Personal background of Victor Smetacek
This is my wife Karen´s web page but since I am part
of her story, I intended writing a few lines about myself
but have ended up with a short autobiography. Sorry, I got
carried away. Read Karen´s story first, which was published
in August 2000 in Das Beste (the German version of Reader´s
Digest).
A crude English translation is given under Presse.
I was born Victor Shahed Smetacek in Calcutta in 1946.
My mother Shaheda nee Ahad came from Orissa in East India
and my father Frederick (Fritz) hailed from the Sudetenland,
a German-speaking enclave now a part of Czechia. Since the
original Smetaczek would have been too much for Indian bureaucrats,
my father dropped the z on acquiring Indian citizenship.
He bought a forest estate in the hills below Nainital
a town established by the British around a lake at 2000 m
elevation in the Kumaon foothills of the Himalayas, just West
of Nepal that same year. I received my schooling in
St Joseph´s College, run by the Irish Christian Brothers,
and acquired my BSc (in biology and economics) in 1964 at
the Government Degree College, then affiliated with Agra University
and now independent as Kumaon University. That same year,
on the basis of my German background and not my performance
at college, I was offered a scholarship by the German Academic
Exchange Service (DAAD) to study a subject of my choice at
any German University.
I was fascinated by bird books since my early childhood and,
greatly encouraged by my parents, I spent the days of my youth
bird-watching, butterfly-collecting, fishing and hunting in
the surrounding mountains, and the nights poring over books
on natural history in the light of a kerosene lamp. I had
always wanted to be a biologist and was toying with the idea
of joining the Forest Department. My attention was drawn to
the ocean by an article entitled Bread from the sea
in a 1940s Reader´s Digest magazine in which the proposition
was made that marine plankton held promise as a future source
of food for humans. Since the threat of famines was looming
over India at the time and I wanted to do something useful
for my country, I chose marine biology and was sent to Kiel
University (following a crash course in the German language)
by the DAAD. My father had been a sea-farer before arriving
in Calcutta in 1939 and his romantic attachment to sailing
ships strengthened my resolve to turn to the sea.
Since the hopes that plankton was harvestable had been dashed
well before 1964, the year of my arrival in Kiel, I decided
to do my doctorate in fisheries biology. Besides, I enjoyed
fishing. However, Professor Johannes Krey, who held the only
chair for planktology in the world at that time, had a strong
affinity to India and Indians and decided that I would work
in his department on phytoplankton. He convinced the amiable
Professor Kändler (then Head of the Fisheries Biology
Department who had accepted me). The belief of the time, that
assessing the production of phytoplankton, then considered
the pastures of the sea, would improve the efficiency of fisheries,
also convinced me that studying plankton would be a useful
thing to do. Besides, Professor Krey was like a father to
me and I felt the same kind of loyalty towards him. His kindness
and dedication to science fostered a family-like atmosphere
within his department.
For details of my professional life refer to
http://www.awi-bremerhaven.de/Pelagic/index.html
I was drawn into the student movement of the late sixties
for the same reasons as the majority of the students in my
year class. The times they were a-changing. We sensed institutionalised
injustice lurking within the relationship between the Three
Worlds exemplified by the Viet Nam war and chafed under the
intellectually stultifying atmosphere of the university. We
asked our elders questions that made them squirm. Anti-authoritarian
iconoclasm was rhe fashion of the day in the class rooms;
during the nights we jerked our bodies to wild, new rhythms
on the disco floors, instinctively and effectively shaking
off the stifling grip of the post-war militaristic era. The
struggle to liberate ourselves and the rest of the world from
the oppressive establishment became a moral urge. The movement
gained momentum from the exhilaration generated by the counter
culture.
I was especially stimulated by the philosophical discussions
raging at the time. A brush with Marxism left me fascinated
with the dialectical thinking of Friedrich Engels and the
big picture of the interaction between philosophical reasoning
and scientific piecing together of facts that he tried to
construct in his unfinished book Dialectics of Nature.
His arguments that science without the conscious application
of philosophy would lose itself in details made sense to me.
Engels´ explanations of the principles of dialectics
stripped them of their mystic Marxist connotations and his
treatment of natural laws made dialectics understandable to
me: The unity of opposites and the inherent nature of contradiction
became tools to grasp physical, chemical and biological principles.
His seemingly trite examples had a deeper significance as
part of a general principle or conceptual framework to elucidate
form and function, bridge abstract and concrete.
Following the political disillusionment of the movement during
the mid-seventies, a group of my friends, including my wife
Karen, established a philosophy circle with an aim to discussing
what had happened to us and where we were going. We were not
willing to throw out the baby with the bath water and strived
to salvage the philosophical core while discarding the political
interpretations. Our approach, that a good philosophy was
one that could be coherently applied to the human condition:
mentally, culturally and materially, led us to read and discuss
a very broad range of books. Humanities and sciences, feminists
and male chauvinists, believers and non-believers were represented
in our group, so the discussions were lively and carried out
weekly over a period of 4 years till Karen and I suffered
a car accident, about which more later.
My heritage automatically attracted me to Eastern philosophies
that had been condemned as reactionary during the Marxist
era. I was not attracted by the mystical, meditating, guru-following
movement and instead applied dialectics to bridge the gap
between eastern and western approaches to the human condition.
The mental exercise of commuting between the two approaches
helped me resolve the clash of cultures which I embodied.
After the seventies, hereticism (being called a reactionary)
was no longer an issue and I felt free and was excited by
my own applications and interpretations of the dialectical
method.
Karen and I had met 10 years before we married in 1975. We
managed to stick together during the turmoil of changing times
because we evolved together. Our´s was a dynamical relationship
in which neither was prepared to yield ground simply for the
sake of peace. Our mutual criticism was constructive because
we empathised with each other and struggled to gain new levels
of understanding. Which we did manage. She was as involved
in the study of language as I was in science so we often argued,
also in the philosophy circle, about the relationship between
language and thought. Together with her colleagues from the
humanities, she held that thought was language-based whereas
the scientists, particularly myself, maintained that thinking
was largely visual and language was used to describe what
the mind´s eye saw. I suppose my attitude emanated from
my background as a bird watcher, hunter and traditional naturalist..
The car accident we suffered on 16th April 1981 changed our
lives. The details of what happened can be found in the Reader´s
Digest article under Presse. She has written a book about
how we coped in the following years and we consider ours to
be a success story. Our backgrounds helped us open the window
to Karen´s language and we would like to pass on the
lessons we learned.
|
|