How does anything happen? The question seems simple enough, but its answer, once you have side-stepped the philosophical minefield of whether causes exist at all, can take you into diverse intellectual domains: mathematics and physics; philosophy and metaphysics; social sciences and history, to mention a few. In all these (and other) domains a central issue is whether things happen towards a particular end, the teleological view, of from initial causes, the Aristotelian view. In other words, if we look at events in the subcontinent during the year 1971, was the creation of Bangladesh in some sense predestined and inevitable, or was it the outcome of push factors: the global situation; the policies of the great powers; or of those in the region.
February 2014, volume 38, No 2