Stephen Hawking, the retired Lucasian Professor at Cambridge is without doubt the most well known scientist in the world. Much like the image of the white haired Einstein with the mischievous smile came to signify the Atomic Age for most people, Hawking is the public face of high brow science in our times.
The publication of the set of papers presented at the International Society for Metaphysics at Vishwa Bharati in 1976 should be welcome to all students of philosophy and perhaps more so to those who have no specialization in the subject. As one belonging to the second category but deeply interested in the implications of the discovery of science on philosophy…
In the year 1996, Jatin Das, the much celebrated painter, sculptor, muralist and poet, created the Flight of Steel. Commissioned by the Bhilai Steel Plant, the Flight of Steel was one of the largest sculptures ever made by the artist. Forged out of steel with the help of engineers and welders from the Steel Plant, it stood on a roundabout in Bhilai City, in what was then Madhya Pradesh. In March 2012, on a visit back to Bhilai City, the sculptor was in for a nasty shock: the sculpture had vanished from the roundabout, and was rumoured to have been moved piecemeal to a zoo.
The past few years have seen an increase in the number of people around the world willing to step out of their homes in support of causes impacting the larger society. One such movement in India was the Anna Hazare led Jan Lokpal bill movement.
The present discourse on Capitalism has two kinds of people, a pessimist and an optimist. A pessimist is one who says, ‘things are so bad that it cannot get any worse’, an optimist is the one who butts in here and says ‘wait, it can..’; well when an economic system can be reduced to the previous joke, it is certainly time to transform the system.
My first reaction to this book was shock and horror: Shock that the subject needed such a monumental tome to do justice to it. And horror that there were so many birds that required special care and protection—like patients in a rather large intensive care unit. The genesis of the book is interesting.