"What is often called offence
to a community is actually a conversation or debate
within that community. It is not the job of arts administrators to decide who can speak or what they can say. It is their job, rather, to encourage, as best they can within an artistic setting, that conversation to flourish.
"
'Offending the audience'
Debate at
'All Together Now?':
British Theatre After Multiculturalism'
Warwick Arts Centre
14 June 2009
"The acceptance of the sacred does not provide an anchorage denied to atheists because that which is anchored has itself got to be defined. Neither the believer nor the atheist can avoid having to make choices about the moral values to follow and, having made those choices, to take responsibility for the consequences. Moral choices are forced upon simply because we are human, and we don’t stop being human just because we are able to imagine the sacred.
"
Debate on 'imagining the sacred'
'How the Light Comes In'
Hay on Wye
31 May 2009
"
This was science reborn for the age of celebrity. 'Any pop band is doing the same thing. Any athlete is doing the same thing. We have to start thinking the same way in science.' So claimed Jørn Hurum, the paleontologist from Oslo University's Natural History Museum who acquired the fossil and assembled the team of scientists that studied it. But once scientists start acting like Madonna or David Beckham, it’s science itself that suffers.
"
'Pimping Ida'
New Humanist online
23 May 2009
"Once the Enlightenment becomes a weapon in the clash of civilizations rather than in the battle to define the values and attitudes necessary to advance political rights and social justice, once it becomes a measure as much of tribal attachment as of progressive politics, then everything from torture to collective punishment becomes
permissible, and the pursuit of Enlightenment itself becomes a source of de-Enlightenment.
"
'Shadow Boxing'
New Humanist
May / June 2009
"What is most striking about the ideas now transforming India is that they challenge not just the old India but also the contemporary West. Today it is Western intellectuals who most fear the population bomb, decry economic growth, deplore consumerism, and fret about urbanization. India is confronting the West in more ways than one.
" Review of Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Sunday Telegraph
10 May 2009
