Colonel Barog: tall upright man of Barog Tunnel

THE 96.54-km-long Kalka-Shimla narrow gauge track in India has 102 operational tunnels that constitute about 8 per cent of the total length of the route.

This rail track, which was open to passengers on November 9, 1903, is a living tribute to those engineers who dared to bore a total of 107 tunnels and set an example of how a railway line could pass through a rough mountainous terrain without destroying the splendour and beauty of the hills.

Barog, the place:

Barog was settled in the early 20th century during the building of the narrow gauge Kalka-Shimla Railway in India. It is named after Colonel Barog, an engineer involved in building the railway track in 1903.

Barog tunnel as of now

Barog, the engineer, was responsible for designing a tunnel near the railway station. He commenced digging the tunnel from both sides of the mountain, which is quite common as it speeds up construction. However, he made mistakes in his calculation and while constructing the tunnel, it was found that the two ends of the tunnel did not meet. Barog was fined an amount of 1 Rupee by the British government. Unable to withstand the humiliation, Barog committed suicide. He was buried near the incomplete tunnel. The area came to be known as Barog after him.

Barog Tunnel Facts

Later it was constructed under Chief Engineer H.S. Harrington's supervison guided by a local sage, Bhalku, in a short period from July 1900 to September 1903 at a cost 8.40 Lakh rupees (Rupees 840,000).

This tunnel is the longest of the 103 operational tunnels on the route of the Shimla-Kalka Railway, which is 1143.61m long. 
Barog station is immediately after the tunnel. 

Barog tunnel is the straightest tunnel in the World. 
Trains take about 2.5 minutes to cross this tunnel, running at 25 kilometres per hour.

And The Man lies forgotten

He was buried in front of the tunnel, 

near the Kalka-Shimla national highway, 

about 1 km from Barog.

Ironically neither the Railway authorities nor the state government has done anything 

to maintain his grave. 

A signboard giving details about the sad end of Barog was put up near his grave 

but that too has now disappeared. 

As a result, it is now even difficult to locate the whereabouts of his grave. 

The forlorn tunnel has now been closed. 

The tunnel has a natural water source 

that meets the water demand of the Special Service Bureau (SSB), Dharampur.

# Reference notes:

* On July 8, 2008, the Kalka–Shimla Railway was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the World Heritage Site Mountain Railways of India. The Mountain Railways of India (including Darjeeling Himalayan Railway and Nilgiri Mountain Railway) and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai have already been declared as world heritage properties.

* Kalka–Shimla Railway

 

	0 km	Kalka
	6 km	Taksal
	11 km	Gumman
	17 km	Koti
	27 km	Sonwara
	33 km	Dharampur
	39 km	Kumarhatti
	43 km	Barog
	47 km	Solan
	53 km	Salogra
	59 km	Kandaghat
	65 km	Kanoh
	73 km	Kathleeghat
	78 km	Shoghi
	85 km	Taradevi
	90 km	Totu (Jutogh)
	93 km	Summer Hill
	96 km	Shimla

# Consulted and thankfully shared from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalka%E2%80%93Shimla_Railway

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barog

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2002/20020615/windows/main4.htm

Joseph Dalton Hooker: man of Himalayan Journal

Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817 - 1911) is remembered as an eminent Victorian botanist and one of Charles Darwin's chief collaborators. Many know of his plant collecting expedition in the Himalayas, but few are aware of his voyage to Antarctica and visits to Syria, Lebanon, Morocco, the Rockies and California. In addition to his botanical skills, he was also an amateur artist who obsessively sketched landscape, flora and occasionally, people and buildings. Son of Sir William Jackson Hooker, also a botanist who researched the flora of Scotland and Iceland, and subsequently (1841) becoming the first director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Sir Joseph become the second director at Kew.

Apart from his letters home and Himalayan Journals, Sir Joseph is also the author of "Genera Plantarum" a monumental work on the flora of New Zealand, Antarctica and India. 

