*Mitra (Proto-Indo-Iranian, nominative *Mitras) was an important Indo-Iranian divinity. Following the prehistoric cultural split of Indo-Aryan and Iranian cultures, names descended from *mitra were used for the following religious entities:

• Mitra (Sanskrit Mitrá-, Mitráḥ), a deity who appears frequently in the ancient Sanskrit text of the Rigveda.
• Mithra (Avestan Miθra-, Miθrō), a yazata mentioned in the Zoroastrian sacred scripture of the Avesta, whose New Persian equivalent is Mīhr / Mehr (مِهر).
• Maitreya, a bodhisattva who in the Buddhist tradition is to appear on Earth, achieve complete enlightenment, and teach the pure dharma.
• Mithras, the principal figure of the Greco-Roman religion of Mithraism.

Etymology[link]

Both Vedic Mitra and Avestan Mithra derive from an Indo-Iranian common noun *mitra-, generally reconstructed to have meant "covenant, treaty, agreement, promise." This meaning is preserved in Avestan miθra "covenant." In Sanskrit and modern Indo-Aryan languages, mitra means "friend," one of the aspects of binding^{[disambiguation needed ]} and alliance

The Indo-Iranian reconstruction is attributed^[1] to Christian Bartholomae,^[2] and was subsequently refined by A. Meillet (1907), who suggested derivation from the Proto-Indo-European root *mei "to exchange."

A suggested alternative derivation was *meh "to measure" (Gray 1929). Pokorny (IEW 1959) refined Meillet's *mei as "to bind." Combining the root *mei with the "tool suffix" -tra- "that which [causes] ..." (also found in man-tra-, "that which causes to think"), then literally means "that which binds," and thus "covenant, treaty, agreement, promise, oath" etc. Pokorny's interpretation also supports "to fasten, strengthen", which may be found in Latin moenia "city wall, fortification", and in an antonymic form, Old English (ge)maere "border, boundary-post".

Meillet and Pokorny's "contract" did however have its detractors. Lentz (1964, 1970) refused to accept abstract "contract" for so exalted a divinity and preferred the more religious "piety." Because present-day Sanskrit mitra means "friend," and New Persian mihr means "love" or "friendship," Gonda (1972, 1973) insisted on a Vedic meaning of "friend, friendship," not "contract".

Meillet's analysis also "rectified earlier interpretations"^[1] that suggested that the Indo-Iranian common noun *mitra- had anything to do with the light or the sun. When H. Lommel suggested^[3] that such an association was implied in the Younger Avesta (>6th c. BCE), that too was conclusively dismissed.^[4] Today, it is certain that "(al)though Miθra is closely associated with the sun in the Avesta, he is not the sun" and "Vedic Mitra is not either."^[1]

Old Persian Mitra or Miθ^ra - both only attested in a handful of 4th century BCE inscriptions of Artaxerxes II and III - "is generally admitted [to be] a borrowing from the Avesta,"^[5] the genuine Old Persian form being reconstructed as *Miça. (Kent initially suggested Sanskrit^[6] but later^[5] changed his mind). Middle Iranian myhr (Parthian, also in living Armenian usage) and mihr (Middle Persian), derive from Avestan Mithra.

Greek/Latin "Mithras," the focal deity of the Greco-Roman cult of Mithraism is the nominative form of vocative Mithra. In contrast to the original Avestan meaning of "contract" or "covenant" (and still evident in post-Sassanid Middle Persian texts), the Greco-Roman Mithraists probably thought the name meant "mediator." In Plutarch's first century discussion of dualistic theologies, Isis and Osiris (46.7) the Greek historiographer provides the following explanation of the name in his summary of the Zoroastrian religion: Mithra is a meson ("in the middle") between "the good Horomazdes and the evil Aremanius [...] and this is why the Pérsai call the Mediator Mithra". Zaehner^[7] attributes this false etymology to a role that Mithra (and the sun!) played in the now extinct branch of Zoroastrianism known as Zurvanism.

Indic Mitra[link]

Vedic Mitra is a prominent deity of the Rigveda distinguished by a relationship to Varuna, the protector of rta. Together with Varuna, he counted among the Adityas, a group of solar deities, also in later Vedic texts. Vedic Mitra is the patron divinity of honesty, friendship, contracts and meetings.

