Stephen Hawking

I read this deeply disturbing news of Prof. Stephen Hawking suffering mysterious injuries for the past few years. Here I don’t want to discuss the person behind his injuries, BUT the sheer act of audacity the attacker possesses.

We all know that Professor is one of the greatest surviving intellectuals on this earth. This severely disabled scientist is suffering from motor neuron disease, needs round-the-clock care and speaks with a computerized voice box. He can only move his few fingers. After taking stock of the nature of his illness everybody had given him few years on this earth to survive. But for the past forty years he was fooling the medical world by his sheer grit, determination, longevity and stubbornness. But till now he failed to fool his attacker, even refuses to identify him / her and is showing the same characteristic stubbornness.

What amazes me is the psychology of the attacker. For a normal human being, it will be difficult to speak harshly to him, he looks so frail. Before touching him, you will think seriously whether it will hurt him? Forget about leaving him stranded in the garden on the hottest day of the year without his voice box so he could not even call anyone for help.

While reading all this I was seething with impotent anger. We bow to the persons if we chance upon to know that he / she is an alumnus of Cambridge, Harvard, MIT or nearer home IIT. Though we know that every year thousands and thousands of them get selected in these institutes. But Stephen Hawking! We don’t know when someone like him will appear on this earth again. He is just like one of our humanity’s precious possessions. Once lost we will never ……….

I also remember one of the India’s great Mathematician Prof. Vashishtha Narayan. I think he is now in a Bangalore’s mental hospital. His greatest mistake in life? I think he chucked his lucrative research projects in America and decided to serve his motherland known as India. And that is what we have given to him. Confined him to a mental hospital. About him I will write later how he reached to that state. Though for the past few years I tried to keep a tab on him by searching the net. But among the trillions of net pages I could not find a single reference to him.

But right now, I am just hoping that Prof Hawking will leave his stubbornness and co-operate with authorities. If I would not have been an atheist I might have prayed for him. But right now all I have left is to hope that Prof would finally realize his self worth and don’t allow anyone to take such kind of liberties with him.