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Questions profound and inane

Abdul Kalam has passed away.  What I remember most about him is his poignant question asking what we are leaving behind for our children – for posterity. Will it be just a collection of temples, mosques and churches?

The profound nature of the question has been lost on us and nowhere could I find that superb rhetoric quoted in any of the obituaries and other writings on his demise.

In striking contrast we have also had that amusingly lovely question from a person classified as an intellectual by an admiring NDTV.  “Have the institutions (in particular IISc. and the Indian Institute of Technology) over the past 60-plus years contributed to making our society and the world a better place?”

Could the same question be asked of Einstein and other Nobel Prize winners?   The furtherance of human knowledge makes contributions that cannot be estimated or even understood by a merchant class that considers the production of wealth as the greatest contribution to ‘making our society and the world a better place’.  As if in an ironic reply to that absurd question we have a country, acknowledged in Europe and all over the world for the production of contributions to ‘making our society and the world a better place’, conferring its highest civilian award to a professor at the Indian Institute of Science.

Highest German Civilian Award for IISc Professor says a headline in today’s paper.