#
The first time we think of doing something that we want to do, there's such a purity
#
There's nothing between us and that ideal version of our thought.
#
But when we get down to it, it isn't easy.
#
This thought most resonates with me when it comes to writing.
#
Every idea I've ever had for a piece seems amazing when it's in my head.
#
But what an effort to write it.
#
And this is just me and an act that is essentially still private.
#
What happens when your desire depends on others, depends on many pieces falling into
#
place in the real world?
#
For example, there's nothing purer than the artistic impulse or the scientific temperament.
#
Both of those, in a sense, are an attempt to get to truth.
#
But both of those, most of the time, cannot happen in isolation.
#
A filmmaker needs to find a producer.
#
A scientist needs to find someone to fund and support the science.
#
Someone who will think it is worth doing.
#
And they both need to encounter politics and bureaucracy and inertia and the brutal speed
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with which time passes.
#
And when we look at artists or scientists, or honestly, just doors of any sort, we should
#
take this into account.
#
It has always been a struggle.
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And most of what is there lies unseen.
#
My guest today is Janvi Phalke, a historian of science, a filmmaker, and now a builder
#
I first heard of Janvi a couple of years ago when I picked up her book, Atomic State, Big
#
Science in 20th Century India.
#
This book looks at the history of nuclear science in India, and it is deeply complex
#
She avoids a popular and easy and simplistic narrative that looks at this history through
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the lens of the nuclear tests of 1974.
#
She also looks past the typical historical frames through which people tell the story
#
Instead, she dives into the complicated, messy reality of scientists, politicians, industrialists,
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bureaucrats, administrators, even humble technicians, all of whom are flawed and fragile,
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and all of whom have only partial control over the events that shape them and shape
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There is drama and intrigue in the book, and it is also an intricate study of some of our
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scientific legends, like C. V. Raman, Meghnath Saha, and Homi Jahangir Bhabha.
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Janvi is not just a writer and a historian of science, though.
#
Another of her passion projects is this wonderful documentary she's made called Cyclotron.
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It's about a bunch of scientists who decide that India must have its own cyclotron, which,
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by the way, is this incredibly complex machine that nuclear physicists use.
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They manage to get one to Chandigarh, spend a decade just setting it up, and basically
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devote their lives to it.
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Such a powerful and poignant story.
#
And while it's not publicly available, Janvi's been kind enough to share a private Vimeo
#
link with me and said that I can share that link and the password with all of you.
#
It's in the show notes, so do watch it while you can.
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A few years ago, Janvi also set up the science gallery Bengaluru, an institution that's
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promoting and redefining public engagement with science.
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All three of these – the book, the film, the institution – are incredible.
#
I loved hearing about her journey, the drinking sessions at Gokul, the engagement with punk
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rock, how she met Homi Bhabha in a dream, and much, much more.
#
But before you start listening, here's a great commercial break.
#
Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet.
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But the problem we all face is, how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
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which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping Rs.2500, Rs.2500 if you use the discount code
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
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Janvi, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
So we are recording this at about 10 in the morning and about 4 a.m. at one point, you
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know, reading about you or listening to something that you said made me blast Because the Night
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by Patti Smith out really loud.
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And then that took me on a trip to my love for alternative rock of that period.
#
And she, of course, started out in CBGBs with television.
#
So then I was listening to television's Marky Moon and I had, you know, for about half an
#
hour I had Venus in Loop because I haven't heard it since the 90s.
#
So suddenly it was like, you know, I started off by playing Because the Night.
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Then I downloaded a book about where, you know, the foreword is about how Robert Mapplethorpe
#
dies and all of that and checked out her Instagram.
#
So when I should really have been reading more of your book and listening to more of
#
you, I kind of went down this trip and I found this really interesting, this beautiful recent
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post on Instagram where she wrote about her friend Tom Verlaine of television, who she
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had once described as like a male version of herself, you know, when he was first performing
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And this is a beautiful poem after he's died where she writes, this is a time when all
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seemed possible, farewell Tom, all of the Omega.
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And I straight away then thought of both your book and your documentary, because in both
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of them, like one, perhaps in the 1930s, perhaps even 1932, which you describe as the Annus
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Mirabilis, nuclear physics is taking off is such an exciting time.
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And that's a time when all seems possible.
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And equally in the documentary with cyclotron, there is, you know, that moment where Mr.
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Hans gets a cyclotron to India, it's installed in Chandigarh, he's got that great team, Mr.
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Govind is with him, all these committed, intense people are there.
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And again, it's a time when all seemed possible.
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But then the way the world plays out is so different.
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And so often, something that appears to, you know, be the start of something magical becomes
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mundane, becomes difficult, like reading Atomic State, for example, it's, in a sense, it's
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a collection of human tragedies, you know, what happens to C. V. Raman, what, you know,
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Meghnad Saha and all that, and we can kind of talk about that, all the historical stuff
#
But I wanted to start by talking about this, because just before we started this conversation,
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before we hit record, you were also talking about, you know, that while I was like super
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inspired by the kind of work you've been doing here in Bangalore in the last five years,
#
you were talking about how it is such a drag, there is so much administrative stuff, and
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all this, the nuts and the bolts can be so difficult, and then thinking of the nuts and
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the bolts took me back to your documentary Cyclotron, where they've got this incredible
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machine and a bolt stops working and everything is at a standstill because that bolt is an
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American bolt and is measuring inches and everything you get in India is measured in
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millimeters and this great machine, this great machine that is going to help them figure
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out the universe is at a standstill for want of a single bolt, right?
#
So what are sort of your thoughts on this?
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Because as a historian, I'm sure you've, you know, gone back to history and seen this
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time and time again that there are moments in time, you know, CBGB in 1975, nuclear physics
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in 1932, the cyclotron in the early seventies when it arrives or and they're putting it
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There are moments in time where everything seems possible and then for a long time, it's
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People grow old, your interviews with Mr. Hans in that documentary, he's like 85, 90,
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you know, and at one point he and his wife are talking about he once accidentally locked
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her up somewhere and you cut to this photograph, which I thought was a beautiful cut of, you
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know, when they are young together.
#
And it's just, you know, the imagination of the viewer then begins to play that what
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is this man like when he's young, when he's excited, when he's filled with this joy and
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wonder at what's happening.
#
So, you know, having studied these histories and innocence, having lived that kind of life,
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trajectory yourself multiple times, as you pointed out, what is now looking back your
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sense of, you know, these ebbs and flows?
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Yeah, this is this is quite fun.
#
So, you know, like you identified, many of my friends and colleagues who saw cyclotron
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often saw the sadness in it.
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And while I can't say that I didn't understand the sadness or that it wasn't apparent, I've
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always felt very affectionate towards the people in the lab.
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And that is also why I ended up making the film about it rather than, you know, write
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a paper, which was sort of, you know, my my first best choice as an academic.
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It's to me, it was always the lab was always about the people.
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And I think that that tenderness kind of has always stayed with me.
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And I have done my best to bring that out.
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You speak about possibilities and you know what?
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It's quite amazing that you see that pattern, because I don't think I have been that aware
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of it for the longest time.
#
It's beginning to appear to me.
#
In fact, just a week ago, I said to a friend of mine on the phone when we were talking,
#
because I'm in the middle of submitting, well, actually submitted the first proper
#
full draft of a found manuscript written in 1970 by an American educationist and activist
#
The book is called Sarkar and Vigyan.
#
He named it that way in 1970.
#
And I found it when I was doing my PhD.
#
I referred to it and, you know, kept it away.
#
And once I started teaching, I thought my students should also have access to the books.
#
I thought of reaching out to ask Morehouse why he never published it.
#
Found out that, unfortunately, he had passed away just a year before.
#
And that was a moment of regret.
#
But that led to conversations with his family.
#
And I realized, and we collectively realized, that they were not aware of a 500-page manuscript
#
that he wrote and never published.
#
And so then one thing led to another.
#
And we are now publishing it with Orient Black Swan.
#
And I've written an introduction, edited it mildly, in order to let it find its way
#
We have exceeded his understanding of some parts of Indian history.
#
Obviously, it's been more than 50 years since he wrote the book.
#
But amazingly, some of the things that he says in the book, and we can come back to
#
it later, remain relevant even today.
#
And so when I was talking about this book to this friend of mine whose comments I really
#
And so I wanted him to read it.
#
And I just said, yeah, I seem to like to go after sad stories, a book not published, a
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cyclotron not refreshed and renewed, labs denied funding and whatever, et cetera.
#
And I wonder what it is that drives me to these stories.
#
But I like your take on it, because I think these are still full of possibilities.
#
This was the moment that Morehouse, in a way, thought about India.
#
He was very what one might call Nehruvian modern in this book.
#
He believed like people in the first government, Nehru and his colleagues believed that science
#
Science working very closely with the state would cover defense and development.
#
And therefore, that was India's path forward.
#
And within a few years of writing that book, he's signing a statement, which begins with
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something called an indictment, where they talk about how science has been put to all
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And from that to Bhopal, when he completely loses faith in that direction, etc.
#
But that's his trajectory.
#
But nonetheless, this is the book.
#
So the possibility of India finding her path to glory, so to speak, like modern glory,
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is very much a part of that book.
#
And so, yes, I think that even when I approach moments of possibility, including those in
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my own life, like the choices that I made, I'm often skeptical.
#
And while those possibilities are important, and I in a way sort of believe that those
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need to be followed upon somewhere inside of me, like I just said, you know, before
#
we started recording, that very few things reach full design capacity, especially in
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India, no matter what you're talking about, whether you're building an institution, whether
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you're chasing an idea, whether you're chasing a policy, whether you're chasing the making
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of a film, whether you're just trying to realize a life full of possibilities, I think it's
#
Yeah, it's interesting. I'd like to explore this more, but I haven't sort of I've thought
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of it as I've thought of these things at the from the other end, in a sense, like, you
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know, the sad things of it. But nonetheless, it's been always important to me how it started
#
and why it started and you know, by why it all even began the way it began. And, you
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know, just to add to the mad mix, because, you know, of course, work is never enough.
#
And, you know, the number of things that I want to do are never enough. I started translating
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with my father's help. The first novel that Rahul Sankrityayan, the writer, traveler,
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wrote when he was in Hazaribagh jail in 1923. He translated seven science fiction books into
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Hindi. We know what those books are, we know what the titles are, but we don't know what he
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translated them from. And my, you know, my reading of science fiction is not comprehensive enough
#
to identify them. But I'm sure those who read will, if they, you know, for that spectrum between,
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say like the late 19th, early 20th century, if, you know, so they'll be able probably to identify
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those books. But at the end of those translations, he wrote this one, which is a utopia, again,
#
extremely full of possibilities, but that actually doesn't end sadly. And so maybe that's the next
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step, and maybe that's the changing moment. But it's called Bhai Svisadi, the 22nd century,
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where everything is wonderful. You know, it's a society of equals, there's no gender, there's
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no religion, there's no caste, there's no inequality, there's no poverty. Everybody
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is learned, there are apples growing on the streets. It's just, it's incredibly beautiful,
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actually. It's at another time in history, it might have appeared naive, if not naive, simple.
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But at this point in time, I think it feels actually incredibly tender again, like, you know,
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wonderful that someone can imagine that such a life is actually a good life to have, right?
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And of course, we all know Sankrityayan's trajectory of where he went from, you know,
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You've got to forgive my ignorance, but I actually don't. So, tell me.
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Oh, Sankrityayan. Oh, yeah. Oh, wonderful. I mean, you know, incredible sort of thinker
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found his… So, he at some point…
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Let me put it this way. He had various phases in his life. He was a Buddhist at some point.
#
He was a Marxist at some point, travelled to Tibet, brought manuscripts back from there,
#
travelled to Sri Lanka, travelled all over India, of course, went to Russia,
#
wrote novels, wrote travelogues. So, his sort of memoirs are called Mere Jeevan Ki Kahani.
#
The novel that we know him most about is from Volga to Ganga. Volga se Ganga tak. It's been
#
translated. Much of his work has been translated. And even this particular book, Bhai Svisati,
#
bits of it have been translated, but not fully. So, yeah, so he was a thinker, a Sanskritist,
#
a Marxist, a Buddhist, who led a very, very full life, life full of thought and reading and
#
writing and was of course also, you know, but he was in prison for protesting British rule. So,
#
also an anti-colonialist. Yeah, so very, very interesting figure in Hindi literature.
#
And my father taught Hindi literature, which is how I became aware of Sankrityayan's work.
#
Yeah. Yeah, fabulous. But you know, you thought you've suddenly found a happy story, but
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that has a frame of a sad story of what the author behind it. And I think aren't all stories in a
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sense sad? Like you can look at happy stories as say the inexorable progress of science,
#
the great discoveries and blah, blah, blah. And all of those are happy. But human stories
#
are always sad, aren't they? Because fundamentally human beings are fragile, they make mistakes,
#
they have regrets. There are roads taken, which means there are so many more roads not taken.
#
And you know, so I don't think you can get away from that.
#
No, you can't. I mean, absolutely. I think the right word you used is fragile, right? Like
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human beings are incredibly fragile and vulnerable. And we struggle, we struggle to keep ourselves
#
together. We struggle to keep our thoughts together, we struggle to keep our minds together.
#
And some of us, you know, are not able to and some of us appear to and you know, all of,
#
all of that is almost always a struggle. And I think as you grow older, in fact,
#
the comprehension of what is missing, what we've lost. So that sense of loss never goes, right?
#
But I think there's a potential, at least I'd like to believe. I don't know that I've found it.
#
But there's a potential in melancholy, in that sadness to find something that,
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you know, because even that can hold you together, it like allow you to hold together.
#
So not in despair, but in an acceptance of,
#
it's never inevitable, but that it's there. And you know, it's not something
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you could have avoided by doing something else. Or, you know, as you said, parts taken,
#
parts not taken for everything you do, there's something else you cannot do. I mean, you know,
#
so we are ridiculously finite creatures in that sense, right? Although we like to believe,
#
you know, in the simultaneity of time and the multiplicity of whatever. I mean,
#
experience doesn't confirm that easily, right? Like, I mean, you experience time in a linear
#
fashion. I mean, you know, the day begins and the day ends, you are born and you live and you die.
#
So it's very hard, cognitively, to comprehend any other kind of complexity around these ideas.
#
And so I think it's, yeah, I mean, the unfolding can, you know, one might find a way, I think,
#
through melancholy to feel, to feel that sort of, okay, you know, one can sort of,
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one can make a path, one can do what one needs to do. So then a friend of mine often used to say
#
to me, you know, there are things you can do and there are things that need to be done.
