March 21 : The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

On this day, 21 Mar...

1846 - Adolphe Sax applied for a French patent on his new instrument, the saxophone, which was granted on 22 Jun 1846.

1877 - Louis Pasteur began work on virulent anthrax bacteria in his laboratory at Lille, France, spurred by a devastating outbreak of anthrax, a disease fatal to cattle and sheep. By 1881, he prepared a vaccine and tested it on 5 May 1881. Cows and sheep inoculated with the vaccine were immunized and survived, while an untreated control group died. He later produced an effective rabies vaccine

1921 - Indian National Congress decided it's Flag.

1925 - The Butler Act became state law in Tennessee that prohibited “the teaching of the Evolution Theory in all the Universities, Normals and all other public schools of Tennessee, which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, and to provide penalties for the violations thereof ... that it shall be unlawful ... to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Within a few months, John Scopes became a willing defendant in the “Scopes Monkey Trial,” which began 10 Jul 1925, and received world attention as the statute was tested. He was convicted and fined $100, which was overturned on appeal. However, the statute was not repealed until 17 May 1967.

1957 - India's national calendar came into force. (The Indian national calendar, sometimes called the Saka calendar, is the official civil calendar in use in India. It is used, alongside the Gregorian calendar, in news broadcasts by All India Radio and in calendars and communications issued by the Government. The Saka calendar is also used in Java and Bali among Indonesian Hindus.

1971 - Gavaskar scores the first of his 34 Test tons, 116 at Georgetown.

1977 - Internal Emergency, promulgated on June 25, 1975, withdrawn by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

1979 - Morarji Desai, PM, inaugurated the Backward Classes Commission in New Delhi.

2010 - China's state media has attacked Google for having what it said were 'intricate ties' with the U.S. government. The Xinhua news agency has said that Google provides U.S. intelligence agencies with a record of its search engine results. It also accused Google of trying to change Chinese society by imposing American values on it.

Born

1916 - Ustad Bismilla Khan, clarionett Master.

1978 - Rani Mukherjee, film actress.

RIP

1995 - Bomb attack on the train in Assam; 27 soldiers killed.

1997 - Seven Kashmiri Pandits gunned down by militants in Sangrampura.

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Over 40 billion work hours are lost each year in Africa to the need to fetch drinking water.