Root Privileges

Tag: Jawaharlal Nehru

  • Looking (only) for Nehru

    Looking (only) for Nehru

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    I have a habit of watching one old Tamil film a day. Yesterday evening, I was watching a film released in 1987, called Ivargal Indiyargal (‘They Are Indians’). In a scene in the film, an office manager distributes sweets to his colleagues. One of them takes a look at the item and asks the manager…

  • The importance of sensible politics to good science

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    Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled ‘Science is political – and that’s a bad thing’. I thought the post missed some important points, which I want to set out here. First, the gist of his argument: [About the “argument…

  • A great discussion on the history of India’s tech.

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    On February 27, the Bangalore International Centre and Carnegie India hosted a panel discussion around Midnight Machines, the new book by Arun Mohan Sukumar that traces the interplay of technology and politics in independent India (read The Wire Science‘s review here). The panelists were Arun (my friend and former colleague at The Hindu), space entrepreneur…

  • Discovering Vikram Sarabhai

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    I just read through a collection of Vikram Sarabhai’s important speeches and papers compiled by members of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, to pick a suitable portion to excerpt on the occasion of Sarabhai’s birth centenary tomorrow. There was one portion I would have loved to publish but it belonged to a larger text…