Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way.
The feelings of the individual are the prime authority in ethics. 'If it feels good, do it' is the basic ethical ideal of humanism.
When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.
You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology.
If you look at the world's top 50 drugs being sold today, they are being marketed and sold by companies that did not invent them. I respect patents. I'll pay a royalty. But I shouldn't be denied the right to produce drugs for poor people at reasonable prices.
I believe that life-saving, essential drugs should be freely available and the innovator should be paid a suitable royalty payment for his invention.
India made a big mistake by signing up to TRIPS. With a population of 1.3 billion, India can't afford a monopoly in healthcare. Monopolies lead to higher prices and we can't allow them in a country like India with so much poverty and misery. It was like signing our own death warrant.
I had seen AIDS patients in India and Africa, and knowing that people were dying even though drugs existed that could help them was shattering for me.
Reducing the price of AIDS drugs gave me so much satisfaction that I've been thinking what else I could do. One day, I thought, 'Let's look at cancer and see how we can spare cancer patients' unnecessary suffering.'
Patients are becoming aware that they're being taken for a ride by big pharma companies. They charge high prices and have never cared for India's healthcare. There are 23 million cases of cancer every year and India has a fair share of that.
Unfortunately, the mechanism for doing philanthropy in a structured way isn't yet in place in India. I already do a fair bit and support various causes such as education, sanitation, health. But selling costly drugs at affordable prices is philanthropy in itself.
I do believe anybody manufacturing products for healthcare cannot regard it truly as a 100 per cent business: it is business plus a humanitarian approach to society because you are saving lives. You are playing with people's lives.
Cipla has a strong professional management team, and we take team decisions. My brother has been working at Cipla since 1973.
AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.
Means are more important than ends in the civilized struggle for ideas. Our dreams may be the loveliest on earth, but if we wade through blood and terror to achieve them, we will arrive to find ourselves destroyed. Don't kill.
Artistic simplicity is more complex than artistic complexity for it arises via the simplification of the latter and against its backdrop or system.
Art's effect is due to the tension resulting from the clash of the collocation of elements of two (or more) systems of interpretation. This conflict has the function of breaking down automatism of perception and occurs simultaneously on the many levels of a work of art ... All levels may carry meaning.
