Transcript of speeches by a Hindu philosopher, chiefly on Hindu philosophy and Hinduism.

Articles chiefly on the Bratachāri Movement, founded and popularised by Gurusadaẏa Datta, 1882-1941; includes articles on nationalism with special reference to Bengal, India.

1. Premadharma o Rāsalīlā.-- 2. Bedānta o bijñāna ebaṃ Jagadgurura ābirbhāba.-- 3. Upanishad-brahmatattva ebaṃ yājñabalkyera advaitabāda.-- 4. Upanishad-jaṛa o jībatattva.-- 5. Karmabāda o janmāntara, abatāratattva ebaṃ prakr̥ta yoga ki? -- v. 6. Sāṃkhya paricaẏa, Buddhadebera 'nāstikatā' ebaṃ buddhi o bodhi. -- v. 7. Gītāẏa Īśvarabāda, Raṅgamatī, ebaṃ Meghadūta (mūla o padyānubāda).

In human languages, a palindrome reads the same forward as backward (e.g., ‘madam’). In regulatory DNA, a palindrome is an inverted sequence repeat that allows a transcription factor to bind as a homodimer or as a heterodimer with another type of transcription factor. Regulatory palindromes are typically imperfect, that is, the repeated sequences differ in at least one base pair, but the functional significance of this asymmetry remains poorly understood. Here, we review the use of imperfect palindromes in Drosophila photoreceptor (...) differentiation and mammalian steroid receptor signaling. Moreover, we discuss mechanistic explanations for the predominance of imperfect palindromes over perfect palindromes in these two gene regulatory contexts. Lastly, we propose to elucidate whether specific imperfectly palindromic variants have specific regulatory functions in steroid receptor signaling and whether such variants can help predict transcriptional outcomes as well as the response of individual patients to drug treatments. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article explores Rabindranath Tagore’s vision of the future, continuously engaged with and drawing from the past, in relation to my own creative practice as theatre and film director, curator, and singer-performer, a practice that continuously engages with the resonances of Tagorean utopia. Through three case studies from the author’s creative engagement with Tagore’s utopia, the article explores the building of transcultural utopias in which Tagore and Leonard Elmhirst participated and how Dartington Hall rapidly became a magnet for artists, (...) writers, philosophers, and musicians; Tagore’s opera Tasher Desh, a powerful political satire on fascism/free will; and the author’s feature film Life Goes On and the Tagorean construct of the absent-present mother figure. (shrink)

Wittgenstein in his early work viz. Tractatus argued that there is a common, essential, underlying structure that links logic, language and the world. He also argued about the need for an analysis of ordinary language in terms of a perspicuous symbolism that would display a one to one relationship between a proposition and a fact – when both of them are broken down to their simplest components – viz. to atomic propositions and atomic states of affairs. All propositions are ultimately (...) truth-functional combinations of atomic propositions – thus all language is resolvable to a unique constant. So for early Wittgenstein, though there is an apparent complexity and diversity of propositions still there lies a uniform, essential structure of truthfunctional propositions and that can be reduced to a single constant. And language to have a determinate sense must be ultimately based on objects – the absolutely simple logical atoms of the world. These objects imbibe their range of combination with other objects, which implies that any genuine propositions – however unusual and unconventional it may seem to be – must ultimately be constrained by the permissible range of combination of the objects. In this way early Wittgenstein sought to secure an essential metaphysics via an essential structure of language. However in Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein attacked essentialism by rejecting the picture theory, and the search for commonality and uniformity. He denied essence, the universal, the common element present in all the objects of a class and accepted only an indeterminate and incomplete flow of the criss-crossing, the overlapping features. For him language is constituted by an ever expanding flow of uses, which he called language-games. The significance of the term ‘language-game’ lies in the fact that like games language too is not based on any ontology that would confer a common essence across all the widely divergent uses. Nor did Wittgenstein accept any hidden essence behind appearance. In PI the later Wittgenstein denied both analysis and essence and propagated description of usage and behaviours as the only method of philosophy. Later Wittgenstein will neither commit himself to ontological necessity, nor to necessity being a matter of scheme-relative propositions in the Quinean sense. For later Wittgenstein all attempts to establish essences, or the contrary exercises to relativise them to a particular set of presumptions, are themselves language-games – they boil down to usage and practices that do not rest on any foundation. (shrink)

In India, domestic workers' movements advocated for their own and other workers’ rights both before and during the pandemic. Over the course of the pandemic, however, the political landscape and de...

