New Delhi, Nov. 14 -- In the 2004 Mani Ratnam film Yuva, there is a scene where political prisoner and student leader Michael Mukherjee (Ajay Devgn) is teaching Cosmology 101 to his fellow inmates, who are bemused and awestruck in equal measure. Imagine, for a second, a similar intellectual salon at the Ahmednagar Fort prison (in current-day Maharashtra) in the 1940s-Maulana Azad holding forth on the Mughals' advanced currency system; Sardar Patel describing the various forms and manifestations of rural governance he had observed first-hand during his Bharat Yatras; Harekrushna Mahtab reading from his magisterial History of Odisha which he wrote at Ahmednagar. And at the centre of it all, Jawaharlal Nehru (whose birthday, 14 November, is ...