An outstanding scientific traveller:
It was chance that brought Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker to India. After his journey to the Antarctica he began searching for an area near the tropics for his next study. The choice could well have been the Andes and if that happened we would have lost out on a unique and rare classic.

Sir Joseph traversed the Central and eastern Himalayas in 1848, a time when no traveller or naturalist, however bedazzled by it's mystique, had ventured forth. Even today, more than a hundred years later, ther is dearth of literature on the region.

Mindful and adventuresome, the author paid acute attention to detail. The journals are much more that exhaustive notes of botanical interest, they are packed with appealing anecdotes and significant sociological insights, all sprinkled with a pich of humour.

Beginning with a quaint palkee-ride from Calcutta, Hooker escorts us through the jungles of Behar and Birhboom, across the river Teesta and up the lofty mountain peaks in Tibet. His journals tell stories of acorns, bikh poison and conch shells, of rhubarb, syenite and Tibetan toys.

They tell of times and lives gone by, for us to relive them in our imagination and hand over in words to the generation after us. (from "Himalayan Journals - Notes of a Naturalist" by J.D. Hooker, 1854)

consulted and shared thankfully from:

# Himalayan Journal - Notes of a Naturalist by J.D. Hooker) 1854

# picture credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Dalton_Hooker_profile.jpg

Proby Cautley: Ganges Canal in India, an engineering marvel

The real story of a beautiful mind

Sir Proby Cautley (3 January 1802 – 25 January 1871), who conceived and built the Ganga Canal, which starts at Hardwar and passes through Roorkee on it's way across the Doab. 

Hardly anyone today has heard of Cautley, and yet surely his achievement outstrip that of many Englishmen in India - soldiers and statesmen who became famous for doing all the wrong things.

He was also instrumental in the establishment of the Roorkee college, the erstwhile Thomason College of Civil Engineering and now IIT Roorkee. One of the twelve student hostels of IIT Roorkee is named after him.

The plant genus Cautleya is named in his honour.

Cautley's Canal: an engineering marvel

Cautley came to India at the age of seventeen and joined the Bengal Artillery. In 1825, he assisted Captain Robert Smith, the engineer in charge of constructing the Eastern Yamuna Canal. By 1836, he was Superintendent - General of Canals. From the start, he worked towards his dream of building a Ganga Canal, and spent six months walking and riding through the jungles and countryside, taking each level and measurement himself, sitting up all night to transfer them to his maps. He was confident that a 500 kilometer canal was feasible. There were many objections and obstacles to his project, most of them financial, but Cautley persevered and eventually persuaded the east India Company to back him.

Digging the canal began in 1839. Cautley had to make his own bricks - millions of them - his own brick klin, and his own mortar. A hundred thousand tonnes of lime went into the mortar, the other main ingredient of which was surkhi, made by grinding over-burnt bricks to a powder. To reinforce the mortar, ghur, ground lentils and jute fibres were added to it.

Initially, opposition came from the priests in Hardwar, who felt that the waters of the holy Ganga would be imprisoned. Cautley pacified them by agreeing to leave a narrow gap in the dam through which the river water could flow unchecked. He won over the priests when he inaugurated his project with aarti, and the worship of Ganesh, God of Good Beginnings. He also undertook the the repair of the sacred bathing ghats along the river. The canal banks also to have their own ghats with steps leading down to the water.

The headworks of the canal are at the Hardwar, where the Ganga enters the plains after completing it's majestic journey through the Himalayas. Below Hardwar, Cautley had to dig new courses for some of the mountain torrents that threatened the canal. He collected them into four steams and took them over the canal by means of four passages. Near Roorkee, the land fell away sharply and here Cautley had to build an aqueduct, a masonry bridge that carries the Canal for half a kilometre across the Solani torrent - a unique engineering feat. At Roorkee the Canal is twenty-five metres higher than the parent river which flows almost parallel to it.

Most of the excavations work on the canal was done mainly by the Oads, a gypsy tribe who were professional diggers for most of the northwest India. They took great pride in their work. Through extrtemely poor, Cautley found them happy and carefree lot who worked in a very organized manner.

