English language - Root Privileges

Root Privileges

English language

A collection of 4 posts

English language

On referring to female officers as 'madam sir'

ET Lifestyle published a Twitter thread this morning about police officers referring to female superior officers as “sir” or as “madam sir”. "I took the word ‘sir’ in a gender-neutral fashion – agar senior hai toh sir hai," says Deepika Suri, IG Narmadapuram, MP Police "A few months

English language

The new JNU VC’s statement has bad grammar. So?

I strongly disagree with some criticism that has emerged on Twitter against the new JNU vice-chancellor Santishree Pandit. The object of criticism is a statement that Pandit has apparently drafted and in which she states, broadly, what she considers to be her mandate. In response, BJP MP Varun Gandhi wrote:

A Q&A about my job and science journalism

A couple weeks ago, some students from a university in South India got in touch to ask a few questions about my job and about science communication. The correspondence was entirely over email, and I’m pasting it in full below (with permission). I’ve edited a few parts in

English language

English as the currency of science's practice

K. VijayRaghavan, the secretary of India’s Department of Biotechnology, has written a good piece in Hindustan Times about how India must shed its “intellectual colonialism” to excel at science and tech – particularly by shedding its obsession with the English language. This, as you might notice, parallels a post I