(D Subbaramaiah)
It’s worthwhile to recall an event: the only Nobel Laureate in physics in India C V Raman once asked his colleague-student and presently Bharat Rathna Awardee Professor C N R Rao in 1970 a few weeks before his death, ” Why is it that India is not on top of the world in science? This distresses me. ” It’s not recorded wherein I read this event but it’s not far-fetching to imagine what Professor CNR Rao might have answered C V Raman.
The answer is an obvious one, not only then but even now. India has been a country neck-deep quagmired in an orthodox ritualistic belief system and such a country can hardly be expected to produce originality and independent thinking with a scientific spirit and the uneducated executive endeavor to make a business out of everything and anything for their survival in the paradigm of status quo.
Even now in the twenty-first century, people are stooped in the chanting of age-old scriptures which are out of tune with the happenings around the world, particularly in the scientific and technological advancements. Most of the Indians are still living in prehistoric and ancient India and very few people are progressive-minded and are being throttled to follow their patterned mindsets.
Personally, I am compelled to maintain whether India would at all wriggle out of this situation, rather beleaguered by sermonizers like Garikapaty, Chaganti, Chinna Jeeyar Swamijis, and other mushroom-growth of self-proclaimed saints and monks who are heavily pampered by the ruling political executive. This provides no chance for renaissance spirit and creativity for a generation as well as survival. I am afraid India is doomed to be a fossilized country for generations to come too.
I have long been reading Sir Roger Penrose, particularly his eccentrically titled book ‘Emperor’s New Mind (ENM)’. His first book was The Road to Reality which worked as a guide to know the laws of the Universe.
Though he is a Mathematical Physicist, he laid great stress on the theoretical study of human mind and consciousness under the prism of Quantum Mechanics which opened new vistas of curiosity for discovering how the human mind works with reference to extraordinarily evolving scope for innovative algorithms for predicting past, present and future events in the fourth temporal dimension.
The horizons of new realities are widening to unravel the secrets of the human brain. His next adventure is on Shadows of the Mind which is an exploratory book on the biological processes involved in the human mind and consciousness.
I hope, rather eagerly that the physics would step into disentangling the symbolic embodiment of our ignorance that is none but the much professed ‘ God ‘ which has become a strong instinct and stumbling block for the advancement of humankind, and generations of science in the future would step into the ultimate answer for sorrow and suffering of the humanity.
And we would be no longer live with faith, beliefs, superstitions, and supernatural spirits, for which the great Buddha lived and taught for more than twenty-five centuries. You might be aware that the Buddha never answered the questions on the existence of God, for the obvious reasons that it had to be realized by the questioners themselves on the unpremeditated and unbiased mind of their own.
It’s only the gullible who speak with absolute confidence in the existence of God. So to say, both the theists as well as atheists are equally stupid and superstitious to have belief in the narratives around an idea which is a figment of the human mind and not a reality. The scientists like Penrose might be encouraged to tread on the green pastures of Nature, the storehouse of secrets. The Nobel Academy has to be gratefully acclaimed to have patted the shoulders of Sir Roger Penrose. It’s unfortunate that the colleague teacher and Senior Stephen Hawking missed this opportunity for reasons best known to the Nobel Academy.
Penrose will share this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics with two others
(D Subbaramaiah is an advocate practising in High Courts of AP and Telangana)