What will Ashok Khemka find next?
Ashok Khemka, the senior IAS officer famous for having exposed numerous instances of government corruption, perhaps most prominently the DLF land-grab scam, has been transferred again. This time, he h…
6.35 pm
The world was a bowl A container of things With cities at the bottom Like the abyss turned upside down Stars blinked back from below When ancient volcanoes erupted Orange lava assembled on the rim…
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…
Scicomm by scientists
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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…