The document describes a meeting between Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest scientists of our time who is paralyzed and uses a computer to communicate, and Firdaus Kanga, a writer with brittle bone disease. Both are brilliant yet disabled. Their interaction showed the real mindset of such individuals, who feel frustration from claustrophobia and wanting more than just sympathy for their conditions. A key lesson is that one can never truly understand the pain of living with disabilities.

1. KENDRIYA VIDYALAYA UJJAIN
A VISIT TOCAMBRIDGE
Prepared by
1 Divyansh Khare
01/12/2012

2. STEPHEN HAWKING-A “DIFFERENT” MAN
Prepared by
Divyansh Khare
01/12/2012 2

3. Prepared by
Divyansh Khare
01/12/2012 3

4. Hawking's unimpressive study habits resulted in a final examination score on
the borderline between first and second class honors, making an oral
examination necessary. Berman commented: "the examiners then were
intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever
than most of themselves". After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford in 1962,
he left for graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Hawking started
developing symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis upon his arrival at
Cambridge. He did not distinguish himself in his first two years at the
institution. With the help of his doctoral tutor, Dennis William Sciama, he
returned to working on his PhD after the disease had stabilized and graduated
with his doctorate in 1966, before starting a four-year research fellowship at
Cambridge.
When Hawking began his graduate studies in the 1960s, there was much
debate in the physics community about the opposing theories of the creation
of the universe: big bang, and steady state. Hawking and his Cambridge friend
and colleague, Roger Penrose, showed in 1970 that if the universe obeys
general relativity and fits any of the Friedman models, then it must
have begun as a singularity. This work showed that, far from being
mathematical curiosities which appear only in exceptional circumstances,
singularities are a fairly common feature of general relativity. For their essay
on this subject, Hawking and Penrose were jointly awarded the Adams prize in
1966. This essay served as the basis for a textbook, The Large Scale
Structure of Space-Time, that Hawking published with George Ellis in 1973.
01/12/2012 Prepared by Divyansh Khare 4

5. In 1969, Hawking accepted a specially created 'Fellowship for Distinction in
Science' to remain at Cambridge. In the early 1970s, Hawking's work with Brandon
Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson strongly supported John Wheeler's no-hair
theorem – that any black hole can be fully described by the three properties
of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. With Bardeen and Carter, he
proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy
with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should emit radiation,
known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.
Hawking was elected one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, and
in the same year he accepted the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar visiting
professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to work with his
friend on the faculty, Kip Thorne. He continues to maintain ties to Caltech, having
spent a month each year there since 1992. Hawking's first popular science book, A
Brief History of Time, was published on 1 April 1988. It stayed on the
British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. A Brief
History of Time was followed by The Universe in a Nutshell (2001). A collection of
essays titled Black Holes and Baby Universes (1993) was also popular. His book, A
Briefer History of Time(2005), co-written by Leonard Mlodinow, updated his
earlier works to make them accessible to a wider audience. In 2007 Hawking and
his daughter, Lucy Hawking, published George's Secret Key to the Universe, a
children's book focusing on science that Lucy Hawking described as "a bit like
Harry Potter but without the magic."
01/12/2012 5 Prepared by Divyansh Khare

6. Prepared by Divyansh Khare
01/12/2012 6

7. Firdaus Kanga (b. 1960, Bombay) is a writer and actor who lives in London.
He has written a novel, Trying to Grow a semi-autobiographical novel set in
India and a travel book Heaven on Wheels about his experiences in
the United Kingdom. Trying to Grow was later turned into an award-winning
BBC-BFI film, Sixth Happiness, for which Kanga wrote the screenplay, and
in which he starred. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard said
of Sixth Happiness: "Firdaus Kanga's performance has battery pack
power...a remarkable true story."Sixth Happiness is about Brit - a boy born
with brittle bones who never grows taller than four feet. It is also about
the Parsi or Parsees - descendants of the Persian empire who were driven
out of Persia by an Islamic invasion more than a thousand years ago and
settled in western India. Parsees had a close relationship with the British
during the years of the Raj. Brit is named by his mother, both after his
brittle bones, and in tribute to his mother's love of Britain. The depiction
of Brit's parents as ardent Anglophiles with fond memories of the Raj and
WW2, presents a glimpse of a non-stereotypical Indian family.
Prepared by
Divyansh Khare
01/12/2012 7

