October 14, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
What Stimulated Men like Luca Pacioli
In spite of their irrationalities and the
social and personal conflicts various religions create between themselves and
within each other (Christianity has hundreds of sects and regarding Hinduism
the lesser said the better) I shall never make them an outcast in my writings.
Why I went at some length to point out the
difference between a friar and a monk is that being a friar keeps you
functional intellectually as their life style does not bar them from mixing
with people or doing interesting and useful work both for themselves and for
the society as well.
Had both these men – Gregor Mendel and Luca
Pacioli – had been a kind of Tibetan monks, they probably would not have been
subjects of my bedtime stories.
The point is that some religions can be
debilitating while some make no practical difference in the lives of their
adherents and their approach to solving problems.
The education that Luca Pacioli received
was targeted to make him a merchant – a basic knowledge of mathematics, especially
arithmetic that would be necessary for mercantile purpose.
Luca Pacioli (1447-1517), from comparing
the time periods, must have existed at the time when Florence became Republic
and was under the rule of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), a king who
questioned Christianity, considered it man-made, promoted innovation as a tool
to improve and control’s ones fortune.
Machiavelli promoted materialism,
innovative economics and politics which indirectly resulted in the generation
of ideas that would be the budding seeds of modern science.
Machiavelli to my understanding is to
Europeans and Americans as Chanakya or Kautilya is to the Indian subcontinent.
It was he who guided the founder of the
powerful Maurya Empire Chandragupta Maurya to create his empire whose legacy
would later fall in the hands of Emperor Ashoka whose path we had crossed few
nights ago.
The ideas and political theories of
Machiavelli come to us through his two major written works:
(a) Il Principe or The Prince that was
published in 1532 some five years after the death of its author.
(b) Discourses on Livy – an even larger
work published yet again posthumously in 1531.
Both these works are largely about politics
and art of ruling in a republic using any means possible and perhaps single
handedly imparting negative connotations to the words ‘politics and
‘politician’ that is today associated with them.
And yet, the ideas in these two books
widely read by future generations (these include men as diverse as the founding
fathers of American Revolution to Voltaire, Napoleon I of France and Joseph
Stalin of Soviet Union) go far beyond politics.
With the kind of thinking and shrewd brain
that he was gifted with, Machiavelli could see through the thick veil of
religious indoctrination that generalizations must be built upon observations
and historical facts rather than on imaginary theology and theories.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
Advertisements
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
No comments:
Post a Comment