Satyajit Ray was born on May 2, 1921, in an intellectual and affluent family in Calcutta, India.

His grandfather, Upendra Kishore Ray (Roychowdhury) was a distinguished writer, painter, a violin player and a composer. He was also a pioneer in half-tone block making and founded one of the finest presses in the country ? U. Ray & Sons. He died six years before Satyajit Ray was born.

His father, Sukumar Ray, the eldest son of Upendra Kishore, studied printing technology in England and joined the family business. He too was an eminent poet, writer and illustrator of nonsense literature in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.(1921〜1992)

Sukumar Ray fell ill the year Satyajit Ray was born with a dreaded tropical disease of the time ? Kala-azar. He regularly contributed poems, stories and illustrations to ‘Sandesh’, a children’s magazine in Bengali which Satyajit Ray’s grandfather had started. Sukumar Ray died in 1924.

Need less to say the child Satyajit was fascinated by the block making and the printing process.

In 1880’s, Ray family had embraced ‘Brahmo Samaj’, sect within Hindu society. Brahmo was a reaction to Christianity (at that time, India was under British colonial rule and Calcutta was the seat of power), western literature and orthodox Hindu practices such as ‘Sati’. With a cosmopolitan and rational outlook, Raja Ram Mohan Roy founded the Brahmo. Later Brahmos were led by Devendranath Tagore, father of Rabindranath Tagore.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Tagore was a Bengali writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. He was born in Calcutta and later traveled over the world. He grew up in a large house where there was much writing and artistic activity, and he wrote prolifically his entire life, producing more than 3,000 songs as well as volumes of novels, short stories, plays, and poems. In later life he delivered lectures and made many paintings. He wrote what are now the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh.

MOTHER TERESA

Mother Teresa is Albanian by birth; her original name is Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. In 1948, Mother Teresa became a citizen of India. At the age of 18, Mother Teresa attended the religious Order called Our Lady of Loreto in Ireland. She received her spiritual training in Dublin, Ireland and Darjeeling, India. In 1931, Mother Teresa took the name of Teresa from the French nun Thérèse Martin, who was canonized in 1927 with the title St. Thérèse of Lisieux. In 1937, Mother Teresa took her vows. She taught for 20 years in Saint Mary's High School in Calcutta, India. In September 10, 1946, Mother Teresa received another call from God to serve the poorest of the poor who live in the streets. In 1948, Pope Pious XII granted Mother Teresa (1910〜1998)

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose

Subhas Chandra was born on January 23rd 1897 in Cuttack (in present day Orissa) as the ninth child among fourteen, of Janakinath Bose, an advocate, and Prabhavatidevi, a pious and God-fearing lady. A brilliant student, he topped the matriculation examination of Calcutta province and passed his B.A. in Philosophy from the Presidency College in Calcutta. He was strongly influenced by Swami Vivekananda's teachings and was known for his patriotic zeal as a student. His parents' wishes kept him away from the Indian freedom struggle and led him  into studies for the Indian Civil Service in England.  (1897-1945)

Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi (1869-1948), also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarat on October 2, 1869, and educated in law at University College, London. In 1891, after having been admitted to the British bar, Gandhi returned to India and attempted to establish a law practice in Bombay, with little success.

(1869-1948)

Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in India in 1858. He received his education first in India, until in 1880 he went to England to study medicine. Bose returned to India, taking up a post initially as officiating professor of physics at the Presidency College in Calcutta. Here he converted a small enclosure adjoining a bathroom into a laboratory. In 1895 Bose gave his first public demonstration of electro - magnetic waves, using them to ring a bell remotely and to explode some gunpowder."The first  successful wireless signalling experiment by Marconi was not until May 1897. The 1895 public demonstration by Bose in Calcutta predates all these experiments.By about the end of the 19th century, the interests of Bose turned away from electromagnetic waves to response phenomena in plants. He retired from the Presidency College in 1915, but was appointed Professor Emeritus. Two years later the Bose Institute was founded. Bose was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1920. He died in 1937.

Father of Telecommunication - Bose or Marconi ?

Nearly 100 years after Guglielmo Marconi's first transatlantic wireless communication, it has come to light that the detector he had used to pick up the signal was invented by Professor Jagadish Chandra Bose. The discovery made by a group of scientists of the US-based IEEE proves what has been a century-old suspicion in the world scientific community: that the honour of being the pioneer in wireless communication should have gone to Bose and not Marconi.

Bose's invention of the mercury coherer with a telephone, which Marconi used, was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, London, on April 27, 1899, over two years before Marconi's first wireless communication on December 12, 1901, from Newfoundland, now in Canada. In January, IEEE will publish a special issue, where evidence will be presented to show that Marconi had used the sensitive semiconductor diode device invented by Bose.

Investigations by the IEEE group show that both Bose and Marconi were in London in 1896-97. The Italian was conducting wireless experiments for the British post office and Bose was on a lecture tour. Both scientists were interviewed by McClure's Magazine (now defunct) in March 1897. In the interview, Bose came out with high praise for Marconi, then under attack from established British scientists who doubted his credentials. Marconi never could make it to college because of his poor high school record. Bose also said he was not interested in commercial telegraphy and that others could use his research work.

