Wisdom in fragments

Because of connectivity, India has increased mobility. People from Orissa work in Gujarat, people from Gujarat can start businesses elsewhere. Because of telecommunications, a farmer can now get information on seeds and fertilisers.

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

Telecommunications has not only connected India, but it has also given India global recognition and a new respect for Indian talent. It has created our own multinationals, and created a huge amount of foreign exchange reserves.

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

When I entered the telecom scene in India, in the early nineteen eighties, we had two million telephones for seven hundred and fifty million people. It used to take fifteen years to get a telephone connection. In a very short space of time, just twenty five years, we have seven hundred and fifty million telephones.

Telecom Pioneer & Advisor to Indian Government on Technology Policy

Life is a masterpiece of complexity. We will never understand, in a near future, the extraordinary complexity of the simplest forms of life.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

Human intelligence is, for want of a better phrase, a degree of magnitude greater than the intelligence of a Paramecium or, better, of a Chlamydomonas; but the difference is just quantitative and not qualitative.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

In biology we are still in a kind of Ptolemaic era with man considering himself the centre of the universe.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. For me intelligence is a property of life. Even the most humble unicellular living organism must be intelligent to solve the problems of everyday life.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

DNA is not life. A single chemical molecule has nothing to do with life. DNA is merely a storage system. Nobody would ever say that the 'Divine Comedy' is the actual paper and ink on which one of its copies is printed, however many influential scientists have supported this nonsensical viewpoint.

Plant neurobiologist and founder of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology.

Only the educated are free.

Our body is a community of cells, in which each cell occupies a place appropriate for its tasks on behalf of the whole. Cancer cells, however, are rogues that trespass aggressively into other tissues. Metastasis is what makes cancer so lethal.

Cell biologist & discoverer of the RGD integrin-binding motif

As two adversaries accumulate a longer history of conflict, their rivalry relationship tends to become 'locked-in' or entrenched, with future conflict becoming increasingly difficult to avoid; characteristics of their past confrontations can hasten or reverse this movement toward rivalry.

At its core lies a universal crisis of legitimacy of the state, and that crisis means many countries will evolve Fourth Generation war on their soil. America, with a closed political system and a poisonous ideology of multiculturalism, is a prime candidate for the home-grown variety of Fourth Generation war.

In the Fourth Generation war, the state loses its monopoly on war. All over the world, state militaries find themselves fighting non-state opponents such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Almost everywhere, the state is losing.

These institutions walk, talk and act like commercial-organisations and must be treated as such.

The 'beneficiaries' of these loans are just like us- consumers who need to borrow money to create economic opportunity for themselves, their families and their children- they would not wish to be treated as a charity in this regard, and we owe them the dignity of therefore doing business with them in a professional manner.

India's 'un-bankable' millions are not only better re-payers than their 'banked' counterparts in the west, but their demand for credit is outstripping supply by a great degree.