Life and work of the great Visionary, Homi J. Bhabha | Hacker News Reader

Life and work of the great Visionary, Homi J. Bhabha

artsandculture.google.com

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homi_J._Bhabha#Death

He rubbed shoulders with giants of Theoretical Physics, and was on the verge of taking India into the nuclear club, in 1966.

Its speculated (including an ex-CIA anecdote) that he was assasinated. USA couldn't handle the fact of India growing into a Nuclear and Space power. Another Indian scientist Sarabhai also died under suspicious circumstances. But Bhabha's seemed especially a strategic concern for US policy in those days.

USA and India were 'almost enemies' in those decades, a period when India refused to be bullied by either side.

Love to hear more on the assassination or poisoning aspects of Bhabha and sarabhai. British is not going to declassify stuff about Ambedkar. It could be the same about bhabha.

In recent years as well Indian nuclear scientists have been departing under mysterious circumstances and the rumour is Pak/China/Rus were not facilitating those departures.

“Business deaths” maybe? Biggest economy doesn’t like competition.

https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/11-indian-nuclear-scientists...

https://www.sundayguardianlive.com/investigation/7559-atomic...

https://www.theweek.in/news/india/2021/01/06/from-the-archiv...

https://asiatimes.com/2019/07/indias-vanishing-nuclear-scien...

https://www.unrevealedfiles.com/the-strange-disappearance-of... — this one just turned up in Google. Seems like a blog, not a news org.

For a second, I thought this was about Homi K. Bhabha, notorious among other things for this gem of a sentence:

"If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalise' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."

Wow, that's a great negative sample for any reading class--uselessly abstruse and verbose.

Took me multiple turns even with ChatGPT to simplify it:

Using desire for control may seem manageable at first, but it leads to negative consequences and people try to justify it using false reasoning and fake authority to make it seem acceptable, even though it goes against rational thinking.

It reminds me of something Postmodernism Generator would generate.

https://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

I find it incredibly strange how this guys work is so prevalent in the arts in academia. I see it a lot when non-philosophy students get to PhD-level and suddenly encounter the problem of needing to include some philosophical thought to justify their work, and they use that of Bhaba, which just leads to them now having two problems. Total word salad. I'm sure he knows what he's talking about, but like all good Hegelians, nobody else does.

One of my undergraduate literature courses was on postcolonial studies, so unsurprisingly we talked about Bhaba quite a bit, and I was confused for a second just like GP. The teacher of that class went on to be dean and also head of the entire university's honors program a year or two later, IIRC. So FWIW this seems to have been a hot topic in academia at that time, too (mid-2000's). I think given the global political climate at that time, the years of OIF when accusations of imperialism were being leveled at the US on a daily basis, it was a fairly interesting and relevant course relative to much of the rest of the department.

Dr. Bhabha belonged to a special generation of Indian scientists like C.V. Raman, Raja Ramanna etc who were well respected by their peers in East and West.

The TV series Rocket Boys is a fictionalised account of Dr. Bhabha (Father of Indian atomic program) and Dr. Sarabhai (Father of Indian space program).

1: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt13868972/

Terrific profile. There are several institutions in India named after him such as the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, Bhabha Hospital, etc.

Thanks so much for sharing that!

I had been unaware of Mr. Bhabha, before this.

He was pretty awesome dude.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com