#DaraShukoh

“Every schoolchild is taken to the Jantar Mantar; almost none is told the name of the astronomer behind it or the reasoning inside it — and the reasoning is the treasure: measure the sky yourself, at the largest scale you can build, and let no book, however famous, overrule what you see.”

“Knowledge has no single homeland. A paṇḍit in his fifties learned Arabic and Persian to carry Euclid and Ptolemy into Sanskrit, coining over a hundred words to do it; his royal student built five giant masonry observatories and a planned city on the argument that when theory and observation disagree, the observation wins.”