Watercolor (1863) titled, "The Ganges Canal, Roorkee, Saharanpur District (U.P.)." The canal was the brainchild of Sir Proby Cautley; construction began in 1840, and the canal was opened by Governor-General Lord Dalhousie in April 1854.

When canal was formally opened on the 8th April 1854, it's main channel was 348 miles long, it's branches 306 and the distributaries over 3,000. Over 767,000 acres in 5,000 villages were irrigated. One of it's main branches re-entered the Ganga at Kanpur (The main branch of the river passes Kanpur (behind IIT Kanpur campus) before breaking into several branches. A branch of it terminates Kanpur Jal Sansthan which comes from behind J. K. Temple.); it also had branches to Fatehgarh, Bulandshahar and Aligarh.

Cautley's achievements did not end there. He was also actively involved in Dr Falconer's fossil expeditions in Siwaliks. He presented to the British Museum an extensive collection of fossil mammalia - including hippopotamus and crocodile fossils, evidence that the region was once swampland or an inland sea. Other animals remain found here included the sabre-toothed tiger, Elephis ganesa, an elephant with a trunk ten-and-a-half feet long; a three-toed ancestor of the horse; the bones of a fossil ostrich; and the remains of a giant cranes and tortoises. Exciting times, exciting finds.

Nor did Cautley's interests and activities end in fossil excavation. My copy of Surgeon General Balfour's Cyclopedia of India (1873) lists a number of fascinating reports and papers by Cautley. He wrote on a submerged city, twenty feet underground, near Behut in the Doab; on the coal and lignite in the Himalayas; on gold washings in the Siwalik Hills, between the Jamuna and Sutlej rivers; on a new species of snake; on the mastodons of the Siwaliks; on the manufacture of tar; and on Panchukkis or corn mills.

How did he find time for all this, I wonder. Most of his life was spent in tents, overseeing the canal work or digging up fossils. He had a house in Mussoorie (one of the first), but he could not have spent much time in it. It is today part of the Manav Bharti School, and there is still a plaque in the office stating that Cautley lived here. Perhaps he wrote some of his reports and expositions during brief sojourns in the hills. It is said that his wife left him unable to compete against the rival attractions of canals and fossils remains.

I wonder, too, if there was any follow up on his reports of the submerged city - is it still there, waiting to be rediscovered....( by Ruskin Bond) 


References thankfully cited and shared:
#Natural History Museum

# picture credit: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proby_Cautley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganges_Canal 
kelvin paul atkins at http://verydingdong.com/?cat=17 
# text credit: Ruskin Bond              

Mountain man

We face barriers in our lives every day.  

Maybe we won’t physically break down mountains, 

but through our commitment to our promises we can create change a little bit every day.

Here is a real story from India, 

which inspires us to the core of our heart !!

He carved a 360 foot long, 25 foot high, and 30 foot wide road, so that vehicles could get through. It took him 22 years, from 1960 to 1982.
Read more at http://www.omg-facts.com/History/A-Man-Carved-A-Tunnel-Through-A-Mountain/54003#TcfIHyqWxP3DraMF.99

Dashrath Manjhi (1934 – 17 August 2007) : the man who moved a mountain.

Dasrath Manjhi, a landless farmer from India, made history after he spent over two decades chiseling away at a mountain with rudimentary tools, in order to create a road for his community

he constructed a 360 feet long, 30 feet high and 25 feet wide passage through Gehlour hills with a hammer, chisel and nails working day and night for 22 years from 1960 to 1982. His feat reduced the distance between Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya district from 75 km to just one km,

“This hill had given us trouble and grief for centuries. The people had asked the government many times to make a proper road through the hill, but nobody paid any attention. So I just decided I would do it all by myself,” Manjhi told an Indian newspaper, in 2007, a shortly before succumbing to the cancer that was plaguing him. With just his chisel, hammer and shovel, this legendary man turned what was once a precarious one-foot-wide passage into a 360 ft-long, 30 ft-wide road accessible by bicycle and motorcycle.

