A Humanitarian and a Great Indian‡

His mother wrote “I taught him to read quite early—partly in self-defence, for when he became absorbed in a book he ceased to ask questions.” To prove to him that methane was lighter than air and to demonstrate the effects of breathing methane, his father took him crawling into a mine, asked him to stand up and recite Mark Anthony’s speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. “Friends, Romans and Countrymen” . . . he soon began to pant . . . about the time he reached “the noble Brutus,” he collapsed, but regained himself because the air on the floor was all right. Just before the declaration of Hitler’s war, the submarine H.M.S. Thetis, while on trial, sank off the coast of Liverpool and 91 lives were lost. He started an experiment in which he simulated the conditions on board the Thetis and had himself sealed in so that the atmosphere he breathed should be exactly the same as that breathed by the crew of the submarine. “He said that it would be some comfort to the friends of the crew when he was able to report that his sensations were never painful: that he ‘quickly lost consciousness’ and would have passed away without any pain or fright,” his mother wrote in her memoirs titled Friends and Kindred. I remembered these stories when my wife and I were recently on a bus-ride through the villages of Scotland. Our bus was going through a village called Balloch, near the famous Loch Lomond, when I spotted a sign “Balloch and Haldane Community Council.” A Haldane, whom I have never met, is one of my heroes. But more about that later. As the bus moved through the village, I saw the name of Haldane appear a few more times in different places in the village. I wondered whether this was my hero. I returned to Kolkata and wrote to the Secretary of the Community Council, Mr J Biddulph, seeking information about the Haldane. He replied “The Balloch and Haldane Community Action Plan’s name is taken from the village of Balloch and within the area is a housing area called the Mill of Haldane which is near the site of the once Mill. I believe that the Mill (no longer there) was owned by the Haldanes and the place name Haldane handed down through the ages.” I also wrote to Jo Sherington, Local History & Reference Librarian at the Heritage Centre of Dumbarton Library, who sent me an article from the magazine The Scottish Field written by Brodrick Haldane titled “The Haldanes.” This article referred to Balloch and traced the ancestry of the Haldane family. Toward the fag end of the article the author mentioned of a respiratory physiologist John Scott Haldane. This respiratory physiologist was the father of my hero, John Burdon Sanderson, JBS. I felt good for having been able to “discover” the ancestral village of my hero. Today, November 5, is celebrated in England as Guy Fawkes Day. On this day in 1605, the Catholic dissident Guy Fawkes and his friends had planned to blow up King James I of England during the opening of Parliament. The plot failed. On the night before, in a cellar below the House of Lords, Fawkes was found lurking beside 36 barrels of gunpowder. To celebrate the failure, residents of London began to light bonfires. A few months later Parliament declared November 5 a public day of thanksgiving. Though originally anti-Catholic in tone, from the 19th century, the Guy Fawkes Day celebrations became nonsectarian in nature. A refreshing change! JBS was born on this day in 1892. He had strong connections to our city, Kolkata. His great-grandfather James sold much family property to raise money for a Mission in Bengal. He adopted Indian citizenship and came to live in Kolkata. My introduction to JBS was through a set of newspaper clippings from Amrita Bazar Patrika, an English daily published from Calcutta that discontinued its publication in 1986. These clippings comprised the serialized printed version of the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Lecture titled “The Unity and Diversity of Life,” that JBS had delivered in 1957, which was broadcast on the All India Radio. My father, himself a marine fisheries scientist, had cut and saved these articles. I read these articles when I was in Class VIII. What a fantastic set of articles covering the breadth and depth of biology, with a lot of philosophical ideas thrown in. I have since reread them many times. Haldane was a popular exponent of science par excellence. He could explain extraordinarily difficult scientific concepts with extraordinary lucidity. “D’you think I didn’t have to GBE