Month: July 2025

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India 1965, a growing India needs electricity, so how about nuclear power?

When India imagined independence from Great Britain, it hoped to include Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri lanka and Burma. A superpower, albeit requiring much development. The smaller India that emerged still had great ambitions and big rivals, so why not forsake some needed development to play big power games. Bizarrely, the West was ready to help. Well at least until Buddha smiled. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

This stamp shows the Atomic Research Center in the Trombay section of Bombay. It is from the same set of stamps as the Gnat airplane stamp I covered here, https://the-philatelist.com/2018/07/20/a-gnat-sting-slays-a-sabre-over-bangladesh/      . As with the Gnat, the stamp is long on the Indian achievement aspect, with no mention of the outside help that made it possible. Ah, superpower dreams….

Todays stamp is issue A205, a 10 Rupee stamp issued by India in 1965. It was an 18 stamp issue in various denominations. The 10 Rupee stamp, a high denomination then, was the highest indicating where India ranked the achievement of the nuclear center. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 50 cents used. Unmailed the stamps value goes up 30 times.

India’s work on nuclear energy began even before independence. The Tata organization, see also https://the-philatelist.com/2019/11/21/india-1958-independant-india-will-be-great-building-on-the-success-of-people-like-j-n-tata/    , was a big believer in Swadeshi, which is India doing for itself. In this case that means sending fellow Parsi Homi Bhabha to Cambridge to study and then fund his nuclear research center once back in India. The Parsi were Persians that British India took in as they were no longer welcome in Islamic Persia due to their Zoroastrian religious beliefs. Interesting that is was from these people the idea of Swadeshi got it’s backing.

Knowledge of how nuclear energy works is not enough, as to use it for peace or war, specialty manufacturing of intricate pieces is needed. The West and the East only developed this after slow expensive development. USA President Eisenhower then proposed the silly stunt of “atoms for Peace’. The American military industrial complex would be encouraged to build nuclear facilities in the third world in return for monitoring how they handle it and the countries’ word that the program would be peaceful. India, Pakistan, Israel, and Iran signed up and solemnly gave their word that the only intention was civilian atomic power. Canada got in on the graft from such a program by providing India another reactor. Over time, and it took a long time, India was able to reverse engineer the reactors they were given and add further reactors built locally. The process was slowed by the death of Homi Bhabha in a mysterious crash of an Air India 707 airplane in Switzerland. Conspiracy theorists blame the CIA, but planes do fly into mountains occasionally. 16 years before another Air India plane flew into the same mountain.

It will be no surprise that India lied about the peaceful intent of it’s nuclear power program. Plutonium derived from the spent nuclear fuel from the Canadian supplied reactor CIRUS at Trombay was used for India’s first nuclear bomb  tested in 1974. The secret program was called Buddha Smiles. The smiles did not extend to the western powers that had foolishly helped the program along. Pakistan sped up their bomb program that also had received help from atoms for peace, see https://the-philatelist.com/2019/05/16/pakistan-atoms-for-peace-poliferates-until-buddha-smiles/  .

Mr. Bhabha made optimistic projections of how much nuclear energy India could produce. A projection made by him in 1962 gave a number by 1980 that is a full five times what is actually produced in the India of 2020. Less than 3 percent of Indian electricity comes from nuclear power. It was of course, all about the bombs.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another in case the power goes out. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from  stamp collecting. First published in 2020.

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United Nations(Geneva offices) 2000, Painters for the new century

When you enter a new century, it is a good time to check out what is going on in the arts. The UN is in an especially good place to do that as they have offices and representatives everywhere. What did they find? So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

The competition featured artists from around the world and all the entries went on a traveling exhibition from London to Brussels, then Stockholm, then New York City. Six stamps featured art from the exhibition with 2 stamps each issued by UN offices in New York, in Geneva, and Vienna. The artists were 1 American, 1 Japanese, 1 Philippine, 1 Kenyan, 1 Greek, and 1 Lebanese, Rita Adaimy the painter of “The Embrace” on this stamp and the only female.

