are settled amicably. Any party can move an application on a plain paper without court fee for getting the dispute settled. The award of the Lok Adalat is a decree and shall be final with no right of further appeal”.

CT scan tender: HC issues notice
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 5
Issuing notice of motion, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has directed that the opening of tenders regarding CT scan facility in Sector 32 Government Medical College and Hospital would be subject to the final decision of the writ petition.

The orders were passed on a petition filed by a firm challenging the rejection of their tender. Describing the rejection of their tender as ‘arbitrary’, the petitioner had added that the move to invite fresh tenders was not valid.

Arguing before the court, counsel for the petitioner added that the clause of five per cent yearly increased had been maintained. Going into the background, he added that their rates were the lowest, but the UT Administration had been asking them to forgo the five per cent increase issue. He further added that in June, the earnest money was returned and re-tendering was ordered in an ‘arbitrary manner’.

CULTURE

WESTERN FILM REVIEW
High on action, low on substance
Rajiv Kaplish

CHANDIGARH: It gets shriller by the minute. An hour of shrieks and screams and one wonders whether one has come to a movie theatre or a war zone. With guns blazing, shoulder-fired rockets blowing army trucks to smithereens and buildings getting reduced to rubble, “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” (KC) comes as a relentless audio-visual assault on nerves.

High on adrenaline and low on substance, the sequel is an assortment of absurdities. Starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu as the tough trio which is called upon to retrieve a pair of silver coins with encrypted details of everyone in federal witness protection programme and Demi Moore as their bete noire, the movie breaks new ground in stupidity. Consider this: the three hurtle down a bridge several feet high and laugh their way home without a scratch. Or this: a US Justice Department official moves around in a private jet ordering the arrest of drug warlords on the roof of a theatre.

Alternately frolicking in wet and soapy slow motion and whipping out revolvers, Barrymore, Diaz and Liu display utter disregard for sensible acting.

What they lack, special effects compensate for. With a plot that moves at a bewildering pace and a director whose imagination seems to have run riot, the only way to see “ Charlie’s ..... is to run with it. Or, be run over.

Balwant Gargi’s plays staged 
Theatre festival from July 28 to 30
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, July 5
This evening brought alive the memory of Balwant Gargi, the man who rose Punjabi theatre to new heights. Coming together on a common platform, three organisations — the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the Chandigarh School of Drama and the Punjab Sangeet Natak Akademi — presented two famous Punjabi plays of Gargi.

Thanks to the stingy dialogues, so basic to the scripts of Gargi, as well as powerful conceptualisation of plays by Gursharan Singh, the open-air auditorium of Punjab Kala Bhavan, Sector 16, was filled beyond capacity, despite inclement weather. The most important announcement of the day came from playwright Gursharan Singh who had earlier promised to conduct a theatre festival in the memory of Gargi. The festival has been postponed because of the ongoing renovation work in the Tagore Theatre. It will now be conducted form July 28 to 30.

The festival will roll with the staging of Gargi’s most celebrated drama work ‘Kesro’. On July 29 ‘Pattan di Bedi’ and ‘Dr Palta’ will be staged. The final day will see the presentation of ‘Bomb Case’ and ‘Jawai’, the two plays which were staged at Kala Bhavan this evening as well.

The first presentation of the evening was ‘Jawai’, a play full of satire on political machinery and officialdom, which cares a little for aspirations of the people. The play centres around an old woman who grants asylum to a fugitive, by confessing to the police that he is his son-in-law. The events take a turn and the fugitive has to run away from the house. The moment he moves away, the actual son-in-law of the old woman lands on the scene and ends up being arrested by the police. Conceptualised very finely, the play was all about the dishonest police officials, who must fill their registers to show their work, irrespective of the quality of work they are doing.

The second play followed closely on the lines of the first. Where in ‘Jawai’, the police walks away with a wrong man, who has not committed any crime, in the second play ‘Bomb case’, the police arrests the protagonist on a baseless charge.

On the hunt for a man who is charged with making bombs, the police ransacks the house of an old woman after getting a tip-off that her son makes bombs. Little concerned about proving the charges before arresting the man in question, the police arrests the old woman’s son who plies a ‘tonga’. Unaware of the technical details, the police walks away with the wrong man, yet again.