#
And finding some kind of a balance between the two usually,
#
in a way, helps hold that sadness, I think, together, especially doing things that need
#
to be done. You know, and what I mean by need to be done, of course, is in terms of
#
imagining that, you know, like in the utopia, better life is possible.
#
You know, better science is possible, better politics is possible, better society is possible.
#
And I think then doing what you think might add to that possibility can kind of keep you together.
#
But yes, I mean, you know, fundamentally, I think you're right. I mean, I often say to my friends,
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I'm a miserable person, usually, and they're like, oh, but what happened? And I'm like,
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no, no, it's okay. I like being miserable, you know, day and night.
#
Yeah, I think one can revel in misery. And sometimes I have to remind myself that even
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melancholy is an act of self-aggrandizement, right? You've happily put yourself in the
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center of the universe and constructed the tragedy around you.
#
Absolutely. It's wonderful. It's wonderful. It has its own charm. Absolutely.
#
Yeah. So, you know, double clicking on something you just said about what you need to do and what
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needs to be done. And one of the thoughts that sort of struck me when I was reading Atomic State,
#
when I was watching Cyclotron, and that generally strikes me when I just look around,
#
is that so many people, you know, they set down a path and then they do it for the sheer love of
#
it. Like many of us, perhaps most of us, we kind of, we start doing X, Y or Z because of circumstances
#
and then we are in the groove and we are not fully engaged and we don't really care. But so many of
#
the characters of the fascinating story that you tell in Atomic State, all the main characters,
#
you know, Saha, Raman, Baba, everybody, there's great passion there, there's deep passion there,
#
there are no immediate paybacks for them, there's no immediate gratification perhaps.
#
And you know, even in Cyclotron, it's almost poignant that all of these people feel, you know,
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such a dense love for the work they do. And it's not just the scientists like Mr. Huns, like, you
#
know, I was kind of reminded of Naipaul, the house for Mr. Biswas, and I was thinking you could have
#
called it a cyclotron for Mr. Huns. You know, it is almost that kind of longing that eventually comes
#
through and you know, then what, the dog has caught the car. But even some of the sort of,
#
you know, minor characters in that story, like the technicians who work there and all of that,
#
you know, you spoke to the two technicians who have retired, but to say that whenever, you know,
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we worked here all our lives, has given us everything, we come back and help out for free
#
when we kind of need to, and that angle is there. So, you know, quite apart from the people who sort
#
of just get into a lane and they just stick there and I guess everything is kind of inertia. I see
#
people do something either out of love, because they just love doing this, you know, they love
#
waking up and doing whatever they're thinking about, whatever it is that nuclear physicists
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think about, or there is, the other great driver for many people is also a sense of duty,
#
a sense that what they are doing has value in the world and therefore it is to be done,
#
it is something bigger, you know, not to use grand words like dharma, but, you know, in a non-grand
#
context that there is a dharma, there is a path that they need to follow. So, what is sort of your
#
sense of this both in the case of the sort of people whose stories you've told and examined
#
and also, you know, in your own case, you know, because in your own case it would have been so,
#
and we'll talk about your journey in some detail later, but, you know, in your own case it would
#
have been so easy for you to stick in academia, for example, you know, tenure track, blah, blah,
#
blah, become a prof, publish papers, write books, live the good life, you know, professor, all of
#
that, you know, and yet you choose to step out of your comfort zone in such a massive way,
#
right, just breaking that inertia that imprisons most of us all our lives. So what are sort of
#
your thoughts on this? Do you think that circumstances are partly responsible for,
#
you know, people going towards things they either love or feel this great duty for,
#
or do you think that it is also a question of character and temperament, that some people are
#
just people like that, that they will be engaged no matter what it is, and some people just don't
#
have that, you know, the moment they find a comfortable groove, they'll stick with it.
#
So I think I'll take a stab at this first at the level of generality and then start getting more
#
and more specific. I mean, it's a privilege, right, to be able to even come to the point
#
where you identify what you might work on. So I think that must be acknowledged and,
#
you know, because we live in a country where that's not possible for the bulk of the population,
#
right, like for different reasons. I mean, it could be simply circumstances where you just
#
don't have the resources to even, you know, find yourself in a position where you can ask
#
yourself the question, what is it that I like? That's the circumstances. Second is the self-imposed,
#
ridiculous circumstances of, you know, become an engineer, become a doctor, become a software
#
engineer, become a banker, whatever that is, right, like so those kinds of our understanding
#
of what a good professional life is or what upward social mobility is. So those also become
#
incredible hindrances. Gender, of course, comes in the way of most women in India, if not,
#
you know, many at least. So those, so it's a privilege to be able to reach where, to reach
#
a point where you can ask yourself that question. And then after that, an even bigger privilege to
#
be able to identify that, right, because many of us can go through life not being able to identify
#
that. And I've often asked myself that question. So why do I move? Is it because I actually haven't
#
found, but, you know, given my friend's advice at 2am after we were all sort of fairly happy and,
#
you know, he had a guitar in his hand and at some point he just sort of put his guitar down,
#
just looked up and said, I think I need a work life balance, Janvi. And, you know, while sort of
#
I understood where it came from and whatever, I mean, you know, I don't, I've never had a balance
#
because I just work and sometimes happily, sometimes unhappily, sometimes out of a sense
#
of duty, sometimes out of a sense of stubbornness, sometimes out of determination. So the motivation
#
changes, but I, well, motivation is dynamic in a sense, you know, circumstantial, but I know I
#
have to work and it keeps me sane. But coming back to, you know, the figures in the film or
#
in the book and what kind of drove them, I mean, if I take, let me start with Meghnad Saha because
#
in many ways he is, his motivations, his driving forces are the most clear, right. He strongly,
#
in a way, how should one put it? He had a very strong politics around inequality. He believed
#
that, you know, a better Indian modern society was possible and that he was going to do his bit for
#
it. He wrote, you know, he started journals, he of course did his own research, mentored young
#
people, et cetera, et cetera, you know, nation building is what he called his own work and he
#
did that, right. And one can discuss that what nation building might mean, you know, which meant
#
both intellectual and material scaffolding, right. Like if you look at the kind of
#
work he participated in, you know, the range was from like standardization of calendars to rivers
#
and floods to who knows what, right. I mean, nuclear physics wasn't even his discipline.
#
He was an astrophysicist, but he knew, like most of his colleagues, that if Indian physics had to
#
stay at the frontiers, they would need nuclear physics in the department in Calcutta. And hence,
#
the sort of bold at that point and audacious step to say, we will get a cyclotron here.
#
And so, you know, so his drive in a way was very clear. And he, you know, he worked day in, day out.
#
And there he was in the end, when he felt that, you know, nothing was helping and policy was the
#
way to change things, he even stood for elections, right, and become a parliamentarian. So, whatever
#
means possible to accomplish that goal of making sure that science and engineering were embedded in
#
building a nation that was strong and sovereign. If we move to Raman, very interesting again.
#
I mean, if Saha, for example, harbored students who were, who, you know, would be in prison if
#
he hadn't protected them and hidden them, etc., you know, so he did those kinds of things in
#
Allahabad as well. Raman wasn't overtly national in that sense, but he was a patriot, right.
#
So, the frame, it's interesting for both of them, the frame of their science is international,
#
but their motivation is to become equals among equals and therefore be recognized as sort of,
#
you know, good minds. And so his work, so Raman's work is to build physics and through his letters
#
to Nehru, but also otherwise, what one finds out slowly is that in many ways, his is a
#
different shade of Saha, so not sort of, you know, in your face, but he's very clear that
#
a good physics department will have to have nuclear physics because that's the frontiers
#
of the discipline. Again, his own research had nothing to do with it and so he was going
#
to encourage it because as he said, and so this is the fun thing, right, like Saha says nation
#
building, Raman says civilization, right, like every civilization, you know, basically worth
#
their salt is going to encourage this kind of work and therefore, you know, we are going to
#
have nuclear physics and, you know, have a particle accelerator in Bangalore as well.
#
Lastly, if you see Baba, you know, Homi Baba, who is sort of the third important figure in the first
#
years of the beginnings of experimental nuclear physics in India, his discipline in fact stood
#
at the threshold of nuclear physics, right, like so he was a cosmic ray physicist and so
#
nuclear physics was transforming his discipline. So in a way, you know, so what people studied using
#
cosmic rays or cosmic radiation, nuclear physics allowed for that to be studied in a lab,
#
right, like so it brought it under control, it was much more, it became much more possible
#
to understand how the universe in a way is made up. But in a lab, you didn't have to actually fly
#
balloons at extremely high, you know, altitudes or underground or, you know, any of those things,
#
you could actually create those circumstances in a lab using particle accelerators of different kinds.
#
And so his discipline stood at the threshold of transformation.
#
He too never became a nuclear physicist. But it's interesting to see how during the Second World War,
#
most international of the lot, in terms of just markers of internationalism, right, like, I mean,
#
you know, and I couldn't resist sort of bringing his Italian socks into the book, you know, so his
#
His suits were stitched in, you know, wherever London or, you know, the sort of fanciest tailors
#
in Bombay, his socks came from Italy, you know, very dapper, you know, dressed. In fact, I mean,
#
the funny thing, I'll come back to Baba and his motivations in a second, but I think, you know,
#
in the last months when I was trying to finish my doctoral thesis, one night I dreamt of Homi Baba.
#
And I was walking down the steps of the Asiatic Society of Bombay,
#
the library in Bombay, the town hall, basically the old town hall. I'm walking down and there on
#
the road in a convertible is Homi Baba in a Hawaiian shirt. And he waves to me and I say,
#
hello, I really have a few questions to ask you. And he says, okay, let's go for a ride,
#
I'll answer your questions. And I get into the car and I woke up and I told myself,
#
I really had to finish my thesis because this was too much. I did not want to dream of Homi Baba.
#
I'm fully getting what your friend meant about work-life balance.
#
I think it's one of the most ridiculously lovely dreams I've had. But coming back to him,
#
I think in many ways he grasped most what the transformation of research and the relationship
#
between science and the state, what the stakes were just at the end of the Second World War.
#
What is interesting is that he chose to stay back. He could have, if he wanted, just like the others,
#
gone out of India, but he stayed back and he sort of in conversation with the state agenda,
#
because there was a government, the very first government, which was of course full of optimism
#
and sort of ideas galore. And same time, you see that with Saha, you see that with Raman as well,
#
that time was full of possibilities again. And so he stays back and in that conversation,
#
together with the support of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, helps establish institutions for
#
funding and regulation of scientific research in India, which still allowed for some degree
#
of independence and not for a complete, in a way, completely subsumed into the state kind of
#
research program, except like what Morehouse, in fact, said in his book,
#
and which, you know, one might debate and argue about how true that is if at all today,
#
is that in India, we like at that time, we built organizations that were heavily dependent on
#
leadership and their vision. And the minute the leaders either stepped down or died,
#
that vision, in effect, became vacuum, in a vacuum, I don't even know how does my vocabulary is
#
falling short, but in a sense, it, that vision is followed, but the substance in many ways is lost.
#
Because it's not somebody else's dream, so to speak. But at the same time,
#
we're not ready to let go and to think of a renewal or a refreshment or a new kind of dream.
#
And so I think in many ways, the balance that people like Raman and Saha and Baba tried to build,
#
where there was a strong relationship with the state, but it wasn't a bureaucratized science
#
that they were encouraging. Science by protocol, science by process, that got lost when they left.
#
But again, so Baba's motivation, I think, to do this work was to
#
basically equal among equals. That idea is so strong in that generation, whether you look at
#
the three people we just spoke about or Mahalanobis, Mirpal Sani.
#
Almost everyone in that generation was looking to walk with their head held high, so to speak,
#
because they knew they were able to do what anybody else was able to do.
#
And I think that's a high, right? You want to do it, right? And then you have a point in a way to
#
establish, because they were not trying to prove anything. I mean, they were incredibly well
#
established. One was a Nobel laureate, one was a person nominated for the Nobel Prize several times,
#
several times. And another was a Cambridge graduate with
#
pretty decent international cachet of reputation for having done good science.
#
And so they wanted to establish that, and they wanted to establish that for the next generations,
#
because they were all mentors. I mean, if you look at how did Saha and Raman work on that idea that,
#
oh, India needs nuclear physics, but I'm not the one to do it, but who's going to do it, right?
#
And they both mentored students, used their networks to get their students into the best
#
labs abroad, get them trained there, get them back to India so that India can have those labs,
#
right? And you have letters. I mean, you have letters from Raman and Saha to the respective
#
supervisors, which is Ernest Lawrence and John D. Cockroft at Cavendish. You also have letters
#
between Lawrence and Nak Chaudhary's father saying, my son is there. I hope he's okay.
#
I hope he is. You know, it's quite funny. I mean, the archive is a lovely place, actually,
#
full of pathos sometimes, yeah, tenderness, sometimes sort of shocking arrogance, sometimes
#
range of things. It's like anything human is, right? So it has the full range of emotions.
#
While you go through someone's papers, which I doubt someone would be reading at this point
#
of time, but yeah, it's good fun. I haven't been in an archive for a long time.
#
You know, I loved your dream of Baba in a Hawaiian shirt, and you're waving at each other.
#
One of the things I really enjoyed about the book, and I absolutely love it when I get a chance to
#
do it, is, you know, what, I mean, these are otherwise, they are dry historical figures.
#
One hears about the things they have done, so and so has won a Nobel Prize, you'll see pictures of
#
them, you know, crisp suits and all of that. And yet through this book, as much as Atomic State is
#
about, you know, the history of nuclear physics in India, and so on, to me, it's the beautiful
#
portraits of these men and even others like Krishnan, for example, you know, whose letters
#
also you mentioned that you had access to. And I was just thinking about how their human
#
sides were, in a sense, shaped so much by circumstances and constraints in a way that is
#
tragic. For example, I was moved by the description of how, on the one hand, you've tried to
#
make sure that your narrative captures some of the complexity of what happened. So when you're
#
writing about the institutionalization of physics, you know, you're also taking into
#
account that it is something that stands outside of nationalistic history and, you know, the whole
#
imperialist race politics that is playing out. And at the same time, those are such huge forces.
#
So a moving moment for me is when, you know, Raman gets an election to the Royal Society of London,
#
and it is so coveted, you know, and he's got, as you put it, a passport as well as a dinner.
#
And then at the dinner, he cries, right? And that crying speaks to me because
#
it sort of opens up something to me. Like when Shottu Chitra got the honorary Oscar,
#
I felt really bad at the almost fawning way in which he thanked the academy. And, you know,
#
I'm such a huge fan of the man. I was like, mentally, I was thinking that man,
#
you're much bigger than these guys. I mean, and obviously he was very old and one can kind of
#
understand. So at one level, you see, you know, Raman in this sort of situation where this
#
validation from your imperial overlords, as it were, means so much to him for understandable
#
reasons. And at the other level, the other constraint that starts happening as we gain
#
independence is the incentives that you now have to work with the nation state and that project.
