I like to call this one "Lemon Grass". Could grass possibly look so pretty???
Friday, February 17, 2012
After a hard day's work
Friday, January 27, 2012
Why J.C. Bose Matters
asoke basu
On 20 November, 1917, the widely recognised physicist, mystic, and civic reformer Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858–1937) founded India’s first major science research institution, in Kolkata. Bose remains as relevant today as he was at the turn of the twentieth century.
Lately, however, faith and science have been at odds in India. Both the postcolonial artifice and the hurried admirers of postmodernists pay short shrift to the foundational reality of India’s sociology of knowledge ~ that individuals are perfectly suited to experiencing the grand ethics of humanity by direct reason. Over the millennia, India’s sages and philosophers have systematised principles and methods of verifying truth. In the Humanities and the Sciences alike, critical inquiry begins with a basic question: what is the essential reality that is capable of explaining manifold behaviours and manifestations? Correspondingly, how does one find that reality, which compels this exuberant play of infinite possibilities?
Eastern philosophers maintain that moral intelligence is independent of mind and body. They believe that when truth is real, it will always have ragged edges. Nevertheless, irrespective of our social origin, each of us can independently verify truth through steady reasoning. Bose set out to unlock eternal truth by self- analysis. His scientific methodology of living, learning, and teaching is a case study in the ethics of a life lived in the pursuit of truth. Theory and practice met in Bose, whose critical realism avoided dogmas that arose from classical romanticism or modern materialism. In dedicating the Institution in 1917, he thought that “the Institute (is) not merely a laboratory but a temple.”
Bose’s life story tells us how an individual can train the gross habits of mind to locate nuanced meanings in the subtlest of places. To human journeymen of truth, the absolute can be a working stage in the theatre of daily life experience. From Bose’s childhood days in Mymensingh (now in Bangladesh), reason and faith were his happy companions. Beginning with the watchful guidance of his father, the young Jagadis learned to focus on subtle rays of perception. His family introduced him to the eternal library of intelligence, memorialised in the sacred texts—the Dhammapada (Buddhism), the Upanishads (Hinduism), and the Ittihad al-Kawn (Sufism).
Curiosity was the fabric that threaded Bose’s intuitive logic of self-inquiry. Illustrative of his approach to critical thinking is a gem of an observation he made in his “Notebook” in 1902: “The apple falls. Newton asks ‘why’? But the average man pockets the apple and says no more about it.” In 1925, while reminiscing on his 40 years of teaching at Presidency College, Bose remembered his childhood classmates, “who were sons of…fisher-folk, (from whom) I heard stories of the strange creatures that frequented the unknown depths of mighty rivers and stagnant pools.” Bose often referred to his source of cultural realism, “which…was supplied (to me) by the daily reading of and recital of Mahabharata, the epic of heroic India.” Even before philosophy came into being, India’s folk theatres were staging the perennial problems of self and the universe in myths. By watching the “wisdom” literature, the youthful Bose learned the norms of human behaviour.
Bose was a quintessentially Indian civic reformer. As an ecumenicist, scientist, teacher, and humanist, he was not an intellectual pugilist who was eager to commit his fate to blind scholastic pedantry. He was also not interested in finding grand doctrines, motives, or beliefs, but instead brought about as much moral good as possible. Hence, for Bose the goal of freeing India from the British occupation was a virtuous social premise that needed to become operational. Accordingly, he strongly believed that for virtue to have any practical meaning, everyone must have access to attain it. His inclusive view was guided by ethical principles of fairness, justice, and means.
Bose’s public plans for educational reform emphasised reasoning, observation, and hands-on laboratory practice. He worked closely with the interested parties ~ both British and Indian ~ to refashion the curricula at every educational level, from kindergarten through university. Soon after his return to India from England, where he had just completed his B.Sc., he accepted an invitation from Dr Mahendralal Sircar, MD, the founder of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, to present public lectures in science and physics.
Throughout his career, Bose demonstrated the viability of the freedom of inquiry by combining faith and reason with experimentation and instrumentation. To him, aesthetic, ethical, and scientific principles were one, united in a single consciousness. From a speech that he gave in 1901, we can reasonably infer that he would agree with two of his closest associates, Sister Nivedita and Rabindranath Tagore, that there is a common structure of consciousness. However, he would extend the domain of commonness of the external scaffolding to all entities, both living and non-living. Nonetheless, he would not divide the conscious mind and its methods of critical inquiry in a bicameral way, appealing internally to the Humanities and externally to the Sciences. The current philosophical and scientific evidence is moving toward supporting Bose’s proposition of mind, reality, and matter as a single unit, an operational reality.
In my forthcoming book, An Appraisal of J.C. Bose in the Context of the Sociology of Science, I have described his creative inquiry and realism as avant-garde. In Bose, both religion and science opened windows to the world, where the fresh breath of truth ~ to paraphrase Tagore ~ cooled the thirsty soul. For him, scientific realism was a truth-seeking exercise. Following Lev Tolstoy, one can hear Bose say, “I can never see life in the way I saw it before I witnessed the Reality.”
On 20 November, 1917, with a sharp nip in the air, Bose had no desire to erect a monument as such. Instead, he committed the Institute’s curriculum to the hard work of creative inquiry. His mission, which some of his students described as that of a punctilious pundit, was to train students who would commit to discovering the hidden truths in man and nature in a methodical way. Over the next ninety-four years, the Institute has moored its anchor in the safe harbour of reason.
The writer is a California-based emeritus professor of sociology.
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