Todays stamp is issue A319, a .90 Swiss Franc stamp issued by the United Nations on May 30th, 2000. The two Geneva issues had different denominations with this the lower. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth $1.10 used. Though this is a Geneva issue, I got it in a pack of stamps I bought at the UN headquarters gift shop in New York in 2013. After getting home from that trip, I put the pack aside unopened till I found and opened it last week. Ah, Lost treasures…

The millennium art competition show us where the art world was at. Despite attracting entrants from around the world the entries turned in were remarkably uniform. In this case it might lead you to believe that Auguste Rodin might have an outsized influence on the contemporary female artists of Lebanon. Perhaps he does and maybe that is not so bad. Imagine a similar competition from the dawn of the 20th century, you would have had fewer entrants from fewer places but you would have had much more diversity of style. You also would be dealing with art from Rodin himself rather than someone who ripped him off.

Artist self portrait as a cross stitch pattern. Try that Rodin

Ms. Adaimy is still an artist and Pharmacy educator in Lebanon. She recently participated in a multi section mural at the Lebanon Museum of Contemporary Art. The mural is in the graffiti style and sponsored by the European Union in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Well my drink is empty and I will pour another to toast the UN for showing us the state of the art world in this millennium. That the state is not so good in not their fault. At least they are not yet doing a stamp set on the current state of postage stamp gasbaggery. Come again soon for another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.

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Iceland 1925, Denmark builds a storehouse of culture, as part of sending Iceland on it’s way

The-Philatelist often writes up stamps of newly independent countries that take credit for infrastructure left behind by the former colonial power. Something like a power station is one thing but what about something that was the place’s central storehouse of knowledge and culture. Isn’t some sort of thanks in order for the generosity? Apparently not, and this is even true where both colony and colonial power were within Scandinavia. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.

You can see from the printing style, how influential Denmark was on Iceland’s stamps. The fact that they were printed in Denmark often meant stamp shortages in Iceland at the time of this stamp. In 1928 a proposal to solve the problem lead to more trouble. A Vienna group of stamp dealers calling themselves the ‘Friends of Iceland” proposed printing a large batch of commemorative stamps. Against the advise of the Postmaster, Iceland agreed to the printing of 813,000 Kronars of stamps, 600,000 of which would go to Iceland for postal use and the other 213,000 would compensate the Austrian Friends of Iceland. Fraud was then perpetuated and Iceland did not not catch that the print order that they signed off on had at some point had a 1 inserted before the 8. A police investigation was initiated but still had made no progress when the war broke out more than a few years later. No jurisdiction in Vienna perhaps even among “Friends of Iceland”. If the Iceland police had renewed their efforts after the Anschluss, the might have had more cooperation. The stamp issue with so many extras seems to have better values than this issue today, so perhaps a crooked Austria beats a niggardly printing Denmark.

Todays stamp is issue A12, a 20 Aurar stamp issued by Iceland on September 12th, 1925. It was a 5 stamp issue in various denominations. According to the Scott catalog, the stamp is worth 85 cents used. The value of the stamp unused rises to $45, showing how few went to collectors when new. The 20 Aurar stamp from the Vienna issue is worth $90 used, twice what it was worth unused. That one got to collectors.

In 1906, Denmark started construction in Reykjavik of a new building that could properly house a National Library and national archive. The large stone building in traditional Scandinavian style was the work of architect Johannes Magdahl Nielson. This was his only building commission outside of Denmark. At home he was more known for his many churches. The year the library was finished, Nielson was awarded the Eckersberg Medal. Later in 1925, he was Knighted.

In modern times as Culture House

The building, now known unofficially as the Culture house, held the National Library and also took in the collections of the national university library and a noted collection of traditional Icelandic furniture. The building held the National Library until 1994 and came under the auspices of the National Museum in 2013 to continue the furniture display. The building is on the national registry of historic places but the history as laid out now mainly goes over the work of Icelandic stone masons and leaves out entirely that the whole thing being a gift of Denmark.

Well my drink is empty and so I will have to wait until when there will be another story that can be learned from stamp collecting. First published in 2020.