The fiction of men
After you find out that a male writer has been a lesser person than you thought he was, have you found it harder to read and appreciate his work? I bet you have. I’m sure…
April 2019
Fantasy and pseudoscience in Rajinikanth’s ‘2.0’
Rajinikanth’s film 2.0, which released last year, was recently uploaded on Amazon Prime and I finally watched it in its entirety. It is a dumpster-fire of masculinity, sexism and misogyny, which is not surprising after…
Welcome to the ergosphere
A black hole’s gravitational influence is a twisted – and twisting – thing, with many parts to it. We all know about the event horizon because of its wondrous ability to capture ‘even light’ within…
Poisoned trees bear poisonous fruits
Of late, there has been a clutch of Tamil films that have endeavoured to show the Hindu right-wing in poor light, associating its rituals with violence and oppression. The two most notable examples are Kaala…
Star Wars and the dynastic principle
Late last week, I picked up Ram Guha’s Patriots and Partisans. I know shamefully little about India’s modern political history – before and after Independence – certainly beyond the virtual borders of its scientific and…
The black hole image’s question of kind
In my latest op-ed for The Wire, where I defended the criticisms of some people who called the EHT’s black hole picture too blurry, there are two lines that aren’t entirely true. This post attempts…
To creativity, and conviction
The physicist David Thouless passed away earlier this month. I confess I didn’t know much about him or his work until he won a part of the Nobel Prize for physics in 2016. After that,…
What it means to be scientific
On April 1, a few days after India successfully completed its ‘Mission Shakti’ ASAT test, an editorial in the RSS mouthpiece Organiser read: In the initial days, scientists had to fight hard to prove their mettle and significance of…