Bharatiya Janata Party
From my article in The Hindu today, New science awards, old political project: The government has been trying repeatedly to shut … the opposition to its policies and world view emanating from academia, a space the Hindutva programme has thus far failed to breach by choking funding and revenue through the
India-based Neutrino Observatory
In a conversation with science journalist Nandita Jayaraj, physicist and Nobel laureate Takaaki Kajita touched on the dismal anti-parallels between the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) and the Japanese Kamioka and Super-Kamiokande observatories. The INO’s story should be familiar to readers of this blog: a team of physicists led by
Bharat Biotech
From ‘Rotavirus vaccine: tortured data analyses raise false safety alarm’, The Hindu, June 22, 2024: Slamming the recently published paper by Dr. Jacob Puliyel from the International Institute of Health Management Research, New Delhi, on rotavirus vaccine safety, microbiologist Dr. Gagandeep Kang says: “If you do 20 different analyses, one
heat wave
In the day or so before June 1, 14 people died in Bihar of heat stroke. Ten of these people were election personnel deployed to oversee voting and associated activities in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and of them, five died in Bhojpur alone. On Friday, at least 17 people in
The Hindu
I’ve been a journalist for 12 years. For the first few years these anniversaries helped to remember that I was able to survive in the industry but now, after 12, I’m well and truly part of the industry itself — the thing that others survive — and the observances don’
Covaxin
Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first
science journalism
The folks at The Wire have laid The Wire Science to rest, I’ve learnt. The site hasn’t published any (original) articles since February 2 and its last tweet was on February 16, 2024. At the time I left, in October 2022, the prospect of it continuing to run
business model
Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his
A Cricketing View
In today’s edition of The Hindu, Rebecca Rose Varghese and Vignesh Radhakrishnan have a particularly noteworthy edition of their ‘Data Point’ column – ‘noteworthy’ because they’ve used data to make concrete something we’ve all been feeling for a while, in the way we sometimes know something to be
crew module
For all the hoopla over indigeneity – from ISRO chairman S. Somanath exalting the vast wisdom of ancient Indians to political and ideological efforts to cast modern India as the world’s ‘vishwaguru’ – the pressure vessel of the crew module that will one day carry the first Indian astronauts to space
Daniel Pimentel
The Hindu publishes a column called ‘Notebook’ every Friday, in which journalists in the organisation open windows big or small into their work, providing glimpses into their process and thinking – things that otherwise remain out of view in news articles, analyses, op-eds, etc. Quite a few of them are very
Bhatnagar Award
The Government of India has replaced the 300 or so awards for scientists it used to give out until this year with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a set of four awards with 56 laureates, The Hindu has reported. Unlike in the previous paradigm, and like the Padma awards to