8. Firdaus Kanga (b. 1960, Bombay) is a writer and actor who lives in London. He has
written a novel, Trying to Grow a semi-autobiographical novel set in India and a
travel book Heaven on Wheels about his experiences in the United
Kingdom. Trying to Grow was later turned into an award-winning BBC-BFI
film, Sixth Happiness, for which Kanga wrote the screenplay, and in which he
starred. Alexander Walker of the Evening Standard said of Sixth Happiness:
"Firdaus Kanga's performance has battery pack power...a remarkable true story."
Sixth Happiness is about Brit - a boy born with brittle bones who never grows
taller than four feet. It is also about the Parsi or Parsees - descendants of the
Persian Empire who were driven out of Persia by an Islamic invasion more than a
thousand years ago and settled in western India. Parsees had a close relationship
with the British during the years of the Raj. Brit is named by his mother, both after
his brittle bones, and in tribute to his mother's love of Britain. The depiction of
Brit's parents as ardent Anglophiles with fond memories of the Raj and WW2,
presents a glimpse of a non-stereotypical Indian family. This, along with the story
of a young disabled man's sexual awakening as family life crumbles around him
makes Sixth Happiness an interesting exploration of modern, urban India. Kanga's
creation - both as writer and performer - resists drawing the main star Brit as
either martyr or victim. Brit is bright, spiky, opinionated and selfish with a razor-sharp
wit. He prefers the Kama Sutra to Shakespeare and does not allow gender
or disability to come in the way of his desire for sex and love.
01/12/2012 8 Prepared by Divyansh Khare

9. Firdaus Kanga has presented documentaries, such as Double the Trouble, Twice
the Fun (d. Pratibha Parmar, 1992), a provocative documentary drama that
explored sexuality and disability. The film was broadcast as part of Channel
Four's lesbian and gay series out. Taboo, another documentary presented by
Kanga, explored religion and disability - for instance, the Hindu notions of
karma - exploring how religion can exclude and patronize people of disability.
Firdaus Kanga was born with ontogenesis imperfecta, a condition also known as
brittle bones disease. This left him with several painful fractures throughout his
childhood and adolescence in India. He grew up in a family of five, in a one
bedroom Bombay apartment. He spoke out against the Indian socialist
consensus, and was a supporter of Reagan and Thatcher politics. Kanga's first
major achievement was Trying to Grow (also translated into French [Grandir] and
Italian) a novel exploring disability, sexuality and culture. In India where religion
still dictates most cultural acts, Kanga's novel broke several taboos - portraying
disabled people with healthy, rich sexual appetites. Kanga publicly
rejected Hindu notions of karma (laying responsibility for suffering at what
humans may have done in their last birth) often foisted on disabled people.
Kanga was one of the first few public figures in India who stood up for the views
of gay people, celebrating sexuality, in a society that still criminalizes, though
hardly, if ever, prosecutes homosexuality.
01/12/2012 9 Prepared by Divyansh Khare

10. Kanga was selected to be part of The Vintage Book of Indian Writing: 1947-97 -
a major anthology of the work of the most important and influential Indian
writers of the last 50 years. This volume was published by Salman Rushdie and
Elizabeth West to coincide with the anniversary of India's independence.
Kanga was born in Bombay in the westernized Parsi community, and his writing
centres on dealing with disability and sexuality.
01/12/2012 10 Prepared by Divyansh Khare

11. Chapter 7
A visit to Cambridge
Summary
A story of a meeting between two extraordinary people. They
are both brilliant and full of intellect.
They are, what people call 'disabled'. However, the story here
calls them two people who are 'differently abled'.
Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest scientists of our time.
He suffers from a form of paralysis that confines him to a
wheelchair, and allows him to ‘speak’ only by punching buttons on
a computer, which speaks for him in a machine-like voice.
Firdaus Kanga is a writer and journalist who lives and works in
Mumbai. He was born with ‘brittle bones’ that tended to break
easily when he was a child. He suffered a lot of fractures in his
early childhood.
01/12/2012 11 Prepared by Divyansh Khare

12. The interaction between them proved fruitful to the extent that it
projected the real state of mind of such people.
The psychological aspect has been written very well, describing the
simple level of frustration which people feel when they feel
claustrophobic, least bothered about people considering them brilliant
and sympathising their condition.
Strong sense of expression such as eyes which can speak, still, and
they are saying something huge and urgent .
A small thing understood through this chapter is the fact that one can
never feel the pain and the agony which a person who is not as capable
as other people does.
Prepared by Divyansh Khare
01/12/2012 12

13. When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really
appreciates everything one does have.
-Prof. Stephen William Hawking.
THANK YOU
Prepared by Divyansh Khare
01/12/2012 13