NCERT Book Class 8 English (Honeydew) Chapter 7 When I set out for Lyonnesse; A Visit to Cambridge

Before you read
This is the story of a meeting between two extraordinary
people, both of them ‘disabled’, or ‘differently abled’ as
we now say. Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest
scientists of our time. He suffers from a form of paralysis
that confines him to a wheelchair, and allows him to
‘speak’ only by punching buttons on a computer, which
speaks for him in a machine-like voice. Firdaus Kanga
is a writer and journalist who lives and works in
Mumbai. Kanga was born with ‘brittle bones’ that
tended to break easily when he was a child. Like
Hawking, Kanga moves around in a wheelchair.
The two great men exchange thoughts on what it
means to live life in a wheelchair, and on how the so
called ‘normal’ people react to the disabled.

Cambridge was my metaphor for England, and it was
strange that when I left it had become altogether something
else, because I had met Stephen Hawking there. astrophysicist:
It was on a walking tour through Cambridge that scholar of
the guide mentioned Stephen Hawking, ‘poor man, who astrophysics
— branch of
is quite disabled now, though he is a worthy successor physics
to Issac Newton, whose Chair he has at the university.’ dealing with
And I started, because I had quite forgotten that this stars, planets,
most brilliant and completely paralysed astrophysicist, etc.

A Visit to Cambridge 93