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On February
4th through the 7th there is going to be a celebration of the
life and work of an extraordinarily erudite son of a legendary
figure in Goan intellectual history, the Abhimanyu of an Arjun, as someone
has said about Damodar Kosambi and his father Dharmanand.
Damodar
Kosambi was a world-renowned mathematician,historian, indologist and
Vedic scholar. Dharmanand Kosambi was a sage in the literal sense, a
Pali and Buddhist scholar.
This festival
of ideas is also an opportunity to hear what another gifted son of Goa,
Vivek Monteiro has to say, presumably, about how science might be an
essential thinking tool for everybody. Vivek Monteiro will give a talk
on ”Science as the cognition of necessity”, a proposal with which,
I suspect, I would fully agree. I have held him in high regard since
my school days, even though I have never met him. I had heard a great
deal about him from the late principal of our (his and mine) alma mater,
People’s High School, Panaji. I was inspired by the audacity of a
scholar with a Harvard doctorate abandoning a brilliant career in Theoretical
Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research to teach Maths
and Science to poor kids living in the slums of Mumbai, and then becoming
a trade unionist.
He, like
my school principal Dr. Jagdish Surlakar, who had a doctorate in
History, and yet chose to teach high school students in Goa, are embodiments
of one of highest ideals of human kind.
There
is no higher calling, no greater legacy, than educating and inspiring
young minds, irrespective of their age and social status, and irrespective
of the titles and degrees of their teachers. Nothing in life is more
rewarding than witnessing the face of a little boy or girl light up
with a flash of genuine insight because of what you said.
But it
is important to do much more than just regurgitate factual knowledge,
as is evident from the abysmal ignorance about biology, evolution and
science in general, displayed by many contributors to Goanet.
Indeed,
Vivek Monteiro is not merely imparting knowledge about scientific
facts. He appears to be teaching kids how to think using the scientific
method, to generate testable explanations without invoking superstition
and the supernatural, and to evaluate evidence in support and against
those explanations in an unbiased manner.
Please
read about all the activities of the amazing organization that he has
established recently at the following link: http://www.navnirmiti.org/
. Unfortunately,
he is not accepting any foreign donations as a matter of policy. Please
also note that his name is nowhere to be found on the website. What
you are seeing is the selfless pursuit and dispersal of knowledge for
its own sake - the high ideal that our school principal aspired for.
Cheers,
Santosh
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