#
So in 1945, you've reproduced that memorandum, which is writing to Nehru, where he's almost,
#
you know, which is like a lament that give us the funding. Don't just give funding to Baba,
#
you know, he's just, you know, the machines that he has, they're not going to of any use,
#
we have a holistic view, putting all of that out a battle that he lost and he and his fellow
#
Krishnan lost and a very tragic story there. And you see that bleeding and equally at the same time,
#
you see the human side of Saha, where he is showing sort of he's talking about how I can't
#
take orders from say Bhatnagar, who's a pure, poor scientist, or Baba is a good scientist,
#
but he's 18 years younger than me. And it's almost a kind of pettiness. And you realize that the
#
pettiness is also circumstantial in a different space where he's got independence, he's doing
#
his own thing. These different pressures and constraints aren't there. He can be a different
#
person. But you see all of these people kind of show their fragile selves as they were in the
#
course of everything that is going on. And in fact, I wished you had more of Krishnan in the book as
#
well. Because that whole thing that when that battle is lost in 47, and no real spoiler here,
#
but just for the listeners, what really happens is that there are these three universities,
#
Calcutta with Saha, IISC in Bangalore with Raman and Krishnan, and Raman is about to retire and
#
Krishnan is about to take over, and Baba in Bombay. But the Indian government decides that
#
nuclear physics is such a vast project, and the scale required is so massive that we're going to
#
have one place and we're going to put everything there. And that goes to, you know, Baba gets
#
lucky there that Nehru favors him and he's a part of the Tata extended family. So everything works
#
in his favor, and Raman loses the battle to get that kind of funding to have his own department,
#
and Krishnan just moves away forever. He doesn't feature in the story anymore. This, you know,
#
this great one nuclear physicist that we actually had at that time. And you read all his letters.
#
So in the context of Krishnan and the others, what was it like for that process to play out
#
in your head where when you start, they're kind of flat figures. But as it goes on and on,
#
they become so deep that you can see them in dreams and perhaps have conversations with them.
#
What was all of that like? And how is it? How is it to negotiate all of that? Because,
#
you know, their journeys are so fraught that I imagine that you get wound up in it as well,
#
right? So one, one does, right? Like, I mean, the, so here's the thing, when you're doing
#
historical research in India, especially for the 20th century at the end of empire and after,
#
the archives are incredibly difficult to find, right? So my American and European colleagues
#
decide they want to work on something, contact the relevant archives, go there. There are grants,
#
usually from the archives, they get the papers photocopied or photographed, they come back,
#
they sit and they work. It's still possible to do that also for India-related papers outside,
#
but then that's the archive of someone else, right? Like, it's not an archive in India,
#
and especially after independence, it matters that the archive, what was produced here and
#
what was written from here, except in most cases, we don't have access to that archive.
#
So that, I think, is that angers me, that breaks me, it demoralizes me in every which way. I mean,
#
I tried to establish a project called Recollect India to record the memories of the first
#
generation of free Indians, scientists, engineers, lab technicians, etc. It's a project that's kind of
#
limping because I just don't have the bandwidth to pursue it with full strength right now,
#
but I'm hoping one of my colleagues is going to pick it up and run with it.
#
So it's very hard to get to, especially personal papers of people who do or did science in India.
#
It's still okay for the tiny period also because these figures were really big, right, like Meghnad
#
Saha. I mean Saha's archive is in fact the most complete and there are copies both in Calcutta
#
and in Delhi at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. When it came to Ramans, of course,
#
it's incomplete, but still the Raman Research Institute has put up significant amounts of
#
material actually online already, but you can still find some of it. Babas is still the most
#
inscrutable. I mean while the Tata Institute has made its archive open, the personal papers
#
are not accessible still and when it comes to the next generation, which is Krishnan's, there it's
#
the hardest and I was lucky. I was lucky because I was told his son lives in Bangalore. I remember
#
this was in 2003. I think it was the second time that I was coming to Bangalore or maybe,
#
yeah second time and the Indian Institute of Science archives were just about opening up.
#
So I found the memo written by Bhabha and Taylor saying why nuclear physics could not be established
#
in Bangalore, but I had very little. I had one letter, the memo from Raman, but I did not have
#
anything else, right. I was like how do I even find out and then someone said maybe you can talk
#
to Krishnan's son and so I went to his house and I went the first time and they wanted to know
#
who I was, why I was doing this, was I a journalist, was I sort of stirring up a controversy of some
#
sorts, why did I even want to do this. Then the conversation kind of ended and we'll find out,
#
we'll let you know at three such visits and I don't blame them. I mean it's difficult
#
because we haven't yet understood how to archive things properly. We also don't have a culture of
#
writing about people beyond hagiographies. It's either we pull them down or we build them up.
#
There's no in between where the purpose is not the individual but understanding larger
#
historical transformation processes and where the individuals fit in. I mean of course the
#
individuals have a role, they are taking decisions, they are saying things etc. But the fourth visit
#
and that was literally, I was on the way to the train station. This was the time when I was a
#
student and I was still taking trains and of course it was a different time too and he said
#
come over and I was like I'm going to the train station but I was like fine nothing's going to
#
happen but I'll go. And I went and he had a massive pile of papers photocopied and he gave
#
them to me. I was lucky, I was really really lucky because in that I found the proposals,
#
I found the work that he did. I mean R.S. Krishnan in the 1930s and 40s was the, apart from
#
Nag Chaudhary, the only person in India who knew how to build, well not so much build but run,
#
maintain and use a cyclotron. Which wasn't a trivial thing then because cyclotrons were
#
creatures of the 30s and you know Krishnan kept the Cavendish cyclotron running during war time
#
because all the physicists were either at Chalk River or you know other bits of the
#
Manhattan Project. And so he was the one who kept the cyclotron running, did research,
#
identified or discovered if you might call them nine isotopes, trained graduate students,
#
you know did all of that work. So I mean his experience was pretty incredible. I mean the
#
recommendation letters that John D. Cockroft wrote for him basically said he kept it running
#
while we were away you know and so he's and he's incredibly good with his hands. I think he says
#
something to the effect of this is the best Indian student I've had who is able to work with his
#
hands or I mean he does use the word experimental but I think it was worth noting and remains worth
#
noting even today that someone is able to you know work with their hands and in India it's such
#
a that's why experimental science in a way suffers. I mean you see Hans saying that too right in the
#
film that we don't have we don't have that desire actually culturally to do work with our hands.
#
So yes so you know so there is that sort of it's the difficulty of getting to the archive and then
#
the difficulty therefore finding out more about the individuals and that is also one reason why
#
many histories get written flatly because who is going to you know go spend two years looking for
#
documents and then triangulating that with oral histories what's come in the press and not come in
#
the press official reports national archives and putting all of that together to see whether the
#
story actually holds right and that's why what we have in the public domain about 20th century
#
science in India is is largely flat because it's written either from oral histories or from memory
#
or from opinion and you know that that has consequences but coming back to the question
#
you asked me about you know emotional involvement apart from you know the the Baba story you feel
#
you know you feel for your characters in a way right like it's it in that sense like a novelist
#
would right like you you grow very close to the people you're writing about or you're filming
#
you know like I said I mean it's the people that made me want to make the film
#
it's you as you start identifying with their stories you see the story from their perspective
#
and I think that is that is when that happens it's a very important moment because you don't
#
want to suspend your critical faculties you want to be alert you want to be skeptical you want to
#
ask hard questions but at the same time you don't want to tell them what their story is about
#
you might evaluate the story in different ways but you want to know what they think the story is
#
and that's why when you know we were editing the film and the first three editors I approached you
#
know the first thought I didn't have a film because there was you know whatever reason there was no
#
film the second person said this is too academic the third person said do a paper edit and give it
#
to me and I'll put it together and I was like what is a paper edit and then the fourth person
#
I found you know serendipity right and that's why circumstances and as a historian you grow to
#
appreciate contingency circumstances you know things that come together that you didn't expect
#
right and that's life that's history that's you know that's how things mostly unfold as it turned
#
out this I asked Tanya Singh who ended up editing the film with me if you know if she knew someone
#
who might help me edit so she was curating a film festival at King's College where I was teaching
#
and she said oh well I might be interested I was like oh great have you done film before
#
and she said actually not but I know editing so I was like okay good so here's my footage
#
look at it it's about 11 and a half 12 hours and tell me what you think and we had a coffee and I
#
explained to her what I thought at that point I wanted to do and she went back she saw the footage
#
she came of came back a few days later she said I just want you to know that my parents taught on
#
that campus before they both moved to England and they know some of the people in the footage
#
and I understand Punjabi and Hindi and English and I would like to do this and I just like died a
#
little death at that moment and I was like okay let's do this together and then we did a paper
#
edit by the by then I found out what a paper edit was and what convinced both of us was that
#
we both had this literally the same starting and the ending point so you know we sort of
#
organized the material for in the beginning in the end towards the beginning towards the end
#
etc so we organized it that way and it matched and so you know we ended up working together
#
and one of the things I said to her was that I want to tell the story in the voice of my people
#
not that I have any other you know material because obviously I came back with like a historian with
#
lots of words right like hardly any visual material and so because voice over is a normal
#
sort of thing about documentaries right like where you tell the story and you put things together
#
and again you know nothing wrong with it it serves a purpose for a certain kind of story
#
but here I didn't want that at all because I didn't want it to be about me or my story but theirs
#
and so then that's how we wove the voices together right like where they innovate like a relay race
#
where they take the baton from each other and complete the stories right and which is why then
#
you know the lovely moments like when the internal beam came right like 78 79 you know it's 75 74
#
and 78 were the three answers you got I think seven yeah something like that right like and then
#
and it tells you a lot also it's I think it those few seconds also tell you a lot about history
#
right because history and memory people very convincingly remember things and you know neither
#
of them are malintent and neither of them are you know trying to manipulate my understanding
#
of the story but that's what they remember you know and it's it's amazing and so you know it it
#
how to do that when you do that right and then when you start listening to them you want others
#
to listen to them and then you try to write that way and writing is hard of course I wouldn't say
#
I came to identify with any of my characters but I did
#
I think even when critically I actually have liked the people that I wrote about
#
or I made the film with or you know Morehouse in that case you know whose book I now want to
#
put out in the public domain or so I think there is I have enjoyed connecting with their stories
#
and I found them important for reasons that are not in the register of significance
#
as is normally sort of you know understood whether geopolitically or politically or
#
or yeah I don't even know in the various registers which are considered sort of significant
#
right like and they might or might not be there I mean in the case of Baba of course you know
#
or even Saha and Raman for that matter but I think there yeah so I have connected I have enjoyed
#
making that connection and then I have tried my best to actually bring it out I find writing
#
very hard very very hard I find it very difficult everybody does yeah I think so
#
I think so and then I thought filming would be easy and then I found out even that's not easy I
#
mean you know it's yeah no I I love watching cyclotron I love the pace of it I love the way
#
in which each of the characters so to say grows upon you and it's not just the main scientists
#
like Hans and Govel it's also the technicians and all of that and each of them you know the
#
richness of their sort of character and journey also comes through a little bit and I love this
#
particular understated sort of moment and I'll use that to segue to my next question
#
where at one point you know early on when one of the technicians is talking you see a random
#
person in the background just sitting there and later on we find that he's a sweeper and you ask
#
him what's his name what does he do and then he's asked to sit down and he talks and the others there
#
are very polite but you I sense that there's a little bit of you know it's outside their comfort
#
zone that a sweeper is sitting and saying and then you ask that you know do you all have lunch
#
together and then you ask him oh you also and they're like no he goes home to I think Manimajra or
#
wherever he was from and and I actually thought that that sort of an approach where you notice
#
someone like that who is usually unseen I guess to use the scene in the unseen film but that sort
#
of a question that sort of an approach is more likely to come from a woman than a man
#
because you know what it is like also to be excluded right and before we started you were
#
speaking about the challenges even within the elite circles that of course we operate in with
#
all our privilege even within those circles the challenges of gender you know in all these
#
different aspects people not taking you seriously or etc etc you know a range of things
#
tell me a little bit about that because everything that you are embarked upon
#
these are you know engaging with science and and you know setting up the science museum that you're
#
setting up and everything all of these things are often things that you'll generally assume
#
that some man will do somewhere right and yet here you are and just as the cyclotron guys had
#
to deal with bolt and all of that which is also a fascinating story
#
and you're having to deal with all those little nuts and bolts and you're having to deal
#
with attitudes here in 2022 in elite educated circles and all of that so tell me about
#
you know that aspect of it the challenge that gender is that extra step that you have to climb
#
hmm so I mean let me again start by saying I'm acutely aware of my privileges right like I'm
#
I've had education went to university you know never lacked anything all of those things
#
we don't have to give that caveat again and again I think we've said it once and okay
#
you know because it one has to be because again many don't even have that right and then it's
#
even harder and I think it's important for all of us to recognize that even privilege
#
doesn't buy you some things right like and there there I think is where yeah we are we are we are
#
I mean gender is a concern the world over and now we of course have highly complex
#
and complicated understanding of gender you know with the new I mean the generation after us
#
is complicating it even further sometimes I actually find it hard to keep up with the
#
level at with level and the intricacies with which they are complicating gender
#
that having said I mean I'm comfortably sort of identifying with the gender that that I have been
#
ascribed I find it okay to I find it good to operate with and which again is you know quite okay
#
okay you know so the world over this is a concern but in India it plays out in peculiar
#
ways because of the kind of intersections and the kind of other levels of stratification it works with
#
it's we are a brutally stratified society it's we are we are actually very hard people
#
we are not socially irrespective of what we talk about community society family even for that matter
#
from my I mean you know from from having to some extent lived outside of India as well I mean I
#
lived in I live in the United States I've studied and worked in the United Kingdom
#
lived for a few years in Norway I have a second home in Germany and I live for a year in France
#
so you know just and when you start accumulating experience across cultures in a sense it also
#
gives you a lens right like you observe things and and you have something else to compare it with
#
so that thing doesn't become exceptional but it becomes specific right like also things don't
#
have to be that way is something that sort of you know occurs to you and that's a pretty happy
#
moment but coming back to you know the the question you asked it's so in India it operates in very very
#
in very peculiarly brutal ways I think the fear of violence is always there always there no matter
#
how you work where you work and what you work in what field you work in and I I had forgotten that
#
after leaving India and and I in the last five years I've become all the more acutely aware of
#
it also because now I'm interacting all the more not with just that thin slice of academia
#
and you know in India sort of what one might call people who engage with professions of the mind
#
right like with be it journalism be it cultural production be it academia be it you know etc all
#
of those things I've had to find my way in a world with skills I didn't have and had to acquire
#
along the way so the so construction finance and audits governance which meant that I interfaced
