Believing the propaganda regarding trouble in Iran, I nearly postponed my visit there. However, the situation was entirely peaceful, even at Khorramshahr, the border with Iraq. There was an invasion of dust, so all flights were cancelled, and we had to travel back to Tehran by road, a distance of some 18 hours. Here is what the dust haze looked like.
Remarkably, the Iranian Deputy Minister for Education, who was among those who attended the meet at Khorramshahr, also travelled back by bus, and stopped at wayside dhabas to eat and watch TV. I did not see any guns, except those pointed at Iraq. I cannot imagine an Indian minister travelling thus, for they are always fearful, and seen only with gunmen even in meetings of philosophers in this “stable democracy” called India. Even the centre of Delhi is infested with guns, but no one says there is any trouble in India!
But then, this sort of propaganda is to be expected from those who passed off the priest Copernicus as a revolutionary scientist, though all he did was to translate the work of Ibn Shatir and the Maragheh astronomers from Greek (into which it had already been translated) to Latin. Of course, he claimed “independent rediscovery”, as Europeans invariably did, for he could hardly have risked being tortured by the Inquisition like his friend Scultetus.
It was a real treat to visit Maragheh and see Tusi’s observatory at first hand.