Purified nuclei are being used as a test system to study the regulation of nuclear enzymes in plants. Regulatory agents such as light, hormones and polyamines can stimulate kinases or phosphatases that control nuclear protein phosphorylation and they can modulate the activity of as yet unidentified enzymes required for transcript synthesis and/or stabilization. This essay summarizes current findings and discusses the advantages and pitfalls of using isolated nuclei to investigate how nuclear functions are controlled.

How does one decolonize and reclaim the meanings of research and researcher, particularly in the context of Western research? Indigenous communities have long experienced oppression by Western researchers. Is it possible to build a collaborative research knowledge that is culturally appropriate, respectful, honoring, and careful of the Indigenous community? What are the challenges in Western research, researchers, and Western university methodology research training? How have ‘studies’ – critical anti-racist theory and practice, cross-cultural research methodology, critical perspectives on environmental justice, and (...) land-based education – been incorporated into the university to disallow dissent? What can be done against this disallowance? According to Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang’s suggestion, this article did not use the concept of decolonization as a substitute for ‘human rights’ or ‘social justice’, but as a demand of an Indigenous framework and a centering of Indigenous land, Indigenous sovereign... (shrink)

The term biology is of Greek origin meaning the study of life. On the other hand, chemistry is the science of matter, which deals with matter and its properties, structure, composition, behavior, reactions, interactions and the changes it undergoes. The theory of abiogenesis maintains that chemistry made a transition to biology in a primordial soup. To keep the naturalistic ‘inanimate molecules to human life’ evolution ideology intact, scientists must assemble billions of links to bridge the gap between the inanimate chemicals (...) that existed in the primordial soup and anatomically modern humans. Even though the proponents of a natural origin of life expressed much optimism for providing their theories, presently there is a detailed compilation of information seriously questioning this doctrine. This reductionistic ideology has always failed to answer two simple questions: (1) What is the minimum number of parts that are essential for a living organism to survive? (2) By what mechanism do these parts get assembled together? Evolutionists say a series of prebiotic processes and developments guide networks of dynamically linked small molecules and amphiphiles to form biological macromolecules, membraneous compartments, and finally primitive cells. However, none of these proposed pathways to life appears to be credible. The continuous advancement in various fields of science are not only providing major challenges to reductionistic ideology but are supplying increasing evidence for a systemic concept of life as an organic whole. Several leading researchers in the field of ‘origin of life’ are continually concluding that there are major scientific problems attached with all existing naturalistic ‘origin of life’ hypothesis. Only by taking into account all biological activities collectively as a system can a satisfactory elucidation of the living state be realized. In this present paper an attempt has been made to present a few significant challenges to the theory of abiogenesis based on the peer reviewed scientific literature. Subsequently, a non-reductionistic concept of life as a system is proposed as an alternative for resolving some of the problems inherent in origin of life research. (shrink)

Ce recueil d’essais rassemblés par une équipe internationale de chercheurs examine la représentation des hommes dans les œuvres de neuf écrivaines de la Belle Époque. Le volume est composé de onze essais sur neuf écrivaines dont certaines, telle Colette, sont toujours célèbres. La plupart cependant sont beaucoup moins connues aujourd’hui, sauf par des spécialistes. Pourtant, pendant leur époque, elles furent les auteures de best-sellers ou couronnées de prix, bien qu’elles aient dû faire face...

In a deeper sense, quality of worklife refers to the quality of life of individuals in their working organizations—commercial, educational, cultural, religious, philanthropic or whatever they are. Modern society is organizational society. Individuals spend much of their lives in organizations. Hence, the impor tance of QWL is unquestionable. It has an ideological core comprising the perceptual gap across individu als about the real connotation of QL as well as QWL. In addition to this ideological problem, the study of QWL presents (...) serious methodological problems too. A positivist attitude is always sceptical about the deeper meaning of life, maybe out of honest lack of knowledge, or maybe with some ulterior motives. The present paper therefore is an attempt to touch upon three aspects of QWL: QWL from a human values approach; some viewpoints for subjective observation of QWL; and some ameliorative measures towards im proving QWL. (shrink)

