Rajbir Bhattacharjee

“So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. For example, studying how Europeans came to dominate Africans enables us to realise that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the racial hierarchy, and that the world might well be arranged differently.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Procrustes, in Greek mythology, was the cruel owner of a small estate in Corydalus in Attica, on the way between Athens and Eleusis, where the mystery rites were performed. Procrustes had a peculiar sense of hospitality: he abducted travelers, provided them with a generous dinner, then invited them to spend the night in a rather special bed. He wanted the bed to fit the traveler to perfection. Those who were too tall had their legs chopped off with a sharp hatchet; those who were too short were stretched (his name was said to be Damastes, or Polyphemon, but he was nicknamed Procrustes, which meant “the stretcher”).”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

“Angina is the pain you get when there’s not enough oxygen getting to your heart muscle for the work it’s doing. That’s why it gets worse with exercise: because you’re demanding more work from the heart muscle. You might get a similar pain in your thighs after bounding up ten flights of stairs, depending on how fit you are. Treatments that help angina usually work by dilating the blood vessels to the heart, and a group of chemicals called nitrates are used for this purpose very frequently. They relax the smooth muscle in the body, which dilates the arteries so more blood can get through (they also relax other bits of smooth muscle in the body, including your anal sphincter, which is why a variant is sold as ‘liquid gold’ in sex shops). In the 1950s there was an idea that you could get blood vessels in the heart to grow back, and thicker, if you tied off an artery on the front of the chest wall that wasn’t very important, but which branched off the main heart arteries. The idea was that this would send messages back to the main branch of the artery, telling it that more artery growth was needed, so the body would be tricked. Unfortunately this idea turned out to be nonsense, but only after a fashion. In 1959 a placebo-controlled trial of the operation was performed: in some operations they did the whole thing properly, but in the ‘placebo’ operations they went through the motions but didn’t tie off any arteries. It was found that the placebo operation was just as good as the real one—people seemed to get a bit better in both cases, and there was little difference between the groups—but the most strange thing about the whole affair was that nobody made a fuss at the time: the real operation wasn’t any better than a sham operation, sure, but how could we explain the fact that people had been sensing an improvement from the operation for a very long time? Nobody thought of the power of placebo. The operation was simply binned. That’s”
― Ben Goldacre, Bad Science

“• Whether it is Godse or Savarkar, what they broadly wanted was unity of the Hindus of India. A unity that ignores the inherent diversity, and silences those who do not consider India their punyabhoomi. Without this unity it is impossible to build a strong nation. Some Muslims in Pakistan also think along these lines. But Bangladesh separated primarily because of language. Blood was shed. • The unity that Gandhi desired was one in which everyone retained their faith, preserved their own unique cultures and accepted ahimsa. Unity comes naturally to those who live in harmony despite their differences. This becomes possible when ahimsa is the basis of their lives. The life force of every community lies in its uniqueness. Whether it is food, games, worship, dress, concept of God, differing methods of prayer, the many climates that nurture mountains, forests, valleys, flora and fauna – they are all part of a chain. This multiplicity is the warp and weft of the ecological system of the living world.”
― U. R. Ananthamurthy, Hindutva or Hind Swaraj