Was universe born in a bang? Will it end one day in a crunch? Is man a product of evolution or the creation of an unfathomably profound being? How can human heart simultaneously shelter both: desolate miseries and eternal joys? Is human decision-making inherently rational or anecdotal? Will our species perish before does the earth? Are these queries lofty yet, futile preoccupations of an idle mind? Or do they highlight a distinguishing attribute of our species, the Homo Sapiens, man who knows? Origin of universe and life can be argued till there is none left standing, but knowledge could not have begun without a mind capable of thinking. And the language of thoughts is words. Human story must have begun with word. Words are the notes that produce the music of our mind called t houghts . Rob human mind of words and it is a spectre of a ghost stage complete with tanpura, tabla, sarangi, a musician; and a funereal silence.   I cannot date my love for books. The farthe...

When does a day begin? When does it end? Does dawn arrive with the distant blush of the dark sky? Or does it set in when a young sun hesitatingly appears at the horizon? Does the dwindling warmth announce a day’s demise, or does it linger till the last light is sucked out? Day is imperceptibly born in dawn and dissolves as furtively in dusk. Autumn unhurriedly begets winter. Winter disappears in spring. Spring after a protracted labour births summer that unbeknownst metamorphoses into autumn. When does life begin? Does the beat of foetus’ heart announce a new life? What about the three-day old embryo or a single-celled zygote after fertilization of the egg? Or each of the ova and the millions of sperm? Each of these throbs with potential of bringing forth a new life. Nature goes on cycling in its rhythm, ceaselessly and imperturbably. These relentless revolutions, pursued over eons, give rise to variations. Newer elements born with their unique cycles mingle in the grind of unive...

Reverend Thomas Bayes of Tunbridge Wells in Kent, England, was a Georgian gentleman scientist. These wealthy, independent, male citizens practiced science as a passionate hobby and not a profession. Many were priests. Church provided easy and respectable means of an ample income and vast spare time to indulge scientific queries. By most accounts, Bayes was a hopeless preacher, but an ingenious mathematician. At some point in his life, exactly when is not known, he devised a formula to work out various probability distributions of an uncertain event. And then; he forgot about it. Richard Price, Bayes’ friend, submitted this formula to Royal Society in 1763, two years after his death, under the title, 'An essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances'.  Bayes’ theorem, as the formula came to be called, had no utility in Bayes’ lifetime. Today it is considered a landmark in the history of probability science and is used for: spam filtering, weather forecasting, DNA ...

  Road to Self-Awareness   I read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene about two decades ago. Fiction was my staple reading then. I had come to acknowledge vagaries of fate – unfathomable misery of many and unbridled joys of some, through fiction. - John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Samuel Butler’s The Way Of All Flesh, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Sharat Chandra Chatterjee’s Shrikant, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, were some of the literary masterpieces that chronicled life in face of a whimsical fate.   But acceptance of chance in human condition gave birth to many queries. It appeared that being human was not just possessing an upright posture, a reasoning mind, ability of language, culture, and social behaviour. These made us all similar. What made us different? Why everyone behaves in a unique fashion? Why are we here? Our existence must justify our fickle fates. Seeds of doubts had been sown but answers were not in sight. ...