Today’s Post: ‘The only thing spoon feeding teaches us, is the long shape of the spoon’

This is Your Day-TODAY: Take a Determined Step Forward and Make History!

On this day, 24 Aug….

1608 – 1st English convoy lands at Surat.

1690 – Calcutta was founded by Job Charnock. He was an employee and administrator of the English East India Company, and is traditionally regarded as the founder of the now-renamed city of Kolkata.

1891 – Thomas Edison patents motion picture camera.

1907 – The Bréguet-Richet Gyroplane No. 1 made what is generally accepted as the first vertical flight, hovering about 2 feet off the ground for one minute.

1932 – Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly non-stop across the United States, traveling from Los Angeles to Newark, N.J., in just over 19 hours.

1947 – Around ten thousand people were believed to have died in border clashes in Punjab.

1966 – Mihir Sen swims the Gibralter channel (14.2 km long).

1971 – Crowds invade the pitch as India beat England by four wickets for their first-ever cricket victory in London .

1997 – Gordon Spence discovered the largest known prime number, 2^2976221 – 1, the 36th known Mersenne prime number. It took his 100-MHz Pentium PC fifteen days to prove it. At 895,932 digits in length, if printed out the number would stretch for 1.4 miles or if spoken 8 hours a day would take 28 days to complete.

2021 – UN says Madagascar is on the brink of the world’s first “climate change famine” with people  suffering “catastrophic” levels of hunger after four years without rain.

Born…. 1918 -Sikander Bakht. BJP politician and minister in AB  Vajpayee govt.  he was governor of kerala from 2002 to 2004. He was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 2000.

1933 – Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, who ruled Palestine  regions from 1969 to 2004 through his party Fatah and  was 1st President of the Palestinian National Authority (1994-2004) and 1994 Nobel peace prize winner. He was also given fist Indira Gandhi award for International Justice and Harmony.

1947 – Dulal Lahiri. Bengali screenwriter, actor and producer. He produced/directed  popular Bengali  serial Cinemawalla  with Rituparno Sengupta (image credit-bengobanjo.in). 

1955 – HS Phoolka. Senior advocate in Delhi High Court. He faught Delhi riot cases  of 1984 against Sikhs. He established a Citizens  Justic Committe. Phoolka faught Punjab Assembly electyions in 2017 and was Leader of Opposition, representing AAP.

1957 – Stephan Fry. English  comedy actor, director, producer and broadcaster. He was given 6 British TV Academy awards and Knighthood in 2025.

You may have known…. At the 2001 census 72.2% of the Indian population lived in about 638,000 villages and the remaining 27.8% lived in more than 5,100 towns and over 380 urban agglomerations.

                                                                                                                                    {Comiled by Lt. Gen. (R)  Raj Kadyan}