Hindu Radio:India's Kumbha Melas-From 4 to 12/Ancient Balinese Scripts Digitized/Swastikas & Science

The Kumbh Mela, presently held in four cities in the country -- Prayag (Allahabad), Haridwar, Ujjian and Nasik. Swami Chitadamanji Maharaj of Siddhaashram says the world's largest religious gathering Kumbh Mela is being organised since the Vedic times and its importance has been mentioned in the Puranas and other Hindu religious texts. Speaking on the origin of the Kumbh Mela, Swami Chitadamanji Maharaj says, "Droplets of the holy nectar (Amrit Kalash) which was derived from Samundra Manthan fell at 12 places in the country. Since then Kumbh Mela was held at these 12 places. Dr Darren Bagnall from the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton has found that he can arrange tens of thousands of gold swastikas on a square millimetre to form new optical metamaterials that act to artificially change the polarisation of light, effectively "twisting" light in accordance with the rotation of the swastikas. By changing the degree of twist in a predictable way the chiral metamaterials can provide an alternative way to code information that is being transmitted using light. According to Dr Bagnall, it is the special arrangement and squareness of the swastika which makes it the ideal geometry for their experiments. He comments: "The swastika has a number of special features, it is entirely made up of vertical and horizontal straight lines and it is square but can still provide the feeling of left-handed or right-handed rotation known as chirality. It is this chirality which causes our swastikas to twist light."