#
with people from professions that I was not used to interacting with so there's that unfamiliarity
#
there's also that interesting element where I spent 20 years in academia learning to say I
#
learning to say I don't know without without fear without worry without whatever I don't know can
#
you explain this to me or where can I read something and understand this better and it took me
#
a full year to realize after coming here that saying this is not going to help me
#
one in India but two also in the profession that I was trying to now make my place in
#
because it meant if you didn't know you either didn't belong or you were basically an idiot
#
madam is confused when I heard that for the first time I was like I didn't say I'm confused I just
#
said I don't understand it so explain it to me or help me understand where I might find the
#
explanation so there's that right like there's that sort of so I'm aware that you know so I
#
say this because it's not only gender it's also how you operate you know what assumptions you
#
come with what habits you come with etc so there's that too that having said I think
#
I think being taken seriously as a woman
#
in these situations where you're dealing with construction we are dealing with bureaucracy
#
where you're dealing with audits where you're dealing with whatever has been tragicomic
#
to the first auditors at some point saying to my face oh we didn't know you were the director
#
I was introduced to them as the director we didn't know you were the director we thought
#
you were assisting the director who was somehow invisible because you know unseen unseen exactly
#
to when I actually had problems serious problems with someone undermining my authority
#
I had a professor say to me say say to me and the person who I was having very serious concerns
#
with in a meeting there is no hierarchy between the executive director and this other person
#
who is you know male and advising you on a particular aspect of your job this I have
#
absolutely no doubt in my mind would simply never be said to a male director of no matter what
#
director of no matter what age in no matter what profession
#
you know and those moments are very very unsettling you know so so things like that
#
right like they keep happening and you of course plow on I mean I'm generally stubborn I'm generally
#
determined if I decide it needs to be done then you know it will be done but it's
#
you know because I'm still sort of in the project etc you know it's it's probably not appropriate
#
to bring in every specific matter in there but but these kinds of moments right like where
#
where either you're simply not recognized as the director I've had people sort of you know also
#
say to me to my face like oh are you the curator then no I'm the director but also you know so
#
those things and then you know these other sort of far more brutal sort of
#
yeah experiences handling various aspects of that work right I mean I'm
#
I think more than ever before in my life I mean earlier in my life actually I would think of
#
Margaret Atwood's expressions that you know men are afraid women will laugh at them but women are
#
afraid men will kill them it's it's it's I mean it's it earlier it was a literary sort of you know
#
how should I say hefty thing to say right like and now in the last five years it's
#
the literary quality of it strikes me less than the other aspect of which is that it contains a
#
kernel of truth of you know what that experience is like operating especially in India in this
#
domain and and and you know again like as you know I have now forgotten whether I said it before
#
we started recording or not but also being taken seriously as someone who is trying to establish
#
a public space for science when what's your first degree in right and so those so that that
#
intersects as well right like with the oh so humanities
#
and then the expectations also of how one will behave at a particular age
#
in the public domain right like and so in in in some ways very subtly I understand that I am
#
not behaving dressing acting my age so you know I've actually had very people
#
sort of well-meaningly tell me why don't you wear saris when you go to the construction site
#
why don't you you know express or assert authority in a particular I mean you know
#
these are people who have who care that you know I should be troubled less by everything that
#
happens as we you know bring this project up to speed but yeah I mean you know so many moments
#
in intersection with several other things so the fact that you come from the humanities from the
#
fact that you come with you know from a culture where it was okay to say I don't know from you
#
know plus you know I don't speak Kannada and we operate in Karnataka and that is to my regret
#
I wish I could and I've often said you know when I go when I when I am in Germany I am you know
#
I learned German in order to operate well there when I moved to Norway I learned Norwegian in
#
order to be able to live there well and similarly I think one should you know I should be learning
#
Kannada when I'm here and I tried I just don't have the time I just don't have the time to
#
actually pursue it properly and you know yeah but I'm hoping maybe in the next five years that I'm
#
still in the job I will find the time to pick up at least enough to do you know out of respect
#
for the fact that you know I'm operating in a culture which speaks a particular language so
#
I should do that yeah one of my favorite cartoons is this one that shows a man sitting across a
#
woman and telling her let me interrupt your expertise with my confidence oh yeah yeah yeah
#
and we kind of you know various guests of mine have told me that you know when they'll go for
#
a meeting with the man the other person will always speak to the man even if they're senior
#
even if they're the boss which kind of mirrors what he was saying did you sack that guy
#
okay we won't go there yeah so what also strikes me then is that one way that you could deal with
#
this yeah one way that you could not take this lying down and kind of handle it is also because
#
of your experience living all across the world which I guess gave you the frames to look at all
#
of this and immediately understand what was happening and hey this is wrong and not let
#
any of it get normalized but I would imagine that women who don't have that privilege which
#
you have painstakingly acknowledged who have just been here would either you know everything would
#
be normalized it would be normalized that they get interrupted more than men do it would be
#
normalized that when they have an idea a man will repeat it and get the plaudits all of that shit
#
that happens and also because you know that this is the way the world is it might just be a barrier
#
from women even aspiring to get to where you are where they might say I'll be a curator not a
#
director you know and you choose those tracks accordingly because some tracks are just incredibly
#
toxic like I was a professional poker player for five years for example and most of my fellow
#
pros as it were were men yeah right and it isn't that women would play worse than men
#
it is just that the environments in which we played the bro talk the late nights all of that
#
is so toxic that you know it's it's any sensible person would just stay away right so yeah so in
#
a sense I mean I guess you see that more acutely because you're from outside but if you're inside
#
like do you find that things are getting better do you so you know I mean I work with incredible
#
women on my board of directors as well as incredible women in my team right and in fact
#
people notice it often oh this is a very woman heavy team and I'm like well you know they were
#
the best candidates I interviewed so you know there they are and that also probably happens
#
because maybe some some men at least are not applying because you know who wants to work
#
with a female director oh my god you know they're hysterical so you know what you said
#
I think is true true for most women in India unfortunately but there are some you know I mean
#
there are women in India who are able to see it irrespective of where they've been or not been
#
right like I mean they and and sometimes their privilege has helped them sometimes you know they
#
don't even come from privilege they just just stubborn determined creatures and they make their
#
way right so there are enough women in India but of course the scale you know everything in India
#
is like you know like I say always you know Karnataka is the size of France,
#
Maharashtra is approximately the size of Germany so the scale at which this needs to happen or
#
you know for us to have a better society I think a better realized society is not happening but
#
there are there are fabulous women I mean you know on my board I have Kiran Mazumdar Shah and
#
Rohini Nilaykani you know I have learned incredible amounts of things from them I mean you know
#
Kiran is you know more than one generation ahead of me and you know she made it she made it
#
and she's quite incredible I mean you know to hear from learn from and so is Rohini
#
and if you look at my team of young people they have a different approach to this
#
they sense it it's not like they don't understand it but they their drive seems to be like yeah okay
#
fine you think this might be the case but you know fine I'm going to do what I want anyway
#
so I think their nonchalance is in a way wonderful to have around I won't jump to say that things
#
will therefore change by the time they are my age enough for you know things to be different
#
because we also see enough of enough of the self-same being asserted and pushed on people's
#
throats as well so I don't know about change but there are there have been there are and there
#
there surely will be women who still find their way through all of this irrespective
#
of where they come from privilege or no privilege careers or no careers they still sort of are
#
fairly assertive yeah oh yeah so I'll take a brief digression where I'll double click on
#
something you mentioned earlier and then I'll explain why it's relevant to the question I'm
#
going to ask you spoke of a found manuscript earlier have you heard of Haimabati Sen?
#
okay I'll tell you about her because it is just one of the most mind-blowing stories I've heard
#
okay Haimabati Sen was born in a village in what is today Bangladesh but Bengal basically in about
#
1860 18 around that period middle of the 19th century to a dirt poor family and it's a small
#
village somewhere randomly and at the age of 10 she was married off to a 40 year old widower
#
and her early memories are that in fact they're not even memories or non-memories the memories
#
are she's playing with his children during the day and during the night there's a non-memory
#
and the memory begins again when she's naked and bleeding right so it's horrendous and that lasts
#
for two years because at the age of 12 her husband dies her parents die her in-laws die
#
and the remaining relatives take all her money and she has nothing and she's 12 years old
#
right and she makes her way to Benares somehow manages to get an education becomes a doctor
#
then becomes a renowned doctor a pioneering doctor right and then every day she has a
#
journaling for a significant part of her adult life and when she dies this manuscript her
#
autobiography lies at the bottom of a trunk for 80 years till it is discovered and then published
#
right this story always blows my mind and I discovered it from a book called Lady Doctors
#
by Kavita Rao when we did an episode together and what struck me while reading the book is that
#
in the 19th century you know for a man to be a doctor was just a question of the right location
#
the right circumstances and then you can become a doctor and otherwise there's nothing special
#
about you for a woman to be a doctor you if you are a doctor and a woman you are extraordinary
#
by default because of walls you've had to climb to freaking get there in the late 1800s like this
#
woman and you know the rest of the women Kavita spoke about are all remarkable in equal ways and
#
it's so much that if you're a male doctor okay no big deal tell me what else is great about you
#
if you're a lady doctor wow you know you are special and therefore I am now wondering that
#
if any woman makes it to a certain level even today you know they have not that they are
#
necessarily outstanding or whatever but they've done something beyond what a man in an equivalent
#
position would have so when you look at someone like Akiran Mazumdar Shah for example you know
#
of course there is a bit of selection bias sir just by virtue of where she has reached
#
it is utterly extraordinary and more extraordinary than a man having done equal things right and
#
therefore I am not surprised when you say that your team has more women than men
#
and you hired them because they're the best people for the job and I imagine once you
#
reach a certain sort of level in terms of both grittiness and drive and being empathetic and
#
just you know being able to step out of yourself and see stuff you're more likely to be a woman
#
I mean I mean you're more likely to see those qualities in women than men I'm just kind of
#
thinking aloud and wondering what you feel about this I wonder I mean you know yes you know so
#
when I was much younger you know every I mean I think every thinking woman is a feminist
#
you know very strongly feminist between sort of you know the ages of you know probably puberty
#
onwards up until early 20s sort of radically feminist and then you know you you probably
#
stay a feminist but the radicalness of that age is very different because you know you're just
#
kind of baffled by the unfairness of the world and at that point you know I would read books
#
like you know The Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas and you know it was it was like yeah oh
#
god yes these things yeah this has to happen kind of of course you know by my by my early 20s I was
#
sort of less radical but still remain feminist still remain so today and at that point one of
#
the things that we discussed for example and this was this came when I was doing my master's degree
#
in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies where I met a group of scholars who were
#
talking about women's sort of well questioning not question or discussing critically the idea
#
that women might be more invested in peace for example simply because they bear the brunt of
#
war in ways in which you know well are psychologically probably more brutal and humiliating
#
right so you know we were reading books like Bananas and Beaches where we effectively talked
#
about military what are they called not based military bases yeah military bases encampments
#
and then the rise of prostitution around them or rape as a tool of war and a range of you know a
#
range of women's specific things that happen in relation to war and violence
#
and at that point I think one of the things we very heavily debated was women's investment
#
in peace because there are women who actually do buy into patriarchy and into war into violence
#
and into holding power and so in a sense what does holding power make you does it make you
#
part of you know does it make you a part of the infrastructure that exists or the establishment
#
that exists or does it make you invested in other values other ideas right and I don't think there's
#
a clear answer to that simply because you know there are there are yeah you know do you want
#
a place at the table and be heard as an equal or do you want to change the nature of negotiation
#
and governance and you know the idea of good society and good politics at all and I think
#
it's a it's it's it's an unsettled it's an unsettled question and if you ask me I mean I
#
think no things don't necessarily change because women occupy positions of power you know at some
#
point I had said a woman is equally capable of being a man you know and and and that's you know
#
I mean for better or for worse one one has to accept it for what it is right and one can one
#
can critique it but critique doesn't sort of mean that that necessarily is therefore an invalid way
#
of being so yeah so there we are you know so I mean I I if I mean personally if you ask me I'd
#
hope to sort of not buy completely into anything but then you know I'm a as they say I'm a Marxian
#
of the Groucho tendency so you know I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have
#
me as a member right like and so you know same for patriarchy or same for you know the systems
#
that we put together it's like yes you know let me find my way through this of course you know
#
none of us can be stupid enough to say that you know you're not we function because we participate
#
we function because we negotiate but I hope it's more of a negotiation it's more of a pathway it's
#
more of you know exploring new possibilities rather than sort of buying into anything that's
#
a given and saying that okay I want to find my place in this right like with all the awareness
#
of the fact that your desires and your wants are also shaped by everything around you with that
#
awareness I would still say I'd like to know what I want before you know sort of proceeding
#
yeah no I'm not surprised that someone who is drawn to sad stories would be a marxian of the
#
groucho variety because you know tragedy does lead to comedy isn't it like it is it is I mean
#
there is I think a quote to the effect of the world is a tragedy for those who feel a comedy
#
for those who think and you know what you said about women being more invested in peace because
#
they're where the brand you know one of my favorite quotes which I always sort of use for my to tell
#
my writing students about the power of show don't tell is these lines from Alan Bennett from history
#
boys where he you know the first line is tell in abstract language the second line is showing
#
with an image and both the two sentences together are history is a commentary on the
#
various and continuing incapabilities of men what is history history is women following behind with
#
the bucket you know which is such a lovely image it tells you of the subsidiary role women play
#
how they have to clean up the messes so you know feeds right into what you were just sort of talking
#
about so let's now you know having digressed a lot and digress from digressions and so on
#
start with how I normally in fact start my episodes by talking about you know my guess
#
early lives where they grew up and all of that and I know very little about that all I all I know is
#
that you grew up in Bombay in the 90s and you know you had to tell me a bit about that what was your
#
childhood like what was family life like what were your parents like I know you had a grandfather
#
who you've mentioned as being a bit of an idealist in the sense that he thought nuclear energy would
#
you know help India industrialize and fulfill his destiny or whatever so tell me a lot about
#
all these early influences when you were growing up I grew up in the 80s but you mentioned somewhere
#
you grew up in Bombay in the 90s yeah I was in Bombay in the 80s I'm just moving the needle on
#
age so I was actually born at India's zero point which is Nagpur my parents both come from around
#
the region so my father from more near Gwalior and my mother from more near Nagpur and so I spent
#
the first 12 years of my life in that region and I was I I schooled in Amravati a school I went to
#
school in Amravati and we moved to Bombay when I was 12 and so the the first years were all about
