A Lifetime Of Scientific Thinking
Shyamon Jayasinghe
Book Review: ‘Essays Of A Lifetime‘ By Professor Carlo Fonseka – Publisher: S. Godage & Brothers (Private) Ltd (2016)
At St Joseph’s College Colombo I had a vivid image-memory of the young Carlo Fonseka as an artist who drew together an informal kind of singing club at Bonjean Memorial Hall.The radio was the mass media device during those days and I remember him and his soulmates flock around it to join the singing during “Listeners’ Request.” As a junior who held seniors in awe, I gravitated toward the flock with some trepidation in order to add my humble input into the vocal outpour. Sunil Shantha was the star then. The handsome singer with the sitar in hand. As we now know only too well, the artist in Carlo never left him even though he was soon to turn into a celebrity exponent of scientific thinking.
The last-mentioned phase commenced after Carlo Fonseka left school to join the prestigious Medical College in Colombo. He performed brilliantly and joined the academic staff. However, he was not destined to hide within the cloistered walls of esoteric academia. We saw him virtually catapult as a celebrity figure invoking people to use their brains and think for themselves about the evidence of their beliefs. A kind of modern Lankan Socrates who had proclaimed that the unexamined life isn’t worth living.
Carlo made an impassioned rebuttal of the claims that the phenomenon of fire walking was evidence of divine intervention. I attended one of his famous fire walking talks and demonstrations. He impressed. Here was an academic messiah come to defend scientific thinking against a widespread flood of superstition. At that stage in his life, Carlo was simply heroic and he represented the intrepid anti-establishment. By his 18th year he had left behind at school his inherited Catholic baggage and he now opened up his fertile mind to the world -at -large encouraging fellow humans to follow suit. From the point of view of traditional superstition one singular attack of this kind can be infectious in the sense that thinking people may begin to wonder if other such claims to divine intervention are also that hollow.
