Sexual harassment, etc.
The name of Sadanand Menon had found mention in Raya Sarkar's list last year. Since then, a journalist and former student of the Asian College of Journalism (ACJ) had published an article in The N…
Op-eds
182 posts
Cognitive flexibility and nationalism
There's something off about a new study that attempts to map the cognitive flexibility of people to their ideological preferences. To quote from the study's 'Significance' section: We…
Remembrance: '2001: A Space Odyssey'
Since news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke last month, many of us have expressed apprehension – often on Facebook itself – that the social networking platform has transformed since its juveni…
Finding trash in the dumpster
Just as there's no merit in writing a piece that is confused and incomplete, there's no merit in digging through a dumpster and complaining that there's trash. However, that doesn't me…
First temple, then launchpad?
ISRO chairman K. Sivan is free to worship and worship any deity he bloody well wants ∞; that's his right. But it's not entirely comforting when you think back about all the chairpersons ISRO h…
Looking for gemstones in the gutter
Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but…
Moon mission pushed to October, so we wait
So, the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO's) Chandrayaan 2 mission to the Moon has been pushed to October from April. Delays of this sort are to be expected for missions of this scale…
Jayant Narlikar's pseudo-defence of Darwin
Jayant Narlikar, the noted astrophysicist and emeritus professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, recently wrote an op-ed in The Hindu titled 'Science should ha…
For space, frugality is a harmful aspiration
Ref: 'ISRO's Chandrayaan-2 mission to cost lesser than Hollywood movie Interstellar - here's how they make it cost-effective', staff, Moneycontrol, February 20, 2018. ∞ 'Chandray…
On that Poynter debate about stock images and ethical visual journalism
Response to Mark Johnson, Article about free images 'contradicts everything I hold true about journalism', Poynter, February 9, 2018. ∞ Let's get the caveats out of the way: * The artic…
ISRO v. SpaceX doesn't make sense
Though I've never met the guy, I don't hold Pallava Bagla in very high regard because his stories – particularly of the Indian space programme – for NDTV have often reeked of simplistic concer…
To watch 'The Post'
I read a few reviews of The Post. Based on what the critics are saying, it seems the film has at least the potential to raise the spirits of many journalists today who could use a leg up. That said, I…