About

I’m Vasudevan Mukunth and this is my blog, Root Privileges.

I write here about science, scicomm and scepticism from an Indian PoV, and occasionally about Tamil cinema and politics and journalism in India. I’m also interested in high-energy and condensed matter physics, research misconduct and fraud, open access publishing, the intersection of pseudoscience and politics, and the history of science.

Aside from writing, my forte is helping newsrooms across media formats and business models maximise the value they can sustainably extract from good science, health, and environment journalism.

I’ve worked at The Hindu, Scroll.in and Brainwave magazine (now defunct). I’ve also written for Hindustan Times, Quartz, Physics World and Wissenschaft im Dialog. I was part of the founding team of The Wire and The Wire Science; I edited the latter until November 2022. Since January 2023, I’ve been the deputy science editor at The Hindu. I'm also a full member of the Science Journalists' Association of India.

Everything I write on this blog is my opinion and not that of my employers or colleagues. The contents of this blog belong to me and are not available to republish or reproduce in any format. Please don’t send guest post requests or offers for native advertising. I won’t entertain them. Comments are disabled here.

I’m on Twitter as @1amnerd and on BlueSky at @1amnerd.bsky.social.