“From Somnath to Pokhran: When Dharma meets Vigyan”, First Post, May 11, 2026
“Today, on May 11, 2026, as we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the restoration of the Somnath Temple, we find ourselves standing on a date that is doubly sacred to the Indian identity. May 11, after all, is also celebrated as the National Technology Day in honour of the Pokhran-II tests successfully carried out in 1998, under the leadership of the then Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
For a nation that has survived the trauma of centuries of foreign invasions and the indignity of colonial rule, May 11 is not just another date on the square piece of the calendar. It is the date where ancient Dharma met modern Vigyan (science). It is the day India proved its unconquerable spirit that manifests both at the sacred Somnath Temple on the seashore in Gujarat and in a thunderous roar beneath the desert sands at the Pokhran-II nuclear site in Rajasthan.
From Ruins to Rise
This story begins a thousand years earlier, in 1026 CE, when the loot and desecration of the Somnath Temple and the Jyotirlinga by Mahmud of Ghazni, an invader from present-day Afghanistan, etched a scar onto the civilisational memory of India. For centuries, that wound “stung like a thorn”, as noted by Vajpayee in one of his reminiscences…….”
Read full article at firstpost.com
