Where Nothing Happens

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‘In letting all pass, we learn what is irreducible in us.’ Padmanabh Vijai Pillai undertakes an intense and self-aware inner journey, creating a memoir in which time and place are incidental, and interior space is all. Written as a letter to his deceased mother, a form that allows him to rove the terrain of his life and bring to view a kaleidoscope of personal recollections—ruminations on India, landscape and architecture, aesthetics and yoga—and philosophic debates that have shaped his thought, it is held together by a metaphysical search for freedom, for ‘the voice behind all [his] voices’. Fitting into no given genre, Where Nothing Happens is a prototype: part autobiography, part meditation, part spiritual quest; a self-portrait rich in tone and texture by a rare mind which merges a poetic sensibility with philosophical density.About The Author Padmanabh Vijai Pillai was born in Delhi in 1941 and educated at the Doon School and St Stephen’s College. After a brief stint with the Indian Foreign Service, followed by sundry odd jobs in the UK, he turned to academics and obtained a Ph.D. in history and a M.Phil. in Library Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He returned to Delhi where he worked as a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and then as a Homi Bhabha Fellow. He was for a time part of the Forum Humanum, a body affiliated to the Club of Rome. He wrote a book, Perspectives on Power: India & China, and co-edited with Pietro Redondi The History of Sciences : the French Debate. Apart from writing numerousreports, seminar papers and articles on pilosophical and developmental themes, he researched and scripted a documentary on Angkor Wat and its restoration. He lived in retirement from 1992 onwards and died in 2007.