#
you know how should I put it heavy summers very very hot summers colder evenings cold proper cold
#
winters and I spent I think the first two two and a half three years with my grandparents because
#
my mother was still studying and so those the memories I have of those years is basically just
#
yeah playing lots of playing with mud and you know things like that and I would build forts and I
#
would build pots and I would paint and you know so those are my memories for whatever reason
#
and I still can't explain it to myself as an adult I loved school I ran away to school in fact so
#
that's sort of a favorite family story of how one day when I was about a little over three I went
#
missing and eventually my father went to the police and you know and then sort of someone said why
#
don't you try asking the other children who've gone to school a new school which had opened very
#
close to where we lived and then they came there and there I was I mean this is the story of course
#
that I was told my only memory of that moment is of looking down at my feet and I was wearing
#
little green slippers and I remember the dress I was wearing which was gray with pink appley tulips
#
on it without sleeves and I've had more or less the same haircut all my life I think
#
except when it grows out and I just remember looking up to my father and saying no and I
#
think the question he asked me was we need to go home or something like that yeah and that's my
#
memory and then the teacher said well you know she's been sitting there and apparently I knew
#
how to write up to C and so she's been you know teaching that other kid how to do it so might
#
as well let her come and that's how school started for me I did many other things like
#
defied orders of getting on to a slide which was freshly installed and then fell with four other
#
kids that were taken to the hospital there's by the way a great twitter account called children
#
falling which is just videos of children falling in strange ways sorry digression I know I'm sure
#
it was something pretty weird like that as well I mean I loved the moment of you know where everybody
#
then came to see how you know I'd fallen and I was sort of lying in bed and you know so there
#
are these snippets of memories I have from my early childhood I grew out of my love for school
#
I think by the time the last two three years of school I kind of grew out of that and yeah and
#
then it was Bombay and so I think in my head I'm a Bombay girl because that's where I did my sort
#
of conscious growing up and so if sort of you know the first decade was you know fun and play
#
and you know I loved doing all of that and reading I used to read a lot and paint
#
young day my young days of growing up in Bombay you know in a sense
#
consciously growing up try or desperately trying to grow up those years were about reading even
#
more and you know everything from so the Soviet Union buses would come right and with free books
#
everything from illustrated Chekhov to what is dialectical materialism and I still have
#
some of those books those to strand book stall you know saving money walking sometimes sometimes
#
oh I'm not hungry today skipping lunch and going and buying those books a typical sort of stuff
#
of what yeah you know what well in India everybody thinks they're middle class I also think I'm middle
#
class or I was middle class I have no idea what I'm now so so yeah lots of reading lots of I went
#
to Elphinstone college and so in that area was the British Council the United States
#
USFE Education Foundation in India the Max Miller Bowen and the Allianz and they would have free
#
films and you know so film shows books libraries so I used to have a bag which literally looked
#
like a grocery bag which I would just go from one library to the other borrowing books and you know
#
looking extremely intellectual and you know making sure I did look like that
#
and yeah you know but definitely the reading watching lots of films and spending lots of time
#
at this place called Center for Education and Documentation which was just behind
#
the Taj the Gateway of India sitting there reading all sorts of things
#
I did believe at that point I was a poet so together with you know a bunch of friends
#
and classmates I think I wrote something close to about 200 poems I have no idea where they are they
#
were all really pathetic but I did write then and then realized of course as I you know at the end
#
of about three or four years that yeah this is this is quite sad this doesn't need to see the
#
light of day but it was it was wonderful while I was doing it and yeah so I think though those
#
years were it was it was that kind of so I was desperately seeking a life of the mind
#
and always did and I still find that fascinating of course like everybody who tries to do this not
#
everybody no I take that back like many who try to do this the imposter syndrome you know comes and
#
goes and you know sometimes stays sometimes doesn't stay but it's it's my adrenaline comes
#
from that right like and it has always come from that I mean even even that that age I mean you
#
know when I ran away to school I still remember the other memory I have of at that point is is
#
opening a book and reading and it was an illustrated book at that age you get those kinds of books only
#
but it's been very important to me right from the start and I think I get that to the largest
#
extent from my father my father taught Hindi literature in government colleges and you know
#
he he was a how do you how he was he studied linguistics and at the Deccan College and
#
Iravati Karve at that point was sort of you know the the inspiring figure for his generation right
#
and he so he did so when he did his doctoral degree he looked at folk literature because that
#
was sort of you know so it was a coming together of ethnography as as sort of you know the tool
#
from anthropology but the study of literature and therefore assigning to folk literature the
#
status of literature etc all of that right so it was it was a heady time I think when you know
#
when he did his his work and I remember as a he was he was finishing up when I was sort of
#
when I was I don't even remember which year he finished but any which way I
#
I do remember no I think he oh never mind I do remember his Sony tape recorder in which he had
#
the songs of the Panjara community that he was studying for their folk literature folk songs and
#
you know which he wrote about and I remember listening to those songs and in fact my
#
father or mother I don't remember which one of them I should ask my mother used to sing one of
#
those songs for me to sing so I get that desire for a very very large uninhibited
#
love for the life of the mind from my father he was he he occupied I think the spectrum from
#
Mungeri Lal Ke Haseen Sapne to you know the Sankriti Ayan right like where anything was
#
possible because you wanted it and you of course worked for it but you he never thought
#
something was not possible and so that I get that from him I and I'm grateful that you know
#
yeah I'm grateful for that my mother is the other end of the spectrum which is
#
incredibly practical very stubborn very determined and her
#
she literally I think the only refrain I have in my entire life from her are the two sentences
#
which is you have to stand on your own two feet and you have to be independent
#
and you have to do what you need yourself and so this that kind of of course also played out and
#
for my siblings and myself I have two sisters and so I think they and we were we were a largely
#
nuclear family my father left home when he was in his early teen years he was I mean he came from
#
a small village near Gwalior and he he did not really maintain contact with his family after
#
that and my mother's part of the family is smaller as well when she has two siblings too and so
#
in a way we so we did so I didn't grow up in what one imagines as a large extended family with you
#
know lots of sort of fun and frolic and festivals and weddings and you know childbirths and what
#
have you and everything that goes so I would I would always I would always watch with interest
#
and be amused by my classmates and others you know who had who had these very vibrant sort of
#
social lives mine wasn't like that and yeah you know I don't know what I've missed but I don't
#
miss anything so it's yeah so so I think that probably captures sort of my growing up and and
#
you know the my my parents and my sisters who are younger to me but who have been you know of course
#
when I was when I was growing up they were they were a pain because you know who wants younger
#
siblings when you're growing up but I think once we kind of you know once they pass their teenage
#
years and I was sort of so I'm five and seven years older to them so they're five and seven
#
years younger to me I think they've been my sort of since the young adult years they've been my
#
rock solid sort of you know support and they remain so even today and yeah so that's kind of
#
you know the sum total of family. For those who like to see patterns and build conspiracy theories
#
it you can now build a plausible story that the managing committee of Elphinstone college
#
has paid me a fat sum because you are my fourth guest in a row who has studied at Elphinstone you
#
know oh wow Jerry Pinto, Arshya Sattar, Rohini Nilikani and now you so you're all Elphinstone
#
people so I'm freaking out a little bit inside and I promise you leave those conspiracy theories
#
aside you know given the law of truly large numbers if I do enough episodes this was
#
inevitable at some point of course of course of course a bunch of things I want to double click
#
on and the first of those is your mother's advice for you you know be independent stand on your own
#
two feet was it as much lament as advice no good lord no she I mean she's been working since I was
#
six months old wow yeah yeah no she would I mean she was she's been teaching too so I should have
#
mentioned that she taught home what is called home science or what was called home science and
#
later became home economics so she taught I mean she retired you know of course a few years ago
#
but no she's worked all her life and I now I remember when when I when I didn't go to school
#
I have one memory of when I didn't go when I wasn't quite of school going age she would take
#
me she would take me and she would put me in a corner and she would teach and at some point she
#
took up a job in Kolhapur while my father was still teaching in Amravati and she took the three of us
#
and went and I was school going my sisters were not and she would just I mean luckily her her
#
classroom was one floor below the hostel and so my sisters could be upstairs and she would lock
#
them in she would go down teach come back feed them go back you know so I my mother's worked
#
forever and she's very she's fiercely independent I mean you know people call me fiercely independent
#
but they haven't met my mother she is yeah yeah so let's let's talk a bit about the life of the
#
mind because you know it was at last night at four o'clock or four a.m I don't even know if it's
#
night I discovered that two of the people you really admire are Ursula Le Guin and Patti Smith
#
both of whom I love as well and you know these common connections are really great like I keep
#
telling people that you know if you like say Mary Oliver and Mark Strand and Tom Waits I know we
#
can be friends I don't need to know anything else about you it's that kind of thing so and it seemed
#
to me from there and from you know the way you're talking about how much you used to read and all
#
of that that your life of the mind was to a large extent also a creative life where you are you know
#
engaging with fiction you're you know engaging with music you're writing poetry and all the
#
poetry all of us wrote when we were young it's terrible so don't worry about that yeah though
#
I hope you know when someone is studying your archives one day they will suitably turn up to
#
embarrass your customers yeah so tell me a little bit about how that is going on that life of the
#
mind and how it is shaping the way that you see yourself like what is the music you're falling
#
in love with what is what are the movies that you're watching and being crazy about like what
#
are the doors that are opening up because of the books that you are reading you know give me a
#
sense of what that journey is like so you know to be I'd like to don the pretentious heart and say
#
my music tastes and my tastes in films etc eclectic they're actually not I mean it's slumdog millionaire
#
it's like you know whatever hit and miss right like someone said watch this I watch this someone
#
says you know but again like you said you know there are people I trust because there's some
#
connection already there I mean if someone's like the sopranos and tells me watch this I'll
#
go and watch this someone says someone likes the wire then I watch it I binge watch it one week
#
before I'm supposed to submit my thesis right like oh my god yeah so it's it's so it's been
#
kind of you know patchy I have dear friends who sort of you know do the do the
#
do the mad thing of actually you know so they'll know every single thing about
#
Patti Smith there's to know they'll know every single book by Ursula Le Guin there is to know
#
and they will know every single song written by Bob Dylan and they will know every film made by
#
Scorsese and they will I'm not like that I'm actually not like that I find it I find it
#
I'm I just don't find myself interested in wanting to do that if I like something I enjoy it
#
and I learn as much as I want from it or take not learn actually take as much as I want from it
#
feel as much as I want with it and then I'm ready for the next thing it doesn't mean I seek the next
#
thing but it comes along right and so so I think I yeah I mean so what what kind of music I mean
#
it's been eclectic there I said it so you know there's a very funny moment in my life when and
#
you know I mean it'll it'll tell you a little whatever it tells I think when I was 15 or so
#
you know I mean remember when I when I was 15 it had been about two and a half odd years since I
#
had come from Amravati to Bombay I thought English music was film but was was music from English
#
films yeah but it's a natural thing to think in it's yeah I mean you know but of course my
#
my friends found it very funny right like an oh my god this woman not even this girl kind of thing
#
so yeah mix of things mix of things my father he was hugely into guzzle so he would sometimes
#
take me along so I grew up on a dose of that live always live I listened to the radio a lot
#
when I was younger so you know Binaka Geetmala was the sort of thing to listen to I came very
#
late to television of course because television came late to Amravati it came I think just about
#
a year when we were leaving so I think the among the first things I saw on television were
#
were Mrs Gandhi's funeral and I think after that Diana's whatever it was at that point 84
#
what would it have been her wedding I'm guessing yeah yeah something like that whatever so that
#
was the time I saw I saw yeah and so so Chitrahar used to be the thing that was the music to watch
#
and then after coming to Bombay with friends I started listening to other songs so it was
#
initially pop I was on I was on the borderline for rock but I didn't quite understand it
#
that well and then I slowly sort of started getting into music a little more seriously
#
I wanted to learn how to sing I didn't get to that until much later picked it up for a couple
#
of years and again dropped it I in fact there are moments in my life when I still want to pick up
#
I think that's the one thing I've done in my life where I actually physically
#
came close to fainting because I was just so engrossed in in singing so my music teacher
#
basically so I learned for a little over a year with Neela Bhagwat in in Bombay
#
wonderful absolutely wonderful in your daydream in your daydream what is the first song you're
#
singing on stage oh there's no daydream there was only one song that I could sing and that
#
was the song so yeah no so I I got more serious and I think I remember I think the first time
#
I felt like I was connecting to music on my own irrespective of who had recommended anything
#
was with Annie Lennox and the album was Diva really really loved it and from there then you
#
know the journey kind of you know then sort of yeah more albums more different things
#
you know and and the time when I really sort of did nothing but listen to music properly and
#
connected with it and sort of felt good about it was the two years that I wasted at IIT Bombay
#
when I tried to do a PhD and then dumped it and said this is not for me and you know went to
#
eventually ended up at Georgia Tech to do history of science those were the years I think when I
#
really found my sort of found my playlist so to speak right and then that contained sort of you
#
know some very usual suspect things you know yeah the dire straits and you know the little bit of
#
Bob Dylan I didn't take to him very much I mean I I do understand the richness of his of his
#
writings but I it musically I don't sort of find it in sort of you know I don't connect very well
#
to it David Bowie who I discovered after well discovered in a different way after I met my
#
husband and so I you know quite enjoy his music now Patti Smith somewhere along the way in between
#
and I just yeah just love and I and I and I think a great moment was when I listened to her on an
#
LP because my my husband's crazy he has some 500 LPs and he still at that point listened to his
#
music on well he still does but it's just that we don't have it with us now yeah so you know
#
that so so that's been that's been the journey so I if you if one had to list it
#
well or attempt a list and I do enjoy some Hindustani classical again same thing so you
#
know I'm I'm not going to listen to everything that Kichori Amunkar sang but there are a few
#
compositions of hers which will drive me to tears and I will listen to those there are a few
#
compositions of Bhimsa Indoshi that I will listen to and I'll enjoy so things like that right like
#
so it's it's literally I mean I would have never called it that until like you know recently but
#
that's my playlist right like so pick up things that I really like from yeah so so Hindustani
#
classical rock punk rock but punk rock limited to Patti Smith and a little bit after her not quite
#
the newer forms and yeah I think that kind of and oh yeah and and I although I haven't taken it up
#
seriously maybe I will in my old age when I can you know again find the time to kind of listen to
#
it and see how I connect his opera I find it quite mad and it's but there are times when I just
#
it just mesmerizes me and so I think I but I haven't kind of taken to it and I haven't found
#
my pieces yet so I think since you mentioned opera I'd like to read something out for you
#
this is Patti Smith writing about Robert Mapplethorpe yeah where she writes I was asleep
#
and he died I had called the hospital to say one more good night but he had gone under beneath
#
layers of morphine I held the receiver and listened to his labored breathing through the phone
#
knowing I would never hear him again later I quietly straightened my things my notebook
#
and fountain pen the cobalt inkwell that had been his my persian cup my purple heart a tray
#
of baby teeth I slowly ascended the stairs counting them 14 of them one after another
#
I drew the blanket over the baby in her crib kissed my son as he slept then lay down beside
