Revelation in Hinduism: A Muslim Reading

Hinduism has been viewed by Semitic religions as a religion devoid of revelation. Early, Medieval and modem Muslim and Christian writings have often portrayed Hinduism as pagan even satanic while Hindus for millennia have claimed to be divinely revealed. Is Hinduism really a revealed religion and if so, what kind of a revelation does it have? In what manner does the divine reveal himself and who are the recipients of this revelation? To what extent is this concept different from ours? Does the process of revelation continue or has it been discontinued? These are some of the more significant questions that this article shall engage with. It clarifies that Hindus have books which they consider revealed and look upon much as Muslims look upon their Qur’an. The most significant of these among a majority of the Hindus are called the Vedas, literally, knowledge. It goes on to introduce the Vedas with respect to their various parts and content, what Hindus largely believe about it and how they ensured its preservation and safe transmission to later generations through various intricate and elaborate memorization techniques. The article highlights the importance of rishl, the recipients of these revelations, their kinds, characteristics and role in the process of revelation. The article contends that there is much in common between Rishland Semitic prophets with respect to their characteristics but that the similarities do not end here. Rather there is much more common ground to be explored with respect to revelation and its contents and its conveyors than meets the eye.

Scalable Dc Microgrids for Rural Electrification

Access to electricity is one of the key factors indicating the socio-economic status of any community. Reliable and adequate provision of electricity is mandatory for improved standards of living including better health, education, transport, agriculture and employment opportunities. Unfortunately, according to International Energy Agency, over 1.1 billion people around the world lack access to any electricity out of which 85 percent reside in rural areas of developing world. Electrification of these remote rural communities through national grid interconnection is not economically feasible for many developing countries due to high cost associated with the development of generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure. Alternatively, DC microgrids implemented with distributed generation and low voltage distribution are becoming very popular for low cost rural electrification. However, current implementations are largely suboptimal due to high distribution losses associated with their centralized architecture and their inability to support high power community loads. In this work, a novel distributed DC microgrid architecture which allows a scalable approach with minimal upfront investment to fulfill rural electricity needs along with the provision of higher powers for communal loads and beyond subsistence provisioning of electrical power is proposed. The architecture is capable to work entirely on solar energy with power delivery capability to individual consumers and added inherent ability to integrate resources to power up larger loads for communal/commercial applications. The proposed microgrid architecture consists of a cluster of multiple nanogrids (households), where each nanogrid has its own PV generation and battery storage along with bi-directional connectivity to the microgrid. Thus, each nanogrid can work independently in islanded mode along with the provision of sharing its resources with the community through the bidirectional converter. In the proposed architecture, the bi-directional power flow capability is implemented through a modified flyback converter. A decentralized control methodology is also proposed to ensure a communication-less, yet coordinated control among the distributed resources in multiple nanogrids. The microgrid is evaluated for optimal distribution voltage level, conductor size and interconnection scheme between nanogrids using Newton-Raphson analysis modified for DC power flow. Various scenarios for power sharing among the contributing nanogrids and communal load power allocation are analyzed from operation and control prospective to validate the architecture and its performance. Further, an optimal framework for the planning of distributed generation and storage resources in each nanogrid with respect to time varying profiles of region-specific temperature and irradiance is also presented to ensure the better resource utilization. A scaled version of the proposed architecture is implemented on hardware, while the efficacy of control methodology is validated on MATLAB/Simulink and hardware in loop facilities at microgrid laboratory in Aalborg University. The proposed distributed architecture along with decentralized control can be considered as a promising solution for the future rural electrification implementations in developing regions.