The first extant record of Indo-Aryan^[8] Mitra, in the form mi-it-ra-, is in the inscribed peace treaty of c. 1400 BC between Hittites and the Hurrian kingdom of the Mitanni in the area southeast of Lake Van in Asia Minor. There Mitra appears together with four other Indo-Aryan divinities as witnesses and keepers of the pact.

Iranian Mithra[link]

In Zoroastrianism, Mithra is a member of the trinity of ahuras, protectors of asha/arta, "truth" or "[that which is] right". Mithra's standard appellation is "of wide pastures" suggesting omnipresence. Mithra is "truth-speaking, ... with a thousand ears, ... with ten thousand eyes, high, with full knowledge, strong, sleepless, and ever awake." (Yasht 10.7). As preserver of covenants, Mithra is also protector and keeper of all aspects of interpersonal relationships, such as friendship and love.

Related to his position as protector of truth, Mithra is a judge (ratu), ensuring that individuals who break promises or are not righteous (artavan) are not admitted to paradise. As also in Indo-Iranian tradition, Mithra is associated with (the divinity of) the sun but originally distinct from it. Mithra is closely associated with the feminine yazata Aredvi Sura Anahita, the hypostasis of knowledge.

Buddhist Maitreya[link]

Maitreya is sometimes represented seated on a throne Western-style, and venerated both in Mahāyāna and non-Mahāyāna Buddhism. Some have speculated that inspiration for Maitreya may have come from the ancient Indo-Iranian deity Mithra. The primary comparison between the two characters appears to be the similarity of their names. According to a book entitled The Religion of the Iranian Peoples, "No one who has studied the Zoroastrian doctrine of the Saoshyants or the coming saviour-prophets can fail to see their resemblance to the future Maitreya.^[9]

Paul Williams claims that some Zoroastrian ideas like Saoshyant influenced the beliefs about Maitreya, such as "expectations of a heavenly helper, the need to opt for positive righteousness, the future millennium, and universal salvation". Possible objections are that these characteristics are not unique to Zoroastrianism, nor are they necessarily characteristic of the belief in Maitreya.

Graeco-Roman Mithras[link]

The name Mithra was adopted by the Greeks and Romans as Mithras, chief figure in the mystery religion of Mithraism. At first identified with the Sun-god Helios by the Greeks, the syncretic Mithra-Helios was transformed into the figure Mithras during the 2nd century BC, probably at Pergamon. This new cult was taken to Rome around the 1st century BC and was dispersed throughout the Roman Empire. Popular among the Roman military, Mithraism was spread as far north as Hadrian's Wall and the Germanic Limes.

References[link]

Prof. Sugata Mitra is Professor of Educational Technology at the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, UK. He is best known for his "Hole in the Wall" experiment, and widely cited in works on literacy and education. He is also Chief Scientist, Emeritus, at NIIT.

Mitra has been described as a polymath by the University of London, as his 30 years of research spans a wide range of disciplines.

Life and work[link]

He was born in Calcutta, India on 12 February 1952.^[1]

Early scientific work[link]

Starting with molecular orbital computation in the 1970s, Mitra discovered that the structure of organic molecules determine their function more than the constituent atoms (Crystal structure sensitivity of the band structure of organic semiconductors. S.C. Mathur and S. Mitra, Journal of Phys.C Solid State, 12, (2) (1979) UK).

After earning a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), Delhi, he went on to research energy storage systems - first at the Centre for Energy Studies in the IIT, and later at the Technische Universität, Vienna. This resulted in a new design for zinc-chlorine batteries that is now in use by the military (A design for zinc-chlorine batteries. S. Mitra, Journal of Power Sources, 8, 359-367 (1982) USA).

His interests in the flow of electricity through biological systems, a consequence of his Ph.D. research on exciton dissociation in organic semiconductors, led on to a seminally speculative paper on why the human sense organs are located where they are (A correlation between the location and sensitivity of human sense organs. A.K. Banerjee and S. Mitra, Spec. Science and Technology, 5, (2), 141 (1982) Australia).