Hereditary breast and ovarian cancers are frequently attributed to germline mutations in the tumor suppressor genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. BRCA1/2 act to repair double‐strand breaks (DSBs) and suppress the demise of unstable replication forks. Our work elucidated a dynamic interplay between BRCA2 and the WRN DNA helicase/exonuclease defective in the premature aging disorder Werner syndrome. WRN and BRCA2 participate in complementary pathways to stabilize replication forks in cancer cells, allowing them to proliferate. Whether the functional overlap of WRN and BRCA2 (...) is relevant to replication at gaps between newly synthesized DNA fragments, protection of telomeres, and/or metabolism of secondary DNA structures remain to be determined. Advances in understanding the mechanisms elicited during replication stress have prompted the community to reconsider avenues for cancer therapy. Insights from studies of PARP or topoisomerase inhibitors provide working models for the investigation of WRN's mechanism of action. We discuss these topics, focusing on the implications of the WRN‐BRCA2 genetic interaction under conditions of replication stress. (shrink)

This essay mobilizes Fanon as a point of entry into mapping the current state of postcolonial studies, and within that, reflects on what constitutes the postcolonial canon. Over a gradual course of the eighties and nineties, there has come about a transition from the field’s founding moments in which anti-imperialism, tricontinentalism, Third World nationalism and aesthetics of realism and resistance thrived, to the current trends that show a slant toward postmodernist fragmentation, multiculturalism, issues of diaspora, metropolitan narratives as well as (...) a proclivity toward theorizing the field itself. There are many reasons for this: the specific dynamics of the post-Cold War American culture within which these works were received; the compromised relationship between academic and commercial publishing culture, which made a jump from narratives of decolonization and neocolonialism to metropolitan multiculturalism; and the sway of postmodernism over academia as a whole, which led to a disregard for Marxist theories and, more importantly, to a neglect of realism as a mode and aesthetic in postcolonial theory. These factors have worked together to shape how the genealogy of postcolonial studies and its theory have come to be accepted as “obvious.” This has, in turn, had strong repercussions for the kind of literature and theory that have come to be celebrated and canonized within the field. The essay draws on Anthony Alessandrini's Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different and Neil Lazarus' The Postcolonial Unconscious to offer a reconstructed genealogy of the field of postcolonial studies. (shrink)

Articles on the life and work of Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950, philosopher and thinker from India, and his views on Ramakrishna, 1836-1886, Hindu saint, and his life.

In the past, philosophers, scientists, and even the general opinion, had no problem in accepting the existence of consciousness in the same way as the existence of the physical world. After the advent of Newtonian mechanics, science embraced a complete materialistic conception about reality. Scientists started proposing hypotheses like abiogenesis (origin of first life from accumulation of atoms and molecules) and the Big Bang theory (the explosion theory for explaining the origin of universe). How the universe came to be what (...) it is now is a key philosophical question. The hypothesis that it came from Nothing (as proposed by Stephen Hawking, among others), proves to be dissembling, since the quantum vacuum can hardly be considered a void. In modern science, it is generally assumed that matter existed before the universe came to be. Modern science hypothesizes that the manifestation of life on Earth is nothing but a mere increment in the complexity of matter — and hence is an outcome of evolution of matter (chemical evolution) following the Big Bang. After the manifestation of life, modern science believed that chemical evolution transformed itself into biological evolution, which then had caused the entire biodiversity on our planet. The ontological view of the organism as a complex machine presumes life as just a chance occurrence, without any inner purpose. This approach in science leaves no room for the subjective aspect of consciousness in its attempt to know the world as the relationships among forces, atoms, and molecules. On the other hand, the Vedāntic view states that the origin of everything material and nonmaterial is sentient and absolute (unconditioned). Thus, sentient life is primitive and reproductive of itself – omne vivum ex vivo – life comes from life. This is the scientifically verified law of experience. Life is essentially cognitive and conscious. And, consciousness, which is fundamental, manifests itself in the gradational forms of all sentient and insentient nature. In contrast to the idea of objective evolution of bodies, as envisioned by Darwin and followers, Vedānta advocates the idea of subjective evolution of consciousness as the developing principle of the world. In this paper, an attempt has been made to highlight a few relevant developments supporting a sentient view of life in scientific research, which has caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of life and its origin. (shrink)