Text of my ‘When Worlds Collide’ column published in Ceylon Today Sunday newspaper on 18 November 2012

I went looking for Albert Einstein and stumbled upon an old friend: the Newspaper Reader.

It was the summer of 2011. Having gone to Princeton University to visit a friend, I stepped out for a leisurely walk around the picturesque campus town. I knew Einstein had spent the last two decades of his life at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies.

I was trying to locate his statue on the walkway that leads to the Princeton Borough office. That’s when I saw the “Newspaper Reader”, a life-size bronze sculpture was of a formally attired man seated on a park bench and reading an opened, broadsheet newspaper.

A closer look revealed that it was The New York Times of 9 August 1974 – the day Richard Nixon resigned as President of the United States. Newspapers…