The importance of sensible politics to good science

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 Brahmin wedding

I was at a wedding this weekend. It had a distinct Omelas-like quality throughout. For most of the elders present, it was an oru naal koothu — a single-day celebration that has been many weeks in the making. But the bride, whom I knew, didn’t want to get married, especially to the groom her parents …

Don’t donate bad food and call it ‘dharma’

There’s a troubling pattern among some people who give food away to homeless people and beggars. I have seen this happen first-hand with my folks, my extended family and their wider group of neighbours and acquaintances. All of them are Brahmins, so I don’t know if this is a Brahmin thing because they’re who my …

NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions

Continuing from here… Irrespective of Arati Ramesh’s words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don’t know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that rate is compared to the international average. But I …

Caste, and science’s notability threshold

A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the ‘scientific genius’ just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and I learnt a lot in this short time, which shouldn’t be surprising because, more broadly, we often don’t stop to …

Curious Bends – macaroni scandal, bilingual brain, beef-eating Hindus and more

1. The great macaroni scandal in the world began in Kerala “‘Only the upper class people of our larger cities are likely to have tasted macaroni, the popular Italian food. It is made from wheat flour and looks like bits of onion leaves, reedy, hollow, but white in colour.’ This paragraph appears in a piece titled: “Ta-Pi-O-Ca …