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| April, 1999 Volume 5, Number 4 HOME EDITORIAL COVER STORY SPECIALS IMMIGRATION EVENTS CLASSIFIEDS HEALTH ARCHIVES |
Cover Story
EMINENT HISTORIANS This has to be one of the most important books published in India since 1947. Arun Shourie, a noted scholar and columnist, is the author of 14 other books, several of them brilliant expose' of the foreign Christian missionaries' covert activities in India, the Communist party's long-standing anti-national policies, and the Congress party's corruption and its pseudo-secular policies that culminated in the massacre of thousands of innocent Sikhs in Delhi in 1984. Shourie holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Syracuse University, and has served as a consultant to the World Bank and the Planning Commission. He has also served as the editor of The Indian Express. His writings have won him major awards including the Astor, the Magsaysay, and the International Editor of the Year. Recently, the Federation of Indian Publishers conferred The Freedom to Publish Award on him. Eminent Historians, the ironic title of his latest book comes from the self-description a group of Marxist historians, most of them academics, arrogated for themselves while signing a newspaper petition during the Ayodhya controversy. Although the group is not large in number, (42 is the maximum), the same set has also preempted for itself the titles of prominent social scientists and leading intellectuals in similar public petitions. Arun Shourie's major thesis: During the past fifty years, this bunch of Marxist historians have been suppressing facts , inventing lies, perverting discourse, and derailing public policy by seizing control of institutions such as the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), the National Council of Educational Research Training (NCERT), and nearly all of the English-media newspapers and publishing houses.
Included as principals in this group of Marxist historians are Romila Thapar, D. N. Jha, Gyanendra Pandey, Satish Chandra, K.M. Shrimali, R.S. Sharma, and Irfan Habib. They have, Shourie charges, Òworked a diabolic inversion: the inclusive religion [Hinduism], the pluralist spiritual search of our people and land, they have projected as intolerant, narrow-minded, obscurantist; and the exclusivist, totalitarian, revelatory religions and ideologies Ñ Islam, Christianity, Marxism-Leninism Ñ they have made out to be the epitome of tolerance, open-mindedness, democracy, secularism! This group, by promoting each other's publications, has long been determining what is politically correct. One measure of the hold these verbal terrorists have been exercising over the English-medium publishing industry in India is that Arun Shourie, despite his wide readership, had to self-publish his books - - including this one! These eminent historians continue to strive hard to denigrate the eight-thousand-year Hindu cultural history, the oldest surviving civilization in the world, blackening the Hindu period and whitewashing the Islamic period. Indeed, Shourie should have asked them to counter American historian Will Durant's assessment in The Story of Civilization:: "The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.Or that of French historian Alain Danielou's statement, in his Histoire de l Inde : "From the time Muslims started arriving, around 632 AD, the history of India becomes a long, monotonous series of murders, massacres, spoilations, destructions. It is, as usual, in the name of 'a holy war' of their faith, of their sole God, that the barbarians have destroyed civilisations, wiped out entire races". As claimed in the books subtitle , Shourie succeeds in unmasking their technology, their line, their fraud by focusing on specifics as exemplified below: his own encounters with one of these eminent historians on a television debate or at a university forum; their repeated failures to respond to published challenges by historians and scholars of persuasions other than Marxism; their documented efforts at distorting established historical evidence. Read the rest of this cover story in our April 99 issue.