  
“My wife, Faguni Devi, was seriously injured while crossing the hill to bring me water; I worked then on a farm across the hills. That was the day I decided to carve out a proper road through this hill,” the farmer said. Sadly, his beloved wife didn't get to see the fruits of his labor, as shortly after the accident she fell ill and died, because she couldn’t be taken to the hospital in time. The tragic loss only made the ambitious man more focused on his task, and fellow villagers remember seeing him “hacking at the hill day and night as if he were possessed”. But with the passing years, his motivation changed. “My love for my wife was the initial spark that ignited in me the desire to carve out a road. But what kept me working without fear or worry all those years was the desire to see thousands of villagers crossing the hill with ease whenever they wanted,” Manjhi said in an interview. 

He carved a 360 foot long, 25 foot high, and 30 foot wide road, so that vehicles could get through. It took him 22 years, from 1960 to 1982.
Read more at http://www.omg-facts.com/History/A-Man-Carved-A-Tunnel-Through-A-Mountain/54003#TcfIHyqWxP3DraMF.99

He carved a 360 foot long, 25 foot high, and 30 foot wide road, so that vehicles could get through. It took him 22 years, from 1960 to 1982.
Read more at http://www.omg-facts.com/History/A-Man-Carved-A-Tunnel-Through-A-Mountain/54003#TcfIHyqWxP3DraMF.99

“What I did is there for everyone to see. When God is with you, nothing can stop you,” Dasrath Manjhi once said. I am neither afraid of any punishment from any government department for my work nor am I interested in any honour from the government.” It took him 22 years to fulfill his self-imposed task, but it granted him immortality… 

The state government had allotted a five-acre plot to Manjhi in Karjani village, which he donated for construction of a hospital. 

The mountain man’s only son and daughter in-law are handicapped and the family lives in abject poverty. For his own family, Manjhi could do nothing more than procuring an Indira Awaas Yojna unit.

#consulted and thankfully shared from:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/mountain-man-dashrath-manjhi-dies-in-delhi/article1-242990.aspx

http://bhushan.quora.com/Dashrath-Manjhi-%E2%80%93-The-Man-Who-Moved-a-Mountain-The-Mountain-Man

http://becauseisaidiwould.com/mountainman/

Mind-Blowing Electron Microscopy

Electron Microscope can reveal the structure of smaller objects because electrons have wavelengths about 100,000 times shorter than visible light photons. 

They can achieve magnifications of up to about 10,000,000x whereas ordinary, non-confocal light microscopes are limited by magnifications below 2000x.

Following are shared images of electron microscopy to our amazement..

 (shared from:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/31/nikon-small-world-photos_n_4182182.html?utm_hp_ref=science#slide=2504392)

Beetle Head

A frontal view of a myrmecophilous ground beetle with the antennae removed.

Head Lice

A head louse on two human hairs.

Dental Floss

The edge section of generic dental floss.

Spider

A domestic spider found in shower. Size of the spider about 5 mm.

Sperm

The head and midpiece of a mouse sperm.

Woodlouse

A stereoscopic image of a faceup woodlouse. Look through 3D stereoscopic glasses (red and blue) to see the "volume."

Bacteria On Food

Listeria monocytogenes (green) biofilm forming on the surface of turkey jerky.

Insect Antenna

The antennae of an insect, shown to be sensor-rich and to contain unique architectures for the collection of sensory information.

Wood

Cells in wood, showing pits and cells running in both directions.

Fish Scale

A fish scale from an Eastern Sand Darter.

Spiny Dogfish

The skin surface of an Atlantic spiny dogfish.

Powder

A titanium, aluminum and vanadium alloy powder, usually employed for the manufacture of medical prostheses and implants.

Yellow Mimosa

An Acacia dealbata (yellow mimosa) flower about to open.

Desert Rose

Desert rose Cu particles forming after the decomposition of CuH at ambient conditions.

Magnetite Mineral

Magnetite contamination particle on 70-degree tilted specimen. All parts of the particle are individual magnetite crystals.