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April 10, 2026
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"Lastly, preliminary results by geoscientists A. Chatterjee and J.S. Ray point to a ‘paleo channel present beneath the modern Ghaggar-alluvium along a 120 km trail’ which was active before 4000 BCE and whose sand deposits are ‘akin to those of the sediment carried by higher Himalayan born Sutlej River and very different from the Siwalik derived Ghaggar sediments’. If confirmed, these findings would contradict the view that the river was purely rain-fed throughout the Holocene."
"Geologists have long identified ‘a wide dry channel coming south from the spot near Ropar where the Satluj abruptly swings westward’; that palaeochannel meets the Ghaggar near Shatrana, some 60 km south of Patiala, close to the point where the Sarsuti also joins the Ghaggar. It roughly follows the bed of the seasonal Patialewali. Remarkably, notes Valdiya, ‘at the point of confluence, the Ghaggar channel suddenly becomes 6-8 km wide—and remains unusually wide until it loses itself in the sand dunes of the Thar desert, west of Anupgarh’. This sudden broadening of the Ghaggar is the unmistakable sign that it once received some of the Sutlej’s waters at this point."
Young though he was, his radiant energy produced such an impression of absolute reliability that Hedgewar made him the first sarkaryavah, or general secretary, of the RSS.
- Gopal Mukund Huddar
Largely because of the influence of communists in London, Huddar's conversion into an enthusiastic supporter of the fight against fascism was quick and smooth. The ease with which he crossed from one worldview to another betrays the fact that he had not properly understood the world he had grown in.
Huddar would have been 101 now had he been alive. But then centenaries are not celebrated only to register how old so and so would have been and when. They are usually celebrated to explore how much poorer our lives are without them. Maharashtrian public life is poorer without him. It is poorer for not having made the effort to recall an extraordinary life.
I regret I was not there to listen to Balaji Huddar's speech [...] No matter how many times you listen to him, his speeches are so delightful that you feel like listening to them again and again.
By the time he came out of Franco's prison, Huddar had relinquished many of his old ideas. He displayed a worldview completely different from that of the RSS, even though he continued to remain deferential to Hedgewar and maintained a personal relationship with him.