Thought for the day. It’s from Meera Nanda’s Prophets Facing Backward again. I may even have quoted this particular passage before – but if I don’t remember, you won’t either, and nobody ever reads old N&Cs, so it doesn’t matter. And anyway this is worth quoting often. It’s from the Preface, page xii.

Having grown up in a provincial town in Northern India, I considered my education in science a source of personal enlightenment. Natural science, especially molecular biology, had given me a whole different perspective on the underlying cosmology of the religious and cultural traditions I was raised in. Science gave me good reasons to say a principled ‘No!’ to many of my inherited beliefs about God, nature, women, duties and rights, purity and pollution, social status, and my relationship with my fellow citizens. i had discovered my individuality, and found the courage to assert the right to fulfill my own destiny, because I learned to demand good reasons for the demands that were put on me.

There. I always think of Meera when people drone about the joys of community and tradition – usually people who want nothing to do with such joys themselves. The hell with tradition; give me liberation and emancipation, instead.