by Kumar David-March 19, 2016, 3:00 pm
Robert Bolt’s Man for All Seasons is a gloomy play focussed on intrigue and the three Thomases (Cromwell, More and the fading Wolsey) entanglements leading to the imprisonment and execution of scholar-statesman Thomas More. Bolt depicts England’s parting of ways with the Roman Church in the conventional way, a consequence of Henry VIII’s excessive concupiscence, but in truth more fundamental was the rise of the mercantile classes, financial dependence of the monarchy and pressure for economic restructuring and seizure and sale of monastic lands. The Act of Supremacy symbolised England’s independence; it did not certify the warmth of Anne Boleyn’s bosom.
The eponymous film with Paul Schofield in the lead was tilted towards depiction of More as scholar, public figure (he was Chancellor after Wolsey was fired) and man of many talents, a ‘man for all seasons’. Prof Carlo Fonseka’s immersion in rationalism, involvement in science and philosophy of science, dabbling in politics, hostility to tobacco - jaundiced eye on single-malt notwithstanding - earns his collection of pleasantly panoptic essays, mutatis mutandis, a similar cachet.
Essays of a Lifetime published in hardback by S. Godage & Brothers (Pvt) Ltd in 2016, is all of 368 pages. The 34 essays are arranged in ten sections ranging over Medicine, Science, Philosophy, Religion, Economics, Politics, Education, Arts, Biography and Travel; throw in technology, sports, a few others and one could have called it encyclopaedic! Some substantial discourses, some anecdotal, none are not a good read. I will focus on a selection that I found striking or interesting.
A measure of the man
The opening essay (‘To Err was Fatal’) recounts five cases where Prof Carlo says he erred but should not have, that ended in patient fatality. Few have the strength for such brutal honesty; failure to take a symptom seriously, allowing an insistent patient to take a course of action that he (Carlo) should have more forcefully prohibited, a too perfunctory examination, failure to see how seriously depressed a patient was, and persuading another to undergo a surgical procedure that he, the patient, was much opposed to. A friend who read and commented on the chapter was generous: "You can’t never make a mistake; think of the thousands of lives this doctor must have served or saved".