#
my husband and said my prayers he is still alive I remember whispering then I slept I awoke early
#
and as I descended the stairs I knew that he was dead all was still save the sound of the television
#
that had been left on in the night an art channel was on an opera was playing I was drawn to the
#
screen as Tosca declared with power and sorrow her passion for the painter Cavaradossi it was a
#
cold march morning and I put on my sweater I raised the blinds and brightness entered the study I
#
smote the heavy linen draping my chair and chose a book of paintings by Odilon Redon opening it to
#
the image of the head of a woman floating in a small sea leo close some French thing I can't
#
pronounce a universe not yet scored contained beneath the pale lids the phone rang and I rose
#
to answer it was Robert's younger brother Edward he told me that he had given Robert one last kiss
#
for me as he had promised I stood motionless frozen then slowly as in a dream returned to my
#
chair at that moment Tosca began the great great aria Vizhidhartha I have lived for love I have
#
lived for art I closed my eyes and folded my hands providence determined how I would say goodbye
#
so yeah just beautiful I read it last night and and so here's the thing that you know I
#
relate to what you said about not going too deep into an artist and at the same time I relate to
#
the opposite as well so sometimes what will happen is I will kind of graze like when it comes to
#
Patti Smith you know I'll listen to because the night and I'll listen to her version of Gloria
#
but I won't actually listen listen to all of horses right I'll listen to selected things here
#
and there but there are some other things where once I'm in a rabbit hole I'm in a freaking rabbit
#
hole you know give me a few hours I'm a world expert on that you know I'll figure every damn
#
thing out so what have been your rabbit holes cyclotrons
#
more recently cyclotrons but yes it does happen it does happen and then you want to know everything
#
and it can be I mean just the last one week it has been bedside tables so that can happen it's
#
because I want the best bedside table in the universe and you know so I will I will literally
#
like spend hours and hours and hours and then try and understand about you know more about how they
#
are made why they are made when they tilt why they don't tilt etc etc so so that can happen it
#
can happen also for an for an artist and I'm trying to think or authors and I'm trying to think when
#
was the last time that happened I mean the last five years I've been dehydrating for my for my
#
mind in the in the sense that I haven't been able to find the time to read and you know nurture my
#
my mind in ways in which I you know must I hope the next five years are not hope no I will make
#
sure the next five years are not like that but I when did I I think I I I'm trying to think
#
I mean I do I do go down rabbit holes like that and then I want to do everything and everything
#
and everything that's when I want to know yeah I can't I can't think of an artist or a but but
#
about things yeah cyclotrons definitely I mean you know there was a point when I needed to know
#
everything about cyclotrons and then there's a time when it was jet fighters yeah in your
#
documentary cyclotron a couple of the scholars that you spoke to yeah say that during the years
#
that they were setting up the cyclotron cyclotron it was so obsessive so all-consuming that they
#
didn't get any papers out I think one of them said four years one of them said a longer period
#
they didn't get any papers out because everything was cyclotron cyclotron cyclotron and and what
#
you're describing seems to be a similar process and and I wonder then that when one looks at
#
that time yeah how does one evaluate it because one way of thinking about that time is using the
#
metric of what have I achieved yeah and if you just put it blankly like that you look at the
#
opportunity cost and you say all the papers not done and blah blah and you say oh I just
#
went down a cyclotron rabbit hole and I haven't done all these 10 other things I could have done
#
but the other way of looking at it is that I delved into something that gave me joy I was happy
#
delving into it and that's what matters yeah so you know in terms of those sort of metrics and
#
I know we are all all the time sort of plagued with self-doubt in terms of have I done the right
#
things have I lived my life the right way but how have you sort of evolved your metrics for
#
you know in one way they could just be rationalizations to help you be at peace
#
with yourself in another way you could be too hard on yourself because of what others expect
#
but what are sort of your internal metrics now how has that evolved yeah I that's a
#
that's actually a wonderful question because you're absolutely right it's been you know
#
you're absolutely how should I put it perceptive to ask that question because I spoke about
#
you know the demoralization of the last five years the difficulties of the last five years
#
but I've kept on and I've kept on not simply not simply because of stubbornness I do get something
#
out of it right like the fact that I chose to do it already you know meant that I found something
#
worth pursuing worth pursuing so here's the here's the thing right like I I know this needs to be done
#
and let me see if I'm going to have if my memory is going to help me keep the train of thought
#
properly because I want to talk about why this needs to be done I want to talk about how I'm
#
approaching it and how I'm doing it and then come back to you know how I evaluate what where I am
#
and what you know what might come of it so that that might be a refrain though the last point
#
in terms of not realizing things fully but why it needs to be done right like so I've often spoken
#
about and I'm you know given given the research you've done you've probably sort of heard me say
#
this already which is that our higher education is incredibly siloed right so between the ages
#
of 15 and 17 you are literally batched out into your professional community you might
#
choose to do something else afterwards but in those four to five years depending on what kind
#
of degree you do you're interacting with people who are engaging with the self same material
#
you do not deal with people you're not with people who are doing anything different to yourself
#
so as as an engineer it's highly unlikely that you are having dinner with a historian having
#
breakfast with a cinematographer or having dinner with a physicist or dating an artist or you know
#
getting drunk with a you know musician I mean you might fancy yourself and most engineering schools
#
have enough people who fancy themselves as musicians but you know so you're not doing that
#
as a result of which I think most of us leave the education system without any respect for the
#
ability to think yes for the ability to think for certain kinds of disciplines
#
but also for how you know how somebody's mind works when they're not doing the same material
#
you kind of get caught up in the narcissism of small differences you know this one
#
This is the thing you get caught in. You don't sort of fight on the dinner table about why history
#
is not merely about dates and list of you know whatever things or why you know art is art and
#
creative expression has something meaningful to say to scientific research and you know creative
#
expression of that kind and I think that leaves and this is I mean in India particularly strong
#
and therefore I think we are all living with relatively impoverished minds I mean many of us
#
pick up things afterwards you know and we exceed the you know the the cards we've been given but
#
for the most part if you don't have the opportunity the luxury and the desire to
#
break out of it you're simply living with such a shrunken imagination that it's beyond tragedy I
#
think it's like we failed we've completely failed and so I think we need to break out of that
#
because in India my journey is an impossibility you take your degrees in civics and politics and
#
after that you move to history of science what is that first of all no university in this country
#
offers a degree in history of science most people are just like oh what what's that all science all
#
history you know history of what so as it is I mean I think impoverishment of professions of
#
imagination all sorts of things even you're not a good engineer I think if you don't understand
#
what technology is being created for and towards and whatever and so on and so forth
#
and so I think that needs to break and that work needs to be done and this is my way of doing one
#
tiny thing in that direction right and so I knew this needed to be done this was one of those things
#
you know as where I started off saying that there are things you can do and things you need things
#
need to be done this is one of those things that I very strongly believe needs to be done
#
did you also need to do it did I need to do it the opportunity came my way I didn't go looking
#
for it the opportunity came my way and once it was at my doorstep and the job was offered to me
#
at that point two things right like I had a tenured position so that life that you spoke about could
#
have sort of happened where you know I would retire at the age of 70 having written I you
#
know hopefully a book or two more and you know having mentored several students etc
#
path was cut out quite well and two things you know changed well no not changed I mean I
#
realized once sort of you know that this needed to be done the opportunity came to me
#
and my family was completely unwilling to help me right like they said this is too big a decision
#
for us to participate in by family I mean mainly my husband and my sister and they said if we say
#
something tomorrow you'll blame us for the decision so please take it yourself and after
#
a few months when I became a really miserable person to be around because the anxiety was
#
really playing on my mind so clearly I was torn I very very clearly I was torn I mean I wasn't
#
on I was I wasn't sort of tilting towards any side at that point there were two things that
#
came up in the discussion with my husband where he said I mean he said one thing which which stays
#
with me which is that nothing should become a trap and so the tenure shouldn't become a trap
#
nor your profession nor anything right and and I think that that resonated with me and it still
#
stays with me that nothing should become a trap the fact that I now have this position and you
#
know and whatever you know whatever it I'm able to do I'm trying to do but even this needn't become
#
a trap just like you know and and I mean you know I didn't let my first three degrees become a trap
#
and you know walked out and you know retrained myself in a range of things so
#
I understood what he meant and I think I connected with that but the other thing he said
#
and that was when I really was a horrible creature I mean you know his father was visiting us we were
#
walking I remember in Nottingham where my sisters lived walking up the the meadow next to the castle
#
and he just turned around and said okay fine when you're 70 will you regret having done this
#
or will you regret not having done this and a week after that I had sort of said yes to the contract
#
and you know the the sort of the comedy of the contract and everything is quite another story
#
but I accepted that right and so then it became to it and then it came to be that I became the
#
person to do this right and I think all of us need to do this and everybody needs to do this
#
and it needs I mean this change just simply needs to happen if we want anything I mean I'm not even
#
talking about growth and development and if we just want people with you know people with
#
people who relate to each other better a society that thinks about each other better a society
#
that imagines better futures a politics that is better informed a public debate that is not
#
ad hominem policy you know what everything will follow I think if we are able to begin to break
#
out of these silos right like so I think there are a couple of things that I say I mean the
#
other thing and this is a sidetrack but although this is also something I keep saying all the time
#
and I'll say it until I die because I don't think that change is coming anytime in my lifetime
#
is that in India I think we need to invest in the in the industrial training institutes which
#
is the ITIs as much as we invest in the IITs because unless we do that you know the story
#
that we saw in cyclotron right the respect and the sort of training that you need at every single
#
level to make things happen the working with your hands respecting you know that kind of work I
#
think we you know again a range of things will follow from that so I think so so that's so that
#
was that is sort of you know the the why I think this institution is an institution of this kind
#
is necessary and it's serendipity that this becomes sort of one of the few starting points
#
it's not that people haven't thought of this before it's not that we are not aware of it there
#
are enough people who are aware of it so this is one such small effort in that direction right
#
and in terms of how I then decided to approach it I was like okay this is the problem now what
#
so science gallery is is you know we are we are a network of seven or eight galleries across the
#
world and it started out in Dublin about 13 or 13 14 odd years ago and it's also a historian of
#
science who can kind of started with that so Michael John Gorman who's now leading biotopia
#
in in Munich which is a sort of a refreshed museum and the the sort of main thing of the Dublin model
#
is to bring artists and scientists together to create public engagement and when it started out
#
it was a it was a pretty novel thing to do it's different from sci art in the sense that it doesn't
#
seek to illustrate science but to create like a pathway to engage with it I'm happy to come
#
back to this a little later but when I started out the question I asked myself was okay so India
#
silos all of these are the circumstances second Dublin a city without a science museum
#
this model in a university worked 10 years ago
#
how am I going to cut out my task in India at the outset it didn't make sense to me
#
to come and try to do the self-same thing as as it worked in Dublin with 10 years ago
#
for two reasons one because Dublin's not India not in India and the second is also that
#
while we needed to create here a format that was relevant to the concerns on the ground to
#
accomplish the same mandate which is public engagement with science what format would be
#
relevant was my first question and the second was I want to look 10 years ahead of me I don't want
#
to look 10 years behind so what can we do in India which will not only speak to what we require
#
here on the ground but also allow us to create an institution which is a reimagined public space
#
for science which others could look at right why should models always come from elsewhere
#
why don't we create models and so that was sort of my starting point and then I took the words
#
that we work with right like we work with the word science we work with the word art and we
#
work with the word public engagement so science for me was human social and natural sciences I'm
#
not going to work only with the Anglo-American idea of science I mean I come from sort of you know
#
look at my background there's no way I was going to take science as you know only natural sciences
#
and art I felt in a way you know the Indian art scene I think is far more global and you know it's
#
interesting it still doesn't look at science in interesting ways there are some who do but
#
and so I thought like also if we want public engagement then art is as distant from the
#
public domain as science is so maybe a broader understanding of culture and various cultural
#
formats is probably a better way to open doors so that became the second word so science as a
#
broader science and culture now public engagement it's like what is public engagement in India
#
in a in a you know in a country where museum going is not necessarily a sort of big thing
#
school trips go to museums occasionally family outings go to museum but it's pedagogy right
#
push a few buttons learn something this is our old history sculptures from so and so time
#
paintings from so and so time like when we do go this is what it is right and occasionally
#
natural history museums when they don't burn down so how how to do that and so I I was thinking
#
like what is it that I'm doing why am I doing it and two three conclusions in a way fell in place
#
in the first first year and one of them was that this is an institution that is a bridge
#
between research and the public it's not research and knowledge basically and the public it's not
#
about communicating research to the public but this is about building that bridge so that there
#
is a two-way traffic so in that traffic where is the onus and I think the onus is on knowledge
#
and science because that is where privilege is and therefore my sort of what you know in in
#
common parlance has is vision statement became one where bring science back into culture is
#
what I operate with that is what I want to do because that is where it has belonged it's only
#
in recent history by which I mean about 120 130 odd years that you know there has been that sort
#
of divergence so it needs to come back where it belongs as I you know as I've said and again you
#
know in your research you might have come across this is that I strongly feel we have a professional
#
conversation on science we don't have a cultural one right like we talk about ranks we talk about
#
recruitment we talk about admission we talk about pay package upward social mobility we don't talk
#
about what actually that means right like we don't sort of what is the meaning of this research for
#
us why is why does this matter why does this new finding speak to me should I be interested in this
#
why should I be interested in this you know everybody doesn't need to practice science
#
doesn't need to everybody shouldn't only people who are inclined to should and not because you
#
got 99.9 percent that you go into an engineering college or you know get a physics degree you
#
should do it because it drives you in an ideal world and we know a lot of you know obstacles
#
come in between and we can discuss those later but yeah so so that kind of you know so so the
#
desire to put knowledge into a cultural conversation is became my motivation
#
to deliver public engagement how do I how do I do this and then then you know two
#
of my I mean I you know again this is sort of after the after the fact you always construct
#
it linearly but there are two thoughts that congealed and from with various sort of you know
#
beginning in various different places one of them was to think about this is a museum like space
#
of course not a museum because we don't have a historical collection and you know we don't
#
have permanent galleries but it's a it's a public space for science what were the earliest public
#
spaces for science they were the Wundakama and they were the museums natural history museums
#
mainly right like with collections of you know birds and animals so what you had there was a
#
connection between the object of scientific inquiry the inquirer and the public because
#
they were in the same space right so you knew what the scientist studied and you had a relationship
#
to that today of course given the changed nature of science that kind of a direct relationship is
