The informedness problem
The following is the text of a speech I prepared to deliver at the 11th Young Investigators' Meeting in Guwahati on March 8, 2019. I wanted to use this opportunity to speak about education, which…
VM
1664 posts
Scicomm by scientists
2 min read
Warning: profanity There are scientists who don’t want other scientists to communicate their work to the masses. There are scientists who want to but don’t have what they need to do it. And there are…
Lightning strikes and sex
1 min read
No, not that sex. Biological sex. In the past eight years, an astounding 80 percent of those killed by lightning strikes have been men. This astonishing statistic is from an article in Bustle, from…
Reading Manto
1 min read
What is a short story? If you were to visualise the completeness of a 'long-story' as arcs of different lengths on a circle, then I would say a finished novel could be 90% of the circumferenc…
A critique of Gaganyaan
3 min read
Arup Dasgupta's incisive article about ISRO's human spaceflight mission, published on The Wire Science yesterday, is drawing a lot of civil, critical engagement from our readers. While this is…
Singin' in the rain, Vadivelu version
2 min read
Stanley Donen, who co-directed the famous 1952 Hollywood film Singin' in the Rain with Gene Kelly, passed away on February 21. Though it released to moderate success at first, the film went on to…
Five reflections on science day
2 min read
Science Day isn’t a very meaningful occasion in and of itself. It is the day C.V. Raman discovered the light-scattering effect named for him. Raman won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, and – by commem…
A wider world
Immense though the threat of war between India and Pakistan is right now, it's not the only thing happening in the world. This is The Wire's lead story right now: No better way to give peace…
Significance of China's moon mission
4 min read
I wrote the following analysis for chinaindiadialogue.com and China Pictorial. A big thank you to Mithila Phadke for the opportunity and for working on the text to make it sharper and more readable.…
Six concerns over India's plan to join Coalition S
7 min read
On February 12, K. VijayRaghavan, the principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, announced that India would join a global consortium of countries that is attempting to standardise the wa…
Are we obsessed with nominal identities?
3 min read
In an interview to The Wire Science last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, the molecular biologist, acknowledged that Indians had a bizarre relationship with the fact that he was a Nobel laureate: I’d left…
Research funds gridlock: who wants what
5 min read
On January 30, the Union ministry of finance announced a 24-25% hike in the junior (JRF) and senior research fellowships (SRF) amounts effective from January 1, 2019. The decision had been prompted b…