The irony writes itself.
The man whose own educational credentials have been under a cloud for years
is today draped in academic robes, walking the red carpet at IIT Delhi…
to hand out degrees.
And the soundtrack?
Not the spirit of inquiry.
Not the language of science.
But Sanskrit chanting.
Nehru built the IITs so India would think in equations, evidence and doubt.
Today the same campus welcomes its most powerful visitor with mantras and ritual.
Scientific temper was once the national ideal.
Now it has been replaced by the politics of spectacle.
When the highest office of the land treats a temple of science like a temple of faith,
it is not culture.
It is the quiet burial of reason, pragmatism and a scientific temperament.
#IITDelhi #ScientificTemper #EducationNotSpectacle
Hum Aapke Hain Kaun
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.
Three movies that whitewashed regressive patriarchy in the eyes of young millenials and made it look cool.
Sooraj Barjatya, Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar are much bigger enablers of thiscregime than Vivek Agnihotri or Aditya Dhar.
All the "great" Indian scientists were either from the pre-independence era and had finished their formal education before 1991. For all the hoopla about our institutes climbing global rankings and bibliometric analyses showing rising publication volumes, they have actually declined compared to the rest of the world.
When I was a masters student at IISc, I once went to a workshop a the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), which is about 12 km away. I had a motorbike, but the road is dangerous (highway) and jammed (once you get off the highway). IISc had a free shuttle bus that went back and forth to JNCASR and so I took it.
I do not remember much about the workshop - it was about visualizing protein molecules and running simulations using some specific software.
The only thing I remember was a fellow participant, who was a PhD student at one of the bio-sciences departments, who was persistently trying to recruit everyone else on the bus (3-4 people) to join Art of Living by Sri Sri Ravishankar.
The workshop was for the entire week (5 days), so I had to listen to his spiel every morning. He would continue it at lunch too.
Art of Living seems to be like Amway or similar multilevel marketing schemes. And the irony of it was that it was being peddled by someone studying at the premier STEM institute.