Bhagwan Nebhraj Thadani

• Bachelor of Engineering, 1952 from University of Poona, India.
• Doctor of Philosophy, 1965 , Bombay University.

In order to obtain these scraps of paper I wasted almost half my life. Actually, I have had to teach myself everything, including the languages listed below.

Languages

Roughly in the order in which I acquired them (1) Sindhi (2) Hindi (3) English (4) Urdu (5) Gujarati (so-so) (6) Marathi (so-so) (7) German (8) Russian (9) French (10) Spanish (11) Arabic (rusty) (12) Farsi (rusty)

Activities

Worked as a civil, structural engineer and professor in various universities in India, and Canada, where I moved to in 1965. Retired in 1991.

Publications

Published my first book in 1960 on Graphic Statics in India and followed up with these titles:

• Applied Mechanics.
• Structural Mechanics
• Nirman Vigyan key Sidhanth

I followed this up with more than 40 papers on engineering in English, German and Hindi. In 1980, I set up my own publishing house, Cantext Publications and published the following books

• Basic Reinforced Concrete Design
• Practical Reinforced Concrete
• Structural Steel Design
• Timber Design
• Prestressed Concrete Sections
• Applied Statics
• Medicinal and Pharmaceutical Uses of Natural Products
• Masonry Design
• Philosophy in the Boudoir. A new English translation of Sade's La Philosophie dans le Boudoir.
• Singar kamray men tatvagyan. The first Hindi translation of Sade's La Philosophie dans le Boudoir.

Music

I have always been passionately fond of the piano and lately have taken to publishing rare piano scores after notating them on my computer. My interest is in the Russian composers of the late 19th, early 20th centuries, specially the music of Sergei Bortkiewicz (1877-1952) and Felix Blumenfeld (1863-1931). I discovered Bortkiewicz's Second Sonata #2, Op. 60 in a museum in the Netherlands and published it in 1995. Since then I have published the following music scores under the Cantext Publications imprint.

1. Sonata #2, Op. 60, Sergei Bortkiewicz, 1995
2. Selected Works, Bortkiewicz, 1996
3. Sonate-Fantaise, Blumenfeld, 1996
4. Selected Works, Blumenfeld
5. Russian Rhapsody, Bortkiewicz from an autograph discovered in a museum in the Netherlands
6. Recollections, by Bortkiewicz, which I translated from the German, 1996

My article on Sergei Bortkiewicz appeared in the Jan. 1996 number of the music magazine Clavier. Please contact me if you are interested in any of these publications.

Fonts

To give further scope to my artistic pretensions, I have designed 19 Devnagari and 6 Gujarati TrueType scalable font families for use with any Windows software. Once installed, these fonts convert your favorite word processor into a Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi or Gujarati word processor. In addition I have modified the Devnagari fonts so that they can be used to write Sindhi in the Devnagari-Sindhi script. Normally, Sindhi is written from right to left using a modified Arabic script.

Date: 1996, July 31