March 18 : Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

On this day, 18 Mar...

1919 - Rowlatt Act, intended to perpetuate the extraordinary powers enjoyed by the Government under Lord Chelmsford during the war, provokes countrywide protests. This Rowlatt Act was forced instead of 1915 Indian Security Act which reduced freedom of Indian people.

1922 - British magistrates in India sentence Mohandas K. Gandhi to 6 years in prison for disobedience.

1931 - 1st electric shavers go on sale in the U.S. from Schick.

1944 - Azad Hind Fauj entered India (Japanese army) from the border of Burma and invaded northeastern India.

1965 - Voskhod 2 was launched into space carrying Aleksey Leonov and Pavel Belyayev aboard. On the second orbit, Leonov left the spacecraft through the airlock while still tethered to the vessel. He was the first man to climb out of a spacecraft in space.

1967 - The biggest oil spill ever, at that time, affected Great Britain and France when the supertanker Torrey Canyon ran aground on Pollard's Rock between Land’s End and the Isles of Scilly. The rocks ripped open six of the ship’s 18 cargo tanks that morning, and by evening there was an eight-mile oil slick leaking from it. Attempts to refloat the ship failed and one member of the salvage team died. With no prior incident of such a huge disaster to guide clean up efforts, bombs and napalm were tried to cause the oil to burn, then detergents which emulsified the oil, but were themselves highly toxic to all marine and shore life. Eventually, all 120,000 tons of crude oil being shipped from Kuwait were released as the ship broke apart. Damage to ecosystems lasted decades. Some lessons were learned.

1998 - A.B. Vajpayee, the Prime Minister-designate, releases the 'national agenda for governance' in New Delhi. It is silent on the Ram temple issue, scrapping of Article 370 and a uniform civil code.

Born

1858 - Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel, a German engineer who invented the internal-combustion engine that bears his name.

1879 - Cluny MacPherson, a Canadian doctor, and inventor of the gas mask.

1938 - Shashi Kapoor, film producer, director, actor, and dramatist.

1946 - Navin Nischol, actor.

1948 - Eknath Solkar, cricketer, India 1969-77, brilliant short-leg fielder.

1963 - Ratna Pathak, actor.

Titbits

1987 - Sunil Gavaskar ends his Test career with an innings of 96 v Pak.

2014 - In the U.S., today's Mega Millions multistate lottery drawing has two winning tickets; the $400 million jackpot is the third largest in the game's history.

You may have known...

There are 1.6 million deaths per year attributed to dirty water and poor sanitation.