Sushma Swaraj Quotes
Our efforts are to be directed towards narrowing the gap between the study of shastras and science.
Swaraj, Sushma. "Inaugural Address at the 16th World Sanskrit Conference." Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, 28 June 2015.
This speech was given in the early days of WWII when it was far from clear that we would win.
At the time few chemists or physicists were involved with biological and medical research, nor did the physicians and biologists of the day have much background or understanding of physics or chemistry. Abel was right on, and today the best medical and biological researchers have had extensive physics and chemistry research and much of the research is being conducted by multidisciplinary teams of scientists.
This quotation from this letter was one of the key items of evidence showing that Wallace had independently developed the concept of Evolution before Darwin published his famous treatise. Darwin began formulating his theory of natural selection in the late 1830s but he went on working quietly on it for twenty years. He wanted to amass a wealth of evidence before publicly presenting his idea. During those years he corresponded briefly with Wallace (right), who was exploring the wildlife of South America and Asia. Wallace supplied Darwin with birds for his studies and decided to seek Darwin's help in publishing his own ideas on evolution. He sent Darwin his theory in 1858, which, to Darwin's shock, nearly replicated Darwin's own…. Joseph Dalton Hooker arranged for both Darwin's and Wallace's theories to be presented to a meeting of the Linnaean Society in 1858. However, Wallace seems to have been onto the idea of evolution over a decade before as this quotation shows.
Sushma Swaraj (pronunciation (help·info)) was an Indian politician and a Supreme Court lawyer. A senior leader of Bharatiya Janata Party, Swaraj served as the Minister of External Affairs of India in the first Narendra Modi government (2014–2019). She was the second woman to hold the office, after Indira Gandhi. She was elected seven times as a Member of Parliament and three times as a Member of the Legislative Assembly. At the age of 25 in 1977, she became the youngest cabinet minister of Indian state of Haryana. She also served as 5th Chief Minister of Delhi for a short duration in 1998 and became the First female Chief Minister of Delhi.