Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam
A Compendium of Poems by India's Leading Light in Science and Technology
An eminent scientist-academic turns poet, tracing a life of global travel back to India's ancient ideal of universal human kinship.
Overview
Fifty-one years of traversing the world's laboratories, classrooms, and corridors of learning left Prof. Pritam B. Sharma with something rarer than academic credentials: a poet's eye for the thread of shared humanity that runs through every culture he encountered. In Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam — the ancient Sanskrit declaration that the world is one family — he finds not merely a title but an animating conviction.
The poems move outward from the Himalayan spirit of India, gathering impressions of countries and peoples Sharma visited across his career, then returning always to the same recognition: that beneath surface difference, humanity draws from a common wellspring. The Himalayan metaphor is not decorative; it is structural — a symbol of the high, still place from which both diversity and unity can be seen at once. Sharma calls this the 'Diversity of Oneness' and the 'Oneness of Diversity', and the poems explore both currents simultaneously.
Readers drawn to poetry that takes the full span of a life as its material — and that holds science, spirituality, and civic feeling in the same breath — will find this collection a rare document of a mind shaped equally by reason and reverence.
Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam, the world is one family, is the compilation of the poems composed by India's leading light of academics Prof Pritam B Sharma, an eminent academician, innovator, and an institution builder who during his 51 years long professional career has traversed the world of learning in science and technology and has connected himself with sensitivity to society and the humanity. Beginning with the spiritual power of Mother India and its age old Himalayan Spirit of oneness of humanity, Prof Sharma expresses his mind to capture the realms of life, that covers his profound appreciation of countries and places he visited. The poems that flow from the heart of Prof Sharma, invoke the Himalayan Spirit of Vasudhaiv Kutumbakam that nurtures goodness and showers its divine bliss on the entire humanity. It is this Himalayan spirit that celebrates the 'Diversity of Oneness' and at the same time invokes a sense of 'Oneness of Diversity'. The poems are a read must for all those who live to make this world a place to live in harmony and peaceful coexistence.