Did you like this story ? NEOMAGIC: A BOON TO MOBILE COMPUTING
Pre-NeoMagic Days Agarwal hails from Hamirpur, Uttar Pradesh, India. He came to the U.S. in 1972 as an 18-year-old to pursue his studies. He got his bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He worked with a few companies in Houston, Washington, DC, and in the Bay Area before joining Cirrus Logic as its ninth employee. He had a high profile job there and had a string of successes during the course of his career. After eight-and-a-half years it was no longer fun for him to work there, he thought. Having acquired lot of experience and knowledge, he wanted to do something on his own and there were people who believed in his vision and were willing to join him. So, he left Cirrus Logic, which had grown to employ 2600 people and where he had risen to the level of vice president of portable products. Then he started his own company, NeoMagic, with a vision to provide semiconductor solutions to mobilizing multimedia. Need to Mobilize Multimedia
Today people have become very mobile as they keep traveling for business or other purposes. They need tools not only for communicating but also for being productive while moving. They donÕt stop with the usage of cell phones and beepers which provide basic communication functions. They want to check their e-mails or surf the Internet and access their company network from anywhere anytime . They want to complete their projects while riding the train, waiting for a meeting, killing the time at airport, or stuck in a gridlock, and have time to spend with their family and relax at night. For such people, who want their complete office away from the office, laptops are a boon. Though people expect the same capabilities from wireless technology as they do from wired computers, there are limitations slow, bulky, poor graphics quality, low battery life thus necessitating the mobile computer users to make several sacrifices and compromises. But not any more thanks to NeoMagic and its MagicWare technology. Birth of NeoMagic NeoMagic was founded in the summer of 1993, with a mission to help notebook users to get high performance graphics, low power consumption and improved portability from their mobile computers. The co-founders, Deepraj Puar, Ravi Ranganathan, Kamran Elahian, and Clement Leung liked Agarwals ideas and showed lot of interest. The founders raised $20 million in venture capital from premier venture capital firms such as Kleiner, Perkins, Claufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, and JAFCO, to start the company, which was to design and manufacture multimedia chips for notebook computers. I didnt spend a single penny from my pocket. From day one funds flowed in and finance was not at all my concern, says Agarwal, But I had to overcome the fear of uncertainty of being successful or not. Once I overcame that nothing prevented me from starting our own company. Since then NeoMagic has developed a product line of multimedia accelerators that enable notebook computer manufacturers to achieve graphic performance levels equivalent to desktop computers. Its the device which sits between the pentium processor and the display. We take all the multimedia data, process them and put them on the display, explains Agarwal, So every information you see on a display goes through our chip.
At its founding, NeoMagics vision was to provide semiconductor solutions that bring the excitement of multimedia computing to the mobile computing market, without compromising the size, weight or battery life of portable systems. NeoMagic took on the mission of mobilizing multimedia by pioneering the development of embedded DRAM semiconductor solutions for high performance, light weight, long battery life electronic systems. The Embedded DRAM Technology The embedded DRAM wizard Agarwal explains this technology in his own words: Traditionally, before NeoMagic came along, there were logic, memory, and analog technologies. In the past people have combined analog and logic together and they knew how to pack more in a single chip. But nobody had combined memory and logic together as they are entirely two different manufacturing processes. (In the word NeoMagic, Neo stands for new and Magic stands for Memory And loGIC.) We cannot manufacture DRAM (Dynamic Random Access Memory) on the logic manufacturing line, and vice versa. We studied the benefits of combining DRAM and logic together for portable applications. NeoMagic has patent for its MagicWare technology. ÒWe are applying this technology of combining DRAM and logic into a single chip across different product lines like multimedia graphics controller for notebooks, digital cameras, and DVDs, says Agarwal. Because of this technology NeoMagic could combine five chips into one to handle multiple functions, and this creates the space to add power and a range of other features without increasing the size of the computer. So laptop users can have the power of their desktop with them on the road. Read the rest of this cover story in our April 99 issue. Did you like this story?
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Prakash Agarwal, President and CEO of NeoMagic Corporation, knows
how to leave his mark in the history of the world high-tech world of course. This
45-year-old embedded DRAM wizard is the winner of the 1998 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur
of the Year Award for high technology / electronics. In spite of his achievements, he is
humble; while his head is full of high-tech ideas, his face is always with a childlike
smile; power and wealth never prevent him from being polite. He is an amalgam of business
sense and technical skills. His company, NeoMagic, is making revolutions in the field of
mobile computing. By incorporating NeoMagic's single-chip solution, the laptop (or the
notebook computer, as it is called nowadays) manufacturers are able to provide desktop
level graphics performance on affordable notebook computers. 
Mobilizing Multimedia