LIFE & TIME

LIFE & TIME are the world's best TEACHERS

LIFE teaches us the use of TIME &

TIME teaches us the value of the LIFE.

Any people anywhere....

Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.
                                                                                              >>>>>>Abraham Lincoln 

Mother Teresa

Born: August 26, 1910
Died: September 5, 1997
Achievements: Started Missionaries of Charity in 1950; received Nobel Prize for Peace in 1979; received Bharat Ratna in 1980.

Mother Teresa was one of the great servants of humanity. She was an Albanian Catholic nun who came to India and founded the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata. Later on Mother Teresa attained Indian citizenship. Her selfless work among the poverty-stricken people of Kolkata (Calcutta) is an inspiration for people all over the world and she was honored with Nobel Prize for her work.

Mother Teresa's original name was Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. She was born on August 27, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. Her father was a successful merchant and she was youngest of the three siblings. At the age of 12, she decided that she wanted to be a missionary and spread the love of Christ. At the age of 18 she left her parental home in Skopje and joined the Sisters of Loreto, an Irish community of nuns with missions in India.

After a few months of training at the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dublin Mother Teresa came to India. On May 24, 1931, she took her initial vows as a nun. From 1931 to 1948, Mother Teresa taught geography and catechism at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta. However, the prevailing poverty in Calcutta had a deep impact on Mother Teresa's mind and in 1948, she received permission from her superiors to leave the convent school and devote herself to working among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta.

After a short course with the Medical Mission Sisters in Patna, she returned to Calcutta and found temporary lodging with the Little Sisters of the Poor. She started an open-air school for homeless children. Soon she was joined by voluntary helpers, and she received financial support from church organizations and the municipal authorities. On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Vatican to start her own order. Vatican originally labeled the order as the Diocesan Congregation of the Calcutta Diocese, and it later came to known as the "Missionaries of Charity". The primary task of the Missionaries of Charity was to take care of those persons who nobody was prepared to look after.

The Missionaries of Charity, which began as a small Order with 12 members in Calcutta, today has more than 4,000 nuns running orphanages, AIDS hospices, charity centres worldwide, and caring for refugees, the blind, disabled, aged, alcoholics, the poor and homeless and victims of floods, epidemics and famine in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Poland, and Australia. In 1965, by granting a Decree of Praise, Pope Paul VI granted Mother Teresa permission to expand her order to other countries. The order's first house outside India was in Venezuela. Presently, the "Missionaries of Charity" has presence in more than 100 countries.

Mother Teresa's work has been recognised and acclaimed throughout the world and she has received a number of awards and distinctions. These include the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize (1971), Nehru Prize for Promotion of International Peace & Understanding (1972), Balzan Prize (1978), Nobel Peace Prize (1979) and Bharat Ratna (1980).

On March 13, 1997, Mother Teresa stepped down from the head of Missionaries of Charity and died on September 5, 1997, just 9 days after her 87th birthday. Following Mother Teresa's death, the Holy See began the process of beatification, the second step towards possible canonization, or sainthood. This process requires the documentation of a miracle performed from the intercession of Mother Teresa. In 2002, the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumor in the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, following the application of a locket containing Teresa's picture. Monica Besra said that a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the cancerous tumor. Mother Teresa was formally beatified by Pope John Paul II on October 19, 2003 with the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. A second miracle is required for her to proceed to canonization.

Just another day in Dravid's life

Many things have happened to Rahul Dravid on this England tour. He made his maiden century at Lord's, fulfilling a desire that was born the day he made 95 on Test debut at the ground 15 years ago. He opened for virtually the entire Test series barring the first innings of the first Test, and ended up with the Player of the Series trophy on the visitors' side. He walked in the second innings of the third Test at Edgbaston believing the umpire's word for a caught-behind when replays conclusively showed the ball had kissed an aglet on his left shoe-lace. He was shocked to hear the news that the he was part of the Indian one-day squad as reinforcement after injuries had ruled many of the frontline players. He played his first and last Twenty20 international where he hit three consecutive sixes, the most by an Indian in the match. Tomorrow Dravid will not only pull curtains on a "bittersweet" tour but also on his one-day career. Luckily Dravid does not mind that one bit.

Today Dravid was expansive, clear and even tinged his answers with a pinch of wit while facing the media on the eve of his final one-day match. Throughout his career Dravid's was an image of a man unsatisfied, of a man who despite all his achievements and humility, was struggling to prove something to himself, more than to the outside world. In some ways his battle with the self always benefited Indian cricket as he grew into the role of crisis manager. He climbed up the batting ladder to occupy a permanent position in the top order primarily at three and four where his best batting was seen.

Being a grafter at the first-class level, Dravid found life difficult in his formative years in the one-day game. But once he returned in 1999 having faced the axe a few times in his first three years, he transformed himself into a batsman who could pace an innings cleverly despite never going for the slog. He even led India, kept wickets, and moved up and down the order in search of pressure situations. He did everything that was asked of him and more. Today he explained how he could pull it off.

