Fear and delight
Earlier this week, I published my 1,100th blog post on this site. It hasn’t been a long and great journey because it hasn’t been a journey, per se, at least I haven’t seen it as one. After publishing…
VM
1664 posts
Two sides of the road and the gutter next to it
3 min read
I have a mid-October deadline for an essay so obviously when I started reading up on the topic this morning, I ended up on a different part of the web – where I found this: a piece by a journalist tal…
The virtues and vices of reestablishing contact with Vikram
3 min read
There was a PTI report yesterday that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) is still trying to reestablish contact with the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan 2 mission. The lander had crashed o…
Unseating Feynman, and Fermi
3 min read
Do physicists whitewash the legacy of Enrico Fermi the same way they do Richard Feynman? Feynman disguised his sexism as pranks and jokes, and writers have spent thousands of pages offering his virtu…
Authority, authoritarianism and a scicomm paradox
5 min read
I received a sharp reminder to better distinguish between activists and experts irrespective of how right the activists appear to be with the case of Ustad, that tiger shifted from its original habita…
Hard sci-fi
1 min read
Come November, I will be at the Bangalore Literary Festival in conversation with Sri Lankan sci-fi author Navin Weeraratne. I am told Navin – "like you," according to one of the organisers –…
The mission that was 110% successful
3 min read
Caution: Satire. On October 2, Kailash S., the chairman of the Indian Wonderful Research Organisation (IWRO), announced that the Moonyaan mission had become a 110% success. At an impromptu press conf…
Fortitude
1 min read
What's the point of sweating to compose a good argument when the reader doesn't exist who will rebut it instead of nosing around to figure out who penned it and going after them instead? This…
The alleged politicisation of science
5 min read
"Don't politicise X" has become the defence of choice for a class of scientists and public intellectuals in India whose class and caste privilege utterly blinds them to various inequitie…
Good writing is an atom
1 min read
https://twitter.com/HochTwit/status/1174875013708746752 The act of writing well is like an atom, or the universe. There is matter but it is thinly distributed, with lots of empty space in between. Re…
One-track mind on a flight
2 min read
The air hostess I just paid 300 rupees to mistook the 100-rupee note for a 50, and realised her mistake only when I asked her for the change. She said she’d give it to me later because she didn’t have…
Chandrayaan 2 and the Left
2 min read
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Vikram Sarabhai
Since after September 7, when the Vikram lander of the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed to touchdown on the lunar surface, many writers and thinkers on the political left have been adopting a stance of th…