India, March 7 -- "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past," Karl Marx writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The trajectory of the life of JBS Haldane, himself a Marxist, which Samanth Subramanian has beautifully captured in his biographical account, is a testimony to the quoted lines....