"I probably had to work harder in one-day cricket than in Tests. It has given me a lot satisfaction that I have been able to achieve so much," Dravid said. "When I started my career, obviously I wasn't recognised as much of a one-day cricketer, [I was] probably more in the traditional frame of mind. That's how I grew up playing cricket, that's how I played my Ranji Trophy cricket. So there was a lot more learning that I had to do in one-day cricket along the way. I faced some ups and downs, I got dropped in the middle, I had to go back and learn some lessons, I had to improve my game, keep getting better."

But Dravid acknowledged the advantages of early struggle and the I-am-only-going-to-improve attitude. "It helped free up my Test game and it has given me lot of satisfaction," Dravid said of his one-day resurgence. "I have done a lot of different things for India in one-day cricket. In some ways that versatility, that ability to do different things helped me a lot. You open the batting, it is different; batting at three is different; keeping and then batting, batting and then keeping ... so many different situations that I found myself in. It helped me grow as a person and cricketer."

Currently Dravid is the seventh highest run-maker and eighth in the list of most ODI appearances, something even he didn't envisage when he started playing. "The fact that I played over 300 games, [and made] close to 11,000 runs gives me a lot of satisfaction. Maybe people might have said at some stage that I will have successful Test career, but I guess not many people would have said that I'll play that many one-dayers at the start of my career. I wouldn't have said that about myself."

Though he did not shortlist his best one-day innings, Dravid pointed out reaching the final of the 2003 World Cup as one of the highlights of his career. Equally satisfying, he said, was watching MS Dhoni's side win the World Cup earlier this year even if Dravid was not part of the squad. "As a young kid in 1983, watching Kapil Dev lift the World Cup was a huge inspiration for me as a 10-year-old. Towards the end of my career, watching another Indian team and being part of the journey in some ways, and watching a team led by Dhoni in 2011 has been really satisfying," Dravid said. The biggest disappointment for him would be the failure to make the Super Sixes in the 2007 World Cup where India lost to Bangladesh in the league stage. He was the captain, and has still not come to terms with that disappointment.

The intensity in their training, the discipline, the hardwork have been the pillars on which Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble and Dravid built their success. These were also the characteristics that aided in the trio's longevity. "If you want to play international cricket and international sport for a long period of time, there are certain sacrifices that you need to make and discipline that you need to follow," Dravid said. "To be honest I have never seen them as sacrifices. I love the lifestyle of a cricketer, I love being a cricketer, l liked playing for my country. In some ways I feel lucky that I enjoy hitting the balls in the nets, I enjoy working hard and I enjoy practising. Sometimes when people ask me 'what will you do after cricket', I feel I will miss just that intensity of preparation, the practice."

In the last two months Dravid has always been the first player to come out an hour or two before the rest of the Indian squad assembled for training. Today was no different. He was at SWALEC stadium, facing throw-downs from Trevor Penney, the Indian fielding coach. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the trees surrounding the small ground dazzled in the vintage autumn colours of red, gold and orange. Comfortable in his own space, Dravid set about working on minor adjustments to his batting technique. It does not matter to him that he won't have to play another ODI after tomorrow.

"I am not dreading quitting. You just recognise that the time has got to come at some stage when you have got to move on. I am happy and I am comfortable in the space that I am in. I am happy with the way my career has progressed, how it has progressed in both forms of the game."

Legends of Cricket

1: Sir Donald Bradman
2: Sir Garfield Sobers
3: Sir Vivian Richards
4: Shane Warne
5: Jack Hobbs
6: Dennis Lillee
7: Sachin Tendulkar
8: Imran Khan
9: Wally Hammond
10: Sunil Gavaskar
11: Ian Botham
12: Sir Richard Hadlee
13: Keith Miller
14: WG Grace
15: Graeme Pollock
16: Malcolm Marshall
17: Greg Chappell
18: George Headley
19: Sir Frank Worrell
20: Sir Leonard Hutton
21: Wasim Akram
22: Kapil Dev
23: Steve Waugh
24: Barry Richards
25: Allan Border
26: Sydney Barnes
27: Everton Weekes
28: Wilfred Rhodes
29: Herbert Sutcliffe
30: Bill O'Reilly
31: Courtney Walsh
32: Mike Procter
33: Fred Trueman
34: Brian Lara
35: Clyde Walcott
36: Richie Benaud
37: Joel Garner
38: Andy Roberts
39: Curtly Ambrose
40: Michael Holding
41: Glenn McGrath
42: Jim Laker
43: Clarrie Grimmett
44: Javed Miandad
45: Ray Lindwall
46: Victor Trumper
47: Alan Knott
48: Allan Donald
49: Alan Davidson
50: Bishen Bedi