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…
casteism
10 posts
On The Caravan's new profile of The Hindu
On December 1, The Caravan published a 50-page report entitled ‘Paper Priests: The battle for the soul of The Hindu’. The report – actually, as a friend put it, a big profile – has many good parts and…
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…
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…
The life and death of 'Chemical Nova'
You know how people pretend to win an Oscar or a Nobel Prize, right? Many years ago, I used to pretend to be the author of a fictitious but, blissfully unmindful of its fictitiousness, award-winning s…
That astrology workshop at the IISc
Couple caveats: 1. I wrote this post on the night of October 28, before the workshop was cancelled on the morning of October 29. I haven't bothered to change the tense because issuing this cavea…
Caste guilt
This is the age of the start-up, not megaliths. Remember T-Rex did not survive evolution. It is unlikely that religions organised like T-Rexes – most of the Abrahamic religions fit this description –…
To understand #NotInMyName
The more vicious public debates we have, the more it will seem like a 'conversation' cordoned off to those masses for whom an awareness of social and political issues is only just budding.…
Caste, healthcare and statistics
In late November 2014, the esteemed British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial calling for the end of casteism in India to mitigate the deteriorating health of the millions of rural poo…
Three overlooked reasons why India’s healthcare indicators remain abysmal
Scroll.in January 2, 2015 The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government announced in July that it would roll out a National Health Assurance Mission, whose aim would be to provide some free medic…