In 1899, Bose unveiled his invention of the mercury coherer with the telephone detector in a paper at the Royal Society. In a curious coincidence, Bose lost his diary containing an account of the invention and a prototype of the detector during a lecture tour in the same year. Brilliant Marconi quickly grasped the commercial importance of Bose's invention and began to explore it secretly. His childhood friend Luigi Solari started experimenting with Bose's invention and presented Marconi with a slightly modified design in the summer of 1901 for use in the upcoming transatlantic experiment.

The Italian scientist then went on to apply for a British patent in his name, never acknowledging his debt to Bose. Securing Bose's place in the history of long-distance communication, the IEEE paper will narrate how the truth was suppressed all these years, even though it was there for all to see in the 1899 Proceedings of the Royal Society. A combination of factors like naivete about patenting, plain misfortune and politics of the contemporary times weighed against Bose, said a scientist associated with the IEEE project. (Source: The Telegraph, Calcutta; Oct 31, 1997 )

Amartya Sen is, inarguably, the most distinguished economist India has ever produced. Some of the major events of his career are highlighted in the accompanying box. If the list therein is exiguous, it's because life is governed by such unpleasant realities as word limits. An accurate and exhaustive catalogue would closely follow the contours of H. Hatterr's capacious fantasy: "... fellow of the royal geographical, humane, automobile, asiatic, astronomical and microscopic societies ..." With Sen, it has been a case of life imitating art.

As part of the brief given to this writer, it was delicately suggested that he should steer clear of unrestrained panegyrics. Since one's objectivity is on the line, one takes it that some element of negative criticism of the subject is called for in the interests of completeness and balance. To this end, it may be useful to resort to Sen's own technique of enumeration. Firstly, for all of the wonderful lucidity of his exposition, some of his formal papers, with their trademark combination of fine-grained logic, minute differentiations, and trickily nuanced arguments, can tax the patience and stamina of even his most devoted students: indeed, a fellow-economist was one provoked to describing him, with some asperity, as "that distinguished distinguisher". Secondly, while Sen has always been a generous and courteous critic of the work of others, he has also been known to be a stubborn and at times prickly defender of his own viewpoint against the criticism of others (as opponents of his work on liberty, for example, will testify wryly). One is here reminded of the exhortation, addressed to an unyielding dissenter, by an ally of that redoubtable rhetorician h*y*m*a*n k*a*p*l*a*n: "Give an inch, Shimmelfarb!" Thirdly, and finally, I believe it would be a great kindness to Professor Sen to suggest that his handwriting is execrable. Surely nobody can now accuse this writer of bias.

(1933〜　　　　　)

A remarkable facet of Sen's research output has been the range and versatility of its coverage. He has worked not only in economics but also in philosophy; and in crossing disciplinary borders, he has nonetheless managed to preserve a certain continuity and smoothness of transition whereby one is enabled to perceive his work as reflecting a seamless whole. Within economics, he has made original and critical contributions to development theory, planning, capital and growth theory, investment appraisal, the study of technology and employment, welfare economics, social choice theory, poverty and inequality measurement, issues in the causes and redressal of famines and destitution, and population policy. This roster naturally leaves out much else of interest.

His philosophical work, insofar as it is possible to separate it from his economics, has made deep explorations into issues of justice, inequality, morality, liberty, freedom, rationality and objectivity. As a philosopher he has eminently fulfilled those requirements that have been laid down by Stendhal, and which Nietzsche held in such high esteem: "In order to be a good philosopher, one must be dry, clear, devoid of illusion." More recently, Sen has been concerned to be a committed commentator on issues of social and political salience, coming out strongly, as he has done, against religious fundamentalism and the bomb. Taking his work as a whole, one especially striking feature of it has been his capacity to systematically anticipate his own future concerns, so that seemingly disparate themes evolving over time are often tied together by a running thread which is part of one grand design: a testimony to both the precocity and prescience of the Sen of progressively earlier vintages. "And the end and the beginning," as Eliot said, "were always there."

What commands the attention of the professional economist is the almost single-handed effort undertaken by Sen to restore economics to the status it once enjoyed under the banner of classical political economy. His great achievement has been to re-establish both the centrality and the scientific validity of value-orientation in economics, to underline the necessity of seeing the subject as being concerned with normative ("ought-related") propositions as much as with positive ("is-related") propositions. Like another great contemporary of his, Satyajit Ray, Sen has expressed himself firmly and unequivocally, but not stridently. His own standing and credibility in the world of scholarship have much to do with the deep responsibility he has shown in deferring to the demands placed by the harsh rigours of disciplinary protocol, and to the demands made by a just vision of life itself.

What can one say of his impact? In his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee has warned against that ultimate instrument of a great person's emasculation: acceptance. Tokenism is the enemy of engagement. Amartya Sen's effort is awesome. One only has to look around to see that the mission to which his life's work points has scarcely begun to be addressed yet.

S.Subramanian is a professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies. He was taught by Professor Amartya Sen.