#
not possible right and it i mean you know you don't recreate the past but that relationship
#
is actually an interesting one and maybe maybe interesting to bring you know interesting to
#
think of how that might play out for today so how do you do that right so that's one question that's
#
driving how i'm thinking about formats at the gallery so needless to say and i'll say this
#
towards the end probably with slightly more elaboration is that this is version 2.0 this
#
is not what started out in dublin so that i want through the gallery to create this relationship
#
of this relationship between the researcher the object of scientific inquiry human social
#
natural sciences and the public right so that's one set of motivations the second is if you look
#
at the story of raman who we you know earlier spoke about for the first 10 or 11 years of
#
his professional life he was an accountant he used to work with the indian audits and account
#
services and in the evenings he would go and work in the labs of the indian association for
#
cultivation of science he wasn't the only one there was mahindralal sarkar ashutosh mukherjee
#
and a range of others who all had sort of you know more than one profession right like so
#
if i remember correctly i think sarkar was a lawyer by day and a mathematician by evening
#
raman was a was a accountant and a physicist by evening in fact his noble prize work was carried
#
out at the association's labs and so here was someone a member of the public so to speak
#
who knew one thing wanted to pursue another thing and there was an opportunity and a space
#
where he could do that where is that opportunity today right where if you're not within the
#
institutional boundaries of an of a scientific science institution if you don't get admitted
#
through you know the innumerable and ridiculous competitive exams if you don't make it through
#
here through here through that through that your access and ability to even act to do any kind of
#
work is simply there or not there right and as a member of the public you can't even work into an
#
institution i mean even me with with you know my fancy card i have to make entries whenever i enter
#
you know science institution campuses right and so i thought this could become that space
#
where someone of course the nature of you know research today is so how should i put it it's
#
expensive it's expanded it's siloed and again this is not only a critique i mean there are good things
#
also you know the narrowing down as we spoke about earlier you know the narrowing down can give you
#
an insight that you can't by looking at the big picture and what you get from looking at the big
#
picture you're not getting by doing that so you need always are going to have a productive need
#
to have a productive tension between the two where that's as necessary as this right
#
and so i think that opportunity to take a step back look at the big picture but also give that
#
ability to look at the big picture to someone who's not necessarily sitting in an institution
#
is the second set of motivations which i then brought to this format right and the end result
#
is as follows we've divided our work now into three buckets the first is the public engagement
#
work which is similar to the work that all of our sibling galleries and other public institutions
#
for science do which is of you know i call them research festivals they started out as exhibitions
#
but now they're full of full-on research festivals because we do a range of things that make sure
#
any door that you want to open can be opened to the same sort of purpose which is to understand
#
more about a given thing from across disciplines from across practices etc so we still bring the
#
scientists but sorry still bring the artists but not scientists necessarily but scholars right like
#
so historians artists filmmakers physicists epidemiologists whoever's relevant to the topic
#
will be brought in so they've become research festivals now so sort of an sort of an expanded
#
version of exhibitions but what is specific and unique to us within the network but also i think
#
different to other institutions other than institutions like the smithsonian
#
is that we will have a public lab complex so we will have seven experimental spaces which
#
cut across disciplines for people to actually propose to do work in and the idea is as follows
#
that these are spaces which will have the the equipment and the facilities required
#
to be able to develop an idea that is at the threshold of research right so it's about
#
exploring in an open-ended manner in conversation with people who are not from your discipline
#
the questions that are good to ask and then when the questions are ready they can go wherever they
#
need to go they can go to a university they can go to an incubator they can go to an art gallery
#
they can go to a classroom or they can go home wherever they need to go right and so
#
Kiran really likes a word that we use for for the format and you know because I was trying to
#
communicate to the board what is the purpose of this thing and I said you know it's about
#
is it an incubator and I was like well if we say to incubate ideas and and it caught on so now we
#
call call it an idea as incubator I think it's a good you know I had huge resistance to using
#
the word incubator earlier but I think it's fine I think it's fine it's a cyclotron there's a beam
#
you're putting out absolutely yes target non-destructive as you know my people would
#
say yeah so you know so it's about generating it's about coming together talking to people
#
you would otherwise not talk to and come up with ideas come up with questions that are worthy of
#
you know our time to pursue so we have a natural sciences lab and the idea behind that is so it's
#
more like a hunterian lab than it is a new sort of lab a new kind of lab because you know how can
#
you have a lab across disciplines anymore right like and so the idea is as follows we stand at
#
the threshold of global sort of you know how do you call it a destruction of nature we need
#
a different relationship to nature now we need to reimagine therefore the kind of knowledge that
#
we need of nature so this is the place to do that and when that idea is ready to be taken into a
#
silo that can be taken in but here's here's where you come and talk to people you normally don't
#
talk to ask the question and then go so that's the idea of the natural sciences lab there's a
#
materials lab which is about materials for the future so sustainability of course is a part of
#
that thinking but also madness of some kind right like how do you how do you yeah you know
#
create maybe you know whatever new fibers or new whatever and how do you study existing ones how
#
do you go back to who knows what right like i don't want to know what someone else should be
#
seeking and i don't want to tell i want people to come and you know pursue their inquiries
#
then we have a food lab because you know central to life and life and everything and you know the
#
system right like agriculture to sort of sewage if you if you like it right like the whole
#
side so food lab we have a new media lab because there's no way to escape from you know simulation
#
augmented reality virtual reality range of things i mean we live on our computers you
#
know and we've begun to carry them in even in our watches now you know and who knows when
#
in my spectacles eventually so the new media lab we have a good lord a theory lab which is basically
#
just a place to bring people to to chat and when they're ready to go into a lab they'll go into a
#
lab a numbers lab because numeric literacy is genuinely like i mean we are in an incredibly
#
dangerously sad state so that and a humanities lab of course and the goal is to get people to
#
work across these labs right like so so you can't like come and propose a project which is only in
#
the natural sciences lab it would be wonderful if you work across the natural sciences lab and the
#
food lab or the food lab and the materials lab or the humanities lab and the new media lab or the new
#
media lab and the numbers lab or whatever else really who cares i mean you know come so that's
#
the thing so the public lab complex will run on a fellowship model and the only condition we have
#
is that you can't work in a silo and you'll have to take a young person as an apprentice
#
because there is no other way to socialize a new generation into thinking beyond disciplines
#
thinking beyond sort of you know the silos that exist so that's new to us and the third
#
bucket is public science and the only reason why i call it public science is because i want
#
to move the needle on citizen science where citizens are not only sort of collecting data
#
or contributing to somebody's research but become participants in a larger research project right
#
like where they're able to do that kind of work and generate new questions to ask so we call it
#
science with society rather than science and society or science whatever of society etc
#
so those are the those are so that's become now the model and we'll have a research festival
#
that runs over a year a fellowship model that speaks to that theme and projects that are off
#
site which are largely then the science with society kind of work that we want to that's a
#
least developed bucket right now for me because bandwidth finding if you ask me you're not asking
#
what i'm going to tell you anyway the biggest challenge biggest biggest biggest biggest
#
challenge i mean the other thing i just demoralizing stuff you know which we know why it's happening
#
and whatever is finding people finding people who can yeah it's hard because people who come
#
from the sciences often think of this as an extension of science communication
#
we don't want to do that not that that doesn't need to be done that needs to be done it has
#
its place but this is not science communication and people from the humanities largely don't want
#
to look at the word science because they've been been socialized into not wanting to do that
#
and yeah so i mean the only success i've had so far is is getting colleagues from straight from
#
university and college and then they have no you know they have how should i put it no inhibitions
#
actually very good energy and less of a commitment to any kind of silo even though the education
#
often sort of you know has been in one direction but we all know how undergraduate education in
#
india is even at the best institutions it's really a test of memory and a test of being able to pass
#
exams or clear exams and so i think they're still not as damaged i mean the other question
#
we often asked is you know why don't you work with even younger people i mean as as audiences
#
because the target age group for us is 15 to 28 15 to 30 and then there's no doubt you know the
#
younger they are the better they will learn and you know the better their brains will get circuited
#
in in you know mad ways but i think young adults in a way are like an orphaned
#
part of human life right like because when you're when you're when you're until you're in school
#
you know everything from your fed food to fed your your studies to everything and people you
#
know drive you around and do everything and then at some point you have a job and then you're an
#
adult but in this age suddenly you're supposed to take decisions accept responsibility within
#
constraints of course you know please be an engineer etc but once after become an engine
#
nobody wants to know what you're doing nobody wants to know how you're doing it's just that
#
and what they want to know at the end of this pipe is that you're able to get a job and maintain
#
your social status if not improve it so working with this age group who in a way is left alone
#
to fend for themselves not left alone in a good way but left alone to you know fight it out
#
it's a good age both to work with in my team but also to work with as sort of you know the
#
target audience because i think we they're able they're able to grasp you know where they've been
#
short changed they have aspirations in a way in which children don't which of course is a
#
different kind of joy to work with young you know i have a dear friend who's three year old just
#
completely i mean i'm just fascinated by her she's just absolutely lovely but you know the
#
the young adults grasp and they they they can fight for change they can you know even if we
#
fail and we all do and we will continue to the desire to change
#
transform something inside you and even if you don't realize it now something else will happen
#
at another point etc but you know that that it propels you in different ways
#
all of this is very fascinating and there are many things i want to double click on and i'll ask you
#
more about the science gallery but first before we go into a break like i'm i loved your phrase
#
the narcissism of small differences by the way what a great phrase uh revealed so much it's not
#
my own unfortunately but fair enough but i learned it from you so i'm going to my gratitude is towards
#
you thank you i want to sort of um talk now about something that you were talking about like when
#
your husband said don't let anything be a trap and i often think about how we are shaped by
#
the forms that we operate in for example as a podcaster i could choose to do a six hour
#
conversation i could choose to do a six minute conversation yes if i'm doing a six minute
#
conversation i'm necessarily being shallow necessarily being quick etc etc if i'm doing
#
a longer conversation that forces me to listen intently to you know not be the main character
#
anymore to show humility to learn more all of that i've written an essay about this as well how
#
you know the form of what you do shapes the work the content of what you produce and that shapes
#
your character so they're all kind of linked and therefore it is very resonant uh those wise words
#
about don't let anything be a trap you know tenure be a trap or the way others see you be a trap or
#
the way you see yourself be a trap and there's this great sort of quote from cyclotron where
#
balwinder singh says first the gurudwara is built then the people who read the scriptures come yes
#
right and those people who are going to the gurudwara to read the scriptures it's a form
#
of the gurudwara that you know is bringing that about and you ask a very perceptive question a
#
little later in the documentary where you ask is a machine setting the research agenda or is a
#
research agenda using the machine right and and at some level i guess even for the protagonists
#
involved internally is perhaps hard to disentangle those because you know you will never give up
#
agency to the machine and say oh i'm just a product of the form you know you are always
#
going to pretend that you are in charge and everything's going that way so you know when you
#
and i guess that you are also in a sense therefore fundamentally different from what you would have
#
been had you stayed as a you know a tenured academic number one and number two that there
#
is also an intentionality in this to some extent you know so tell me a a little bit about sort of
#
this because you know you you and we you know after the break we'll get back to your academic
#
life and you speak about how that you know until the point you're doing like you know civics and
#
whatever in iot bombay you're miserable but then you change track and then you find some you know
#
when you go to georgia you find the history of science and everything's kind of working out
#
again so you've made these sort of changes and so is it the person you want to be in the things
#
you want to do shaping the form that you choose and the form of living i mean the form of doing
#
things what you're doing how do they play into each other how do you think about this
#
how much of it is kind of intentional so i think this is the first time i am actually reflecting
#
on this aloud i've had moments when i've thought about this because obviously i mean you know i
#
i mean i'm old enough now to begin to take stock and i i think that also begins for most of us
#
with losing a parent and that happened for me recently so it's you know what have i done
#
in a way and how i organize my life and i i mean if i let me start by saying that there's a kernel
#
of truth to the joke i'm about to crack my sense of humor is very bad my team often makes fun of
#
me for that but nonetheless is that there is some amount of truth in it like freud has told us i
#
mean you know there is always even in a joke and humor something there which so every major change
#
in my life has been taken the decision the decision for every major change in my life
#
has been taken in anger and deep level of dissatisfaction and so you know so like i said
#
i got my my i mean i did my civics and politics in bombay at elphinstone and then i did a masters
#
at the school of oriental and african studies i came back i was unwell for a for a brief while
#
after which i started a phd at it bombay and that's when i realized in the first year itself
#
that you know this wasn't going anywhere i simply wasn't interested in the questions that my field
#
which was largely social sciences then was expecting me to answer i found them uninteresting and i
#
yeah so so so that so that was dissatisfaction
#
it also i mean you know again people play a role and you know they they
#
it doesn't necessarily make someone how should i put it
#
it doesn't necessarily make someone how should i put it
#
but my supervisor my supervisor at that point found it very hard to trust me
#
and that wasn't good and she found it probably hard to trust me because i wasn't
#
sounding like i was ready to to take on big questions and finish a phd because the questions
#
she wanted me to answer were not appealing to me at all like what so you know so remember this is
#
like the mid when was this yeah mid 1990s right it's so i started working on the i mean now i can
#
say history of but although at that point the framework was the material was historical but
#
the framework wasn't early cinema in india my name of course helped me open doors no relation
#
whatsoever i would love to invent one if i can but i was i wanted to look for the
#
i still remember i was you know i wanted to look for how the space for a new medium was created
#
nobody knew what cinema was and suddenly cinema was everywhere and i mean how
#
right in india how i mean it's crazy right so i wanted to understand the early years like i think
#
you know what do people think why did they want this thing in the public domain at all
#
you know like i'm not wanting to create a space for a public space for science
#
do people really want it clearly in hindsight we can say that a space was created for that medium
#
and like in a incredible way i mean how have we embraced cinema so keeping that aside like like
#
you know sort of good scholars should not explain it teleologically but to understand you so where
#
was the equipment coming from where to what extent were they going what kind of stories were they
#
picking etc so you know i wanted to understand that and at the heart of it were the three
#
cinematograph committee reports where they spoke to vendors traders people showing cinema people
#
making cinema regulators people talking about unruly publics this that whatever right and i
#
wanted to go through all of this and say something interesting about what one might call and at that
#
point i knew that word properly which is political economy of cinema and the questions that my field
