Bharatiya Janata Party
The electoral bonds release has been reassuring on one count. For some time after the (new) BJP first rose to power in 2014, with a groundswell of support (but arguably also because of the ‘first past the post’ system) I used to think it represented an ideology that I’ve
Agni V
From Times of India, March 14, 2024: ISRO chairman S. Somanath confirmed to TOI in an exclusive interview that the NGLV project, internally named “SOORYA”, will be headed by (Project Director/PD) S. Sivakumar, currrently the programme director (space transportation systems) at VSSC… ISRO and DRDO really need to systematise
Agni V
On March 27, 2019, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) conducted ‘Mission Shakti’: India’s first anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test. After the event, the national broadcaster broadcast an hour-long speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since the Election Commission’s restrictions on poll candidates’ screen time was in effect
Atal Bihari Vajpayee
When we met Mr [Morarji] Desai, he was totally relaxed even after the long journey from Delhi. Squatting on a carpet in the Kremlin and spinning his favourite charka, he received us very gracefully and congratulated us on the impressive achievement [the launch of Bhaskara-I on June 7, 1979]. He
166
Now this is quite upsetting. I learn from Jatan Mehta’s Moon Monday #166 that Intuitive Machines – the maker of the Odysseus spacecraft that landed on the moon on February 22 – may have lied about the circumstances of the landing attempt in order to protect its market value, before ‘correcting’
Arrhenius law
‘Metastable systems’ is a technical term for something you’ve definitely experienced in your daily life, as much as scientists often encounter it when studying subatomic particles. Say you’re sitting on a chair and are getting comfortable. You realise you’d be even more comfortable on a bean bag
Acharya Balkrishna
On February 27, a bench of the Supreme Court upbraided Patanjali Ayurved and its chairman Acharya Balkrishna for continuing to disparage systems of medicine other than Ayurveda (technically, what it calls Ayurveda) and claiming its products offer “permanent relief” from “blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, asthma and obesity” in its advertisements,
Department of Space
This post is in response to a question on Reddit about why the Indian government won’t increase ISRO’s space budget. There’s a good analogy in India’s research budget. As a share of the GDP, the national expenditure on R&D has fallen significantly since 1996,
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
fascism
When a user asked, “Is modi a fascist”, Gemini AI responded that Mr. Modi had “been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterized as fascist”. “These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of [the IT Rules, 2021] and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code,
Artemis Accords
A historian of science I follow on Twitter recently retweeted this striking comment: Capitalism's critics want to portray it as un-social and un-human when in reality it is one of the most profound forms of human cooperation. For example, the number of people who contributed to these hyper-advanced
adversarial journalism
One dubious but vigorous narrative that has emerged around Poonam Pandey’s “death” and subsequent return to life is that the mainstream media will publish “anything”. To be sure, there were broadly two kinds of news reports after the post appeared on her Instagram handle claiming Pandey had died of
