The poor sometimes resemble luckless gods: Their voices should be heeded but the world often listens to them via go-betweens.

Religion and science keep on clashing, even in the 21st century. So it was in another century, on April 12, 1633 when Galileo, an old man of almost 70, was held for two weeks by the Inquisition, the Church's tool for probing and investigating the conviction of one's faith.

Ecce homo! What did he mean? What did the Roman Imperial Procurator, speaking in Latin, want from the people of Jerusalem crowding impatiently beneath the balcony? Was his shout directed towards Caiaphas and the other religious leaders present, who were demanding that 'this man' be sentenced to death?

With this dramatic sentence, the Communist Manifesto in 1848 depicted the arrival of an era when capital enters social life. Marx and Engels were not predicting the future: They were merely describing how astonishingly the bourgeoisie change the world. And set it quaking.

Einstein was completing his curriculum vitae one day in 1932. The prestigious Kaiser Leopold German Academy of Scientists, where Goethe had once been a member, had asked him to join.

I was gingerly finding a path on roots in the peat land, tread by tread in the reddish water oozing between the trunks of the jelutong and ramin trees. The dense foliage of the new branches still clustered thickly shading the way, but soon it became evident: the 'poems written on the sky' have been almost wiped out at Sabangau River.