Articles by Sundar Sarukkai

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Tracing Gandhi: Satyarthi to Satyagrahi by Samir Banerjee, Routledge, Oxon and New York and Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, 2020; pp ix + 205, ₹995.

The draft National Education Policy, 2019 (DNEP) is an important document. It has had a fair share of criticism but that is to be expected given the diversity of opinions about education in our country. It is a sincere attempt to present a vision for the future of education in India. It is holistic in that it combines the vision of education from school to higher education within one document. It thus attempts a kind of unification of the aims and practices of education. Most importantly, as part of this vision, it strongly promotes a basic foundation of multidisciplinarity and liberal arts education at all levels. To say this in explicit terms and to say it with enough detail to make it seem as if it is workable is indeed commendable.

This paper explores the philosophical foundations of untouchability through an analysis of the phenomenology of "touch". The sense of touch is unique in many ways; one such is the essential relation between touch and "untouch". Drawing on both Indian and western traditions, the paper begins by analysing the meaning of touch and then goes on to explore some meanings of "untouchable". It then concludes by pointing out the importance of untouchability within the brahmin tradition and attempts to understand the process of supplementation which makes untouchability a positive virtue for the brahmins and a negative fact for the dalits.

What does it mean to apply mathematics? Why is mathematics considered as essential to natural sciences? Why do scientists consider the applicability of mathematics as something mysterious? The applicability of mathematics is mysterious and unexplainable only if we subscribe to a particular view of mathematics, namely, mathematics as a logical, axiomatic and formal system, which deals only with a platonic world and not our real one. In contrast, there are enough reasons to believe that mathematics is a fertile lived-language, sharing many characteristics with other verbal languages. Thus, to understand the applicability of mathematics, we need to first understand the applicability of languages, for example, the 'applicability' of English. The paper discusses some common characteristics in applying English and mathematics and offers a particular model to explain why mathematics seems to be so effectively applicable in science.