Talk:H. Narasimhaiah

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BM, this is a prominent person in India. Please do not remove information from the article. He is very respected. When I chatted with a person from India, one guy spontaneously mentioned and praised him. Andries 19:36, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

No problem, Andries. But what information did I remove from the article? It seems to me mainly that I just tightened up the text. If I dropped something important, let me know, and I'll work it back in. By the way, I don't suppose he isn't prominent. But just from the content of article, to be honest, you wouldn't get that idea. The only claim to prominence would seem to be the "god-man" investigation 30 years ago. The only other specific thing that is mentioned is that he runs some kind of science lecture series in Bangalore. I'm not very impressed by those two things, although perhaps the "god-man" thing was bigger than it seems. If he is prominent, maybe it would be good for someone who knows more about him, to put that information into the article. --BM 20:02, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

BM, you are right, you did not remove contents from the article. I got a bit scared after I noticed what you had done to Abraham Kovoor. Andries 10:35, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] In lieu of clarification

I just cannot understand what this question of prominence is about. What precisely does it mean? A person could be prominent in a specific field. It doesn’t mean that he should necessarily be known to every individual in the whole world. What criteria one should employ to judge whether some one is prominent or not? As far as Dr. Narasimhaiah is concerned, he is definitely a prominent figure amongst Skeptic circles in India. For instance, if the topic of discussion is godmen and spurious paranormal topics, none in India can ignore Dr. Narasimhaih and the investigation committee he set up as Vice-chancellor of Bangalore University. That is sufficient for me to write a brief sketch about his life. Every Tom, Dick and Harry need not know him.

Again, I highlighted the awards he received because they were at least indicative of other fields in which he was prominent, especially when the awards are some of the top civilian awards in India. I don't have much information about these facets of his life and I expect other users of wikipedia to fill the gaps.

The reason for giving the details of the Investigation Committee members was that it would, I thought, give the readers an idea of the competency of the committee to investigate such matters. My experience is that the adherents of various cults and believers in paranormal phenomena (in which I would include BM too – I may be wrong) normally question the competency of people challenging their heroes.

The petty tricksters such as Sai Baba, Amrithanandmayi etc still hold sway over the masses in India. It was appropriate then, I thought, to give some additional details of the Committee’s investigation, which was why I quoted part of the first letter of the Committee to Sai Baba at length.

I don’t agree with all the changes made by BM in the article (as I don’t agree with changes made by him in the article on Abraham Kovoor) but I don’t want to reverse it to the previous version.

MANOJ