Eulogy for Stephen Hawking

Eulogy for Stephen Hawking.

Stephen Hawking, a symbol of human hope and inspiration for hundreds and thousands of people with debilitating disabilities and the man who defied all odds and known medical diagnosis and prognosis of definitive death to lead a creative and productive life for well over 50 years, is no more.

Hawking,died in the early hours of 14th March at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76. For well over 50 years, Hawking had lived with a disease - Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) - in which motor neurons die, leaving the brain incapable of controlling muscles. His frail yet indefatigable appearance - stuck to the wheel chair with his characteristic voice synthesized speech - will surely be missed by hundreds of thousands of his admirers all across the globe. And for the innumerable differently-abled and their caregivers, for whom he continued to be a shining star of hope and aspirations, his death means the star has collapsed into a black hole creating an unconquerable vacuum.

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, in 1942. He was not one of those precocious child who was destined to be famous from the word go. Rather, Hawking didn't excel in school as a child. It was only after he entered the college that he started enjoying his subject and got immersed in his studies. While pursuing his PhD in cosmology at the University of Cambridge, he was diagnosed with the ALS disorder. By then he had already noticed that he was getting clumsy had even fallen once or twice for no apparent reason. His father then took him to the family doctor to ascertain reasons for his unnatural fall and clumsiness. Suspecting some thing serious the family doctor referred him to a specialist, who after conducting a series of diagnostic tests diagnosed that Stephen had motor neuron disease.

Unlike many who would have been crestfallen and feared for their future, the diagnosis helped him to be more focused and to overcome his so called “bored with life attitude” that he possessed before this diagnosis. Addressing an audience of disabled students at Seattle University he had said “Before my condition was diagnosed, I had been very bored with the routine life and that it is only after coming face to face with death that the diagnosis offered for him, that he became more focused over his research”. It was this indefatigable attitude that helped him keep cheating death. No one, not even Hawking himself, expected that he would survive so long. Even today while the medical fraternity continues to debate as to how he could survive this long with ALS, hundreds of thousands of disabled people and their care givers continue to look upto him with a ray of hope that this miracle could happen to them as well.

Hawking was one of the most successful scientist who brought science to the masses and we as science communicators owe a special debt to him. His public popularity can best be seen from the number of copies that his best selling book “A Brief History of Time” sold. Almost 10 million copies of his book were sold in 40 different languages and he was on the best-seller list of several newspapers and magazines for several weeks including a record 237 weeks for the Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper. While hundreds of thousands of people from across the globe, who brought and read his book for the profoundly simplified manner that he adopted in dealing with a complex subject of cosmology to the general reader in its most easiest of ways, yet there are thousands of others who brought this book but never cared to read it. This book therefore is also infamously referred to as "one of the most unread books of all time".

I was one of those lucky few, with couple of colleagues at the National Science Centre Delhi, who had an opportunity to listen briefly to Stephen Hawking at Delhi on 15th January 2001, during his India visit. During his Delhi visit he also met the then President K.R. Narayanan at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The President had described his 45-minute meeting with Hawking as "an unforgettable experience". Stephen Hawking, knowing well that the President was from TamilNadu the land of the great Ramanujan, is believed to have told the him that “Indians are so good at mathematics and physics". Hawking won the hearts not just of the President but the entire nation.

In his demise, while the world has lost a great scientist, the global differently abled community have lost their ideal, a role model, who defied all odds of disability well over 50 years, to shed a Ray of hope into the lives of hundreds of thousands of differently abled section of society and their caregivers.

Long live Stephen.