Word: nehru
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...months ago sharp-tongued, devious V. K. Krishna Menon was probably the most widely disliked man in India. Even his colleagues considered him insufferably arrogant, and too clever by far. When Jawaharlal Nehru decided to make him a Minister without Portfolio, some of India's top politicians fought a bitter rearguard action against the appointment. When Menon voted against a U.N. resolution calling for withdrawal of Soviet troops from Hungary, India rang with demands for his expulsion from public life. But last week, when Krishna Menon was sworn in as India's Minister of Defense-a job previously...
Among Jawaharlal Nehru's many ambitions for India is to make its measures metric, its thermometers Centigrade and its coinage decimal. Easier said than done. Through the length and breadth of India, there are more than 140 different systems of weights and measures. Dates and records are kept according to 30 different calendars, at least one of which, instituted more than 500 years ago with a slight miscalculation, has slipped out of phase by 23.2 days, so that Hindu dances meant for moonlit nights are often performed in total darkness. To top it all, the Indian coinage system, based...
Last week, having already established a national calendar of twelve months (more or less comparable to the Gregorian) and threatening soon to put weights and measures on the metric system, Nehru's government chose to inaugurate a new decimal coinage. In place of the rupee (20?), anna (1/16 rupee) and pie (1/12 anna) of the past, the new money will consist solely of rupees and naye paise (literally: new coins) worth .01 rupees. The trouble is that for three years both sets of coins will be used at once, and since there is not always a way of translating...
...time. Mothers fretted that the new coins were too easy for kids to swallow. Even the beggars complained formally that the changeover would cost them profits since passers-by now tossed them a mere naya paisa (.01 rupee) instead of a pice (.015 rupee). But through it all, Decimalist Nehru seemed pleased and proud of his changeover, as well he might. He had decided to get it over while India was still largely unencumbered by adding machines and cash registers. "The later we made it," he said, "the more difficult it would have been...
Describing his views as close to those of Fabian Socialism and, on the international level, Nehru's neutralism, Tsuru said he gradually shifted toward "realism and moderation" as he matured. He was first disillusioned by the Hitler-Stalin Non-aggression Past...