What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. -           Hamlet, William Shakespeare Not only man, each species of living organisms, is a breathtaking piece of design, occupying its niche in nature with perfect poise. One cannot but exclaim in awe at the wonderful process that designed this machine. An intelligent designer who created this perfect design seemed inevitable. Charles Robert Darwin busted the myth of a creator with the publication in 1859, of his book, The Origin of Species. Alfred Russel Wallace simultaneously arrived at this marvellous explanation – the theory of Natural Selection. Millions of species are designed for their habitat in nature, not by an ‘all seeing’ eye of a creator, but by the blind process of Natural Selection. Theory of ev...

In 1964, a pair of radio-astronomers, Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson, were experimenting on the huge twenty-feet antenna of the Bell Telephone Laboratory at Crawford Hill, New Jersey. They were trying to measure the radio waves emitted by our galaxy, the Milky Way. A constant noise bugged them and confounded their experiment. Frantic search for the source of noise revealed a pair of pigeons roosting on the antenna. They had left there 'a white dielectric material’ – young scientists reported in a delicate jargon. Pigeons were shooed away and antenna scraped off the contamination. But the noise persisted. Penzias and Wilson found that the noise was recorded with equal intensity irrespective of the direction in which antenna faced the sky. Radio waves were evidently not being emitted by a galaxy, but emanated from the whole space in the universe. They also found that these were microwaves with a wavelength of about 7.35 centimetres. This wavelength corresponded to a temperature...

Theism is belief in a god or gods. Atheism is ‘a’, i.e., ‘without’ theism, or without belief in a god or gods. It is theists who are claiming a positive belief. Therefore, the onus of proof lies on their shoulders. Atheists are not asserting a belief. They merely do not find theists’ belief convincing. If the evidence is not forthcoming, is insufficient, or self-contradictory, the belief can be rejected forthwith. Einstein did not believe that Newton’s definition of gravity as the force of attraction between two bodies was the correct interpretation of gravity. He held that gravity results from warping of spacetime by massive bodies. He could not readily summon the maths to prove his theory. But he did not relinquish the job of proving his hypothesis to the Newtonians. He worked for ten years to arrive at the concise mathematical formulation of his theory of gravitation. Result was the theory of General Relativity – believed to be one of the most beautiful inventions of human mind. ...

God was in my world, the farthest I look into my past. My parents were not fastidious about religion. I do not remember they ever talked to me about religious doctrines. They were not aware of these in their own religion. Their religion centred around celebrating major festivals as a cultural event. On these days house was cleaned more assiduously. My mother prepared special dishes, specific for each festival. I eagerly awaited them. On some of these days she told us parables. I heard them year after year and knew every word. But I still looked forward to the evening when she would wear a special sari meant for these occasions, dress us up, sit with us on the floor, savouries arrayed around as offerings to the gods, and narrate the story. My mother had her hands full with household chores. A little spare time she salvaged from these cares she spent with books. She prayed only on the days of festivals. We had some framed pictures of gods arranged on a shelf. My father would light a la...

Of Human Bondage - W. Somerset Maugham The Eternal Story Apart from the freedom to say truthfully that grey in your hair bespeaks your experience, age brings many compensations. Not the least of these is the ability to contemplate past calmly and indulge once again in certain innocent exploits that gave one much joy in the past. For past now looms large in life where future seems to be shrinking fast. I now find indescribable pleasure in books that I read many years back, and whose memory, I would hate to part with.   I first read  Of Human Bondage  about three decades back. I had discovered Maugham recently and had fallen headlong for his books . Until my memory is swayed by the lure of nostalgia, I can claim that I found it ravishing. I read it again last year and once again relished every word. Of Human Bondage  was published in 1915, when Maugham was forty. In preface to an early edition of the book, Maugham tells us how the book ‘came to be written’. He wrot...

In a world not simple by any reckoning, time is the weirdest phenomenon. It is universally felt and effortlessly perceived. But it treads so softly that one doesn’t notice its passage in the daily grind. Nearer sixty than fifty, it is inexcusable to maintain an illusion of youth. But I remember and experience my past so vividly and with such force that the day I joined college, was married, my children were born, do not feel to belong to last millennium. Aged visage of a college mate whom I haven’t met in decades, occasionally viewed on a social-media platform, remind me of the incessant flow of time; so do events that highlight adulthood of my children. Mirror then speaks the truth for a little while.   An obstetrics resident, friend of my wife who was studying pathology in the same college, held her in a tray resting on her extended forearms, as she exited the operating theatre to show me my daughter. ‘Oh! She is so small, is she fine!’ was the thought that came to my mind ...