His interest in computer networking led him towards the emerging systems in printing in the 1980s. He set up India’s first local area network based newspaper publishing system in 1984 and went on to predict the desktop publishing industry (Compositors that compute, S. Mitra, Computers Today, May 1985, India). This in turn led to the invention of LAN based database publishing and he created the “Yellow Pages” industry in India and Bangladesh.

Education and cognitive science[link]

Mitra is a leading proponent of Minimally Invasive Education. He has a PhD in Physics and is credited with more than 25 inventions in the area of cognitive science and education technology. He was conferred the prestigious Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology in the year 2005.^[2]

His interest in the human mind once again led him into the areas of learning and memory and he was amongst the first in the world to show that simulated neural networks can help decipher the mechanisms of Alzheimer's disease (The effect of synaptic disconnection on bi-directional associative recall. S. Mitra, Proc. IEEE/SMC Conf., Vol.1, 989, 1994 USA).

He was among the first people to invent "voluntary perception recording" (a continuously variable voting machine) and a hyperlinked computing environment, several years ahead of the Internet. ^[3]

Mitra’s work at NIIT created the first curricula and pedagogy for that organisation, followed by years of research on learning styles, learning devices, several of them now patented, multimedia and new methods of learning.

Since the 1970s, Professor Mitra’s publications and work has resulted in training and development of perhaps a million young Indians, amongst them some of the poorest children in the world.

Some of this work culminated in an interest in early literacy, and the Hole in the Wall experiments.

Hole in the Wall[link]

In an experiment conducted first in 1999, known as Hole in the Wall (HIW) experiments in children’s learning. In the initial experiment, a computer was placed in a kiosk created within a wall in a slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and children were allowed to use it freely.^[4] The experiment aimed at proving that kids could be taught by computers very easily without any formal training. Sugata termed this as Minimally Invasive Education (MIE). The experiment has since been repeated at many places, HIW has more than 23 kiosks in rural India. In 2004 the experiment was also carried on in Cambodia.^[5] His interests include Education, Remote Presence, Self-organising systems, Cognitive Systems, Physics and Consciousness.

This work demonstrated that groups of children, irrespective of who or where they are, can learn to use computers and the Internet on their own using public computers in open spaces such as roads and playgrounds, even without knowing English.^[6] His publication was judged the best open access publication in the world for 2005 and he was awarded the Diwang Mehta Award for innovation in IT that year.

The Hole in the Wall experiment left a mark on popular culture. Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup read about Mitra's experiment and was inspired to write his debut novel Q & A, which later became the movie Slumdog Millionaire.

External links[link]

• Hole in the wall official website
• The Hole in the Wall Experiment, TED Talks 2007
• The Child-Driven Education, TED talks 2010
• The Hole in the Wall, a documentary about the experiment
• Press release about Dewang Mehta Award
• HIW: Kids learn computer by themselves: An interview with Dr Mitra published in a Hindi webzine.
• Personal profile at Newcastle University
• Wiki referenced during Ted Talks

References[link]

Shazia Manzoor (Punjabi, Urdu: شازیه منظور ) is a singer from Rawalpindi who now resides in Lahore Heera Mandi, Punjab, Pakistan. She is a popular singer in Pakistan and India and among the Punjabi diaspora. Shazia Manzoor sings mostly Punjabi music. She has sung various Punjabi folk songs and Punjabi Sufi poems and also sings Urdu songs as well. She is popular for her songs like Aaja Soniya, Mahi Aavega, Maye Ni Kinnu Akhan, Chann Mere Makkhna and Dhol Mahia, etc.

Selected Albums[link]

• Raatan Kaaliyan
• Aarfana Kalaam
• Chan Makhna
• Hai Dil Jani
• Ishq Sohna
• Tu Badal Gaya (March 2010)
• Balle Balle (May 2011)
• Sahib teri bandi haan
• Jatt London (February 2011)

Duo Collaboration[link]

• 2001: Fix It Up (With DJ Vix)
• 2005: Groundshaker (With Aman Hayer)
• 2009: Collaborations 2 (With Sukshinder Shinda)

External links[link]

• Shazia Manzoor at the Internet Movie Database

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