#
at that point was interested in was work representation gender body politic nationalism
#
i'm aware of the intersection of all of these questions acutely now
#
i was aware of them then i was not ready to foreground any of those categories
#
at all that's not to say that they weren't shaping every single thing that was happening there
#
in different ways in different proportions i want i i was i would have liked to find the weave
#
i wasn't interested in a category i wasn't ready to if i may say so run the story through
#
a cranking machine and pull out a story where the answer was evident even before i started that
#
i couldn't have articulated this at that point remember this is like 1998 and i was angry because
#
i didn't know what are the emotion to attach to it and so that was that i you know spent the next
#
i mean i have no idea how how this goes in the podcast or not but i mean i spent the next two
#
years basically you know just happily getting drunk and doing theater and making some very good
#
friends and you know doing inhabiting a very different life to what i was used to earlier
#
i mean you know elfinston wasn't like that university of bombay wasn't like that so as
#
wasn't like that i submitted applications together with all the all the petech kids
#
you know even at that point i was a couple of well they were all i mean the last the people
#
who were writing the applications were probably around 22 i was probably 25 so you know already i
#
was slightly older and i i had gone to london and come back so i was kind of this mad creature plus
#
i was from the humanity so like what useless thing plus phd oh my god like levels of depth
#
of uselessness right so i was like but but then she's the only girl who comes with us to you know
#
these shady bars to drink and you know i mean there are other women who did drink so it's not
#
like you know i was the only one who was drinking but i was the only one who went out and you know
#
whatever with them to the bars and whatnot and then i did theater and things like that and i
#
listened to floyd and you know whatever have you and so i think it was it was a strange
#
strange time in that sense in that that world was not something i'd inhabited before that kind of
#
confidence i had not seen in people my age before and then i just wrote applications with all of
#
them right like and so the the thing to do was to go to the computer lab leave your truffles
#
outside which often got stolen and so you left with whoever else's truffles and and there's
#
there's still a story circulating out there about how i ran after someone who took my truffles and
#
you know basically asked them to give it back to me these were all bathroom slippers i mean they
#
weren't like you know whatever but anyway and you know it was very it was i loved my time there
#
because once i decided i wasn't doing what i was expected then expected to do i i just started
#
doing other things which is also what i did at the university of bombay when i did my first
#
master's degree which is you know spent basically from morning to evening in the library reading
#
whatever came my way you know i did not care i have disciplinary boundaries whatever who cares
#
right like i mean again i wouldn't have articulated it this way i was like i was there i was reading
#
what i liked and there were a bunch of students of economics who would also hang out in the library
#
and they of course you know they they what one would call studied
#
i read and so i started doing that here in a far more fun way i think i was ready to enjoy life
#
and of course i was also getting over the illness that i spoke about and so you know it was
#
yeah it was it was it was a good time and the what i what is fascinating is when we wrote the
#
application right as a moral economy to the whole thing so we wrote our applications and they would
#
go as bundles to whatever university you wanted to send it to to a senior from i.t bombay and then
#
the senior would submit all those applications by paying the application fees and then your
#
promise was that when you go there you will do it for the next batch of people it was just really
#
quite incredible you know so and so this is the level at which networks and communities work it
#
didn't mean everybody liked each other it didn't mean you know some of them were of course very
#
deep and and long-term friendships which you know even today i see and you know they survive
#
but this was you know so i became a part of a community where i was i was allowed in because
#
i was just so much of an outsider that you know there was that was probably the only way to deal
#
with me and i wanted that community right like i wanted to be with people and i wanted to be
#
with people where i could do whatever i wanted and find the next path and so i wrote those
#
applications i would have on my own probably never applied to go to the united states but you know
#
from iit you apply only to the u.s so i applied and i got into seance pole in paris i'm talking
#
about with funding because you know that was that was the best way to go i couldn't have asked my
#
parents to take a loan i did not want to ask my parents to take a loan so i got into seance pole
#
with the efel scholarship i got into ucl and that would have been going back to london which i
#
absolutely adored at that point of time i got into new school with a scholarship and then i
#
got into georgia tech and the georgia tech program was the was the one that was in sort of i i had
#
no idea what it was and i was like i'm going to go there and i'm going to not study india ever
#
and i'm going to completely like reimagine my life
#
and my so my my friends joke about it it's like okay so london paris new york atlanta
#
did you think this was figure the odd one out like that's how you you chose it and i was like
#
you know didn't strike me that way at that moment but it was it was the thing i didn't know and i
#
went and i remember i went there in august and science began the semester began in october so
#
i told myself if i don't like it in the first two months i'll go to science and continue with
#
civics and politics and other things and i'll be happy and you know paris was sort of alien enough
#
i'd never been in paris and you know the program was actually quite mad they would give you
#
instruction in french for the first year and then you'd start on your program and
#
whatever so you know there was a promise of sort of fun and i remember the welcome party we had at
#
one of the professor's house and this is my first time in america and everything was kind of just
#
i was half my size that i am now i was literally like a matchstick short hair little you know so
#
whatever and everything in america was big really big and my cohort was five other people so we were
#
six of us one electrical engineer one lawyer one biologist one mechanical engineer one economist
#
and myself five boys and me and the at the welcome party there's something about some
#
vaccination proof that i had not submitted or whatever whatever this is going on like whatever
#
you know the discussion and i had to do this some very minor thing and you know and i
#
there was a new professor who had just joined the same year and he was at the party and he's like oh
#
so where you from this that we're talking and like yeah nobody here cares you know like they
#
want this vaccination thing then whatever in a typically offhand young person kind of why should
#
i have to do anything kind of mode and he just let us but i care i was just struck by why would
#
anyone even respond like that right like and i still i have no idea how and why it it has still
#
stayed with me and i was like okay fine i'll take your course i'll figure out you know i mean i
#
didn't say that to him i said that in my mind and i i yeah i started and i mean october came and went
#
and i was in love i was absolutely in love i mean this was stuff i did not know anything about
#
it was incredible i mean there were difficult moments as well when i had to take courses in
#
american urban history and things like that which i had no clue and you know how to grasp and what
#
not and i was like can i take another course and they were like no you have to take this
#
it was really really really fun i had like i mean i i don't think i've had that much fun before or
#
after i mean i had fun already at iot but this was so i i stayed with a couple of boys i knew
#
at iot bombay so you know we had a we shared a house and i was actually housemates also with
#
another set of people who were a mix of iot madras and iot delhi people and so effectively if i
#
wasn't found in one place i was in the other place and my cohort and i i mean you know
#
because we were all coming from different disciplines none of us knew how to deal with
#
what we were being taught and i was still the social science person so i was kind of
#
you know at least knew some of the language some of the authors etc so we would read together
#
we would sit and we would make really bad instant coffee and really bad double chocolate chip
#
cookies and we would stay up you know day and night and you know just read like so what does
#
he mean by that what does he mean by that oh he refers to that book okay you go to the library
#
and get that book and you know you come back to the point where at some point we got a we got an
#
email from the graduate studies coordinator saying stop kibbutzing because we were just found always
#
in that room in us sitting in our socks which is apparently not quite the thing to do and just
#
reading away and eat going out in the evenings eating really bad pizza and you know drinking
#
really big bottles of who knows what and i would just i it was i think it was an exhilarating time
#
and this is funny now to comprehend for me because i don't drive i don't i don't have a driver's
#
license and i was living in atlanta and i still had a good time and yeah i mean you know so so
#
yeah no i had come home i mean i went and took physics classes i've been apart from sort of you
#
know the regular history of science and technology courses i mean the person who said but i care
#
became my supervisor and i worked with him i'm now editing his first shift
#
because he retired last year we still can't believe he's retired but you know yeah it was
#
i loved it what a wonderful answer and the only flaw in it is that you began it by promising a
#
joke and the joke never came oh that i that i take decisions in anger that's a joke yeah okay
#
hmm obviously i told you my sense of humor is bad yeah i think i think i think we'll
#
take a quick break now and we'll come back and we'll continue this story yes
#
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welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with janvi falke about her life and
#
her work and all of that and in a sense about her love because just before we got to the break
#
you spoke about how you fell in love with studying the history of science and october came and went
#
and all of that which can actually be the title of an iceberg also october came and went and uh
#
and you know when we fall in love and typically it's with an actual person and we'll often have
#
these vivid memories of little concrete things about them maybe a dimple maybe the way they
#
pronounce a word or something like that and i'm going to ask you to sort of turn that gaze onto
#
what you were studying and what you fell in love with and and try to you know like if you can
#
describe those sort of aspects of it which made you go wow you know was there a particular frame
#
which attracted you was there a particular book that you read which you were like you know this
#
is so good it's you know so what was that like to just kind of make that flesh and blood for me in
#
terms of you know precisely what are the things that you fell in love with about the history of
#
science and let me anchor it let me anchor my answer in a book which is Leviathan and the Pump
#
which was a book you know one of the books that we read in graduate school written by Steven
#
Shapin and Simon Schaffer at Harvard and Cambridge respectively and you know sort of considered
#
by most of us as sort of pretty robust good inspiring scholars of the previous generation
#
both are I mean at least one of them is retired now now this was a book in which I learned that
#
Thomas Hobbes who I had earlier studied as a political philosopher you know the nasty
#
brutish and short person was a mathematician and in his debates with Robert Hooke about this pump
#
and you know the nature of science and experiment and theory and thinking
#
it just completely drew me in you know this was like the the pathway of Alice Falling through the
#
tree trunk it was crazy because here was a house into which I had walked in which I had no idea
#
about I didn't know walls from windows from doors I had not formally studied science since
#
the age of 15 here I was being intelligently able to engage with aspects of the scientific enterprise
#
and establishment and getting excited along the way you know how is knowledge produced who produces
#
knowledge why does that matter how ridiculously fragile disciplinary boundaries are how new that
#
phenomenon is you know all of these things sort of began to play in my mind and while I understood
#
fairly early on because you know within history of science we have this debate on the internalist
#
and externalist nature of writing history of science where you know internalists are which
#
became a bad word by the way somewhere along the line were people who were trained in science and
#
then wrote histories of science from within about how disciplines transformed and who did what
#
research and why who designed what experiments and why etc and then externalists who would write
#
about you know the scaffolding around this enterprise why you know how some things become
#
possible what kind of discoveries let transformation of society so the Copernican revolution for that
#
matter or you know the the acceptance of the idea that the earth was not flat or evolution or you
#
know things like that and I'm talking about sort of you know in the historical past and there are
#
newer ideas of course which also command a similar kind of engagement and so this was this was sort
#
of put in front of us but of course the people who I was studying with were you know incredibly
#
good scholars who also sort of made us understand that you know even this binary wasn't quite an
#
interesting one about externalists and internals about what questions you were interested in and
#
were you able to answer them right so if you were interested in the emergence of quantum mechanics
#
did you have the desire the ability and the time to engage with it to understand it in order to
#
explain that transformation and if you wanted to do that you should do that so I think those doors
#
just opened right like again you know coming back to the refrain that you have established for this
#
conversation of possibilities right like you know that the generation previous to mine across the
#
world and history of science is a very small discipline compared to most other disciplines
#
they most of them came from degrees with degrees in science and then took to history of science so
#
history of science is offered as an undergraduate degree practically nowhere
#
it's almost always a postgraduate degree and then you know a further research and kind of
#
grappling with the internalist externalist aspects being told that that wasn't a particularly
#
meaningful boundary to engage with etc and and you know being a small community understanding
#
that you know things were possible if you wanted to understand you should do it you should sort of
#
engage with it you should pursue the questions you wanted to pursue so I think that became very very
#
exciting and then again you know anger stepped in you know sometimes I imagine myself as there's
#
this character in the Moomin comics that Toby Jensen wrote she's called little me or little
#
little my and she's like this angry person who's basically just working on all the time and I
#
sometimes I think I'm her and my anger was during my coursework so I'd come there telling myself
#
I'm done with the study of India I do not want to engage with the frontiers of studying South Asia
#
and India because those questions I find I'm not able to engage with them in a way I want to engage
#
with the study of India and then anger was of course quite another thing because I was sitting
#
in coursework month after month on the 20th century history of science on history of science
#
history of science and technology history of engineering engineering practice urbanity and
#
technology range of you know very very interesting fascinating courses and there was no sign of India
#
anywhere and I mean my generation at least grew up with I would say dare say our generation grew
#
up at least with some knowledge of names of you know people who practice science in India right
#
I mean I find that increasingly is to be less the case I mean I have colleagues who have
#
you know no idea of who Vikram Sarabhai was or Satish Dhawan was or
#
whatnot but our generation in a way grew up with those names right and I'm like okay I don't know
#
the history of science in India I haven't really read contemporary history of science in India but
#
there are these people where are they did they do work of absolutely no consequence at least
#
Raman should be there he did you know work of consequence you know so very very preliminary
#
questions about why is this all you know again articulating it in hindsight why is all of this
#
only Anglo-American and when history of science did show up it was all about imperial science and
#
it was all from the imperial archive too so not just imperial history but imperial history has
#
written from the imperial archive right so people going to the British Library or the National
#
Archives of India looking at those records largely up until 1950 most until about 1945 47
#
and then you know science as tool of empire dominance by design that kind of scholarship
#
right like and again not walking for countries like India not walking out of that trap if I may
#
say so of rewriting the same history again and again and again case studies of the same
#
or instances of the same argument I'm not saying it's a trivial argument I'm not saying it's an
#
unimportant argument or episode but there is only there is only so much to gain by way of insight
#
if you're not interested in a particular niche be it archaeology be it zoology be it botany
#
unless you're interested in one of those you're learning by way of abstraction the self-same
#
thing science in India science in imperial India is an argument about colonialism it's an argument
#
about oppression it's an argument of seeking that then as an intellectual tool for liberation
#
so tired on two fronts or angry on two fronts which is why is this story so you know only
#
only Anglo-American and why is the story of India that of empire or then of history of mathematics
#
which you know people like David Pringrey and Kim Flocker and others have written you know
#
very very robust histories of good I mean based on good archives good documents etc so you know
#
reliable histories of mathematics especially and astronomy of India which predated the imperial
#
times and then imperial India nothing after that it was tiring the only places where I found
#
histories of technology and some mention of science in India were in discourses on development
#
and defense right like so defense meaning stories of the Indian bomb or the Indian space program
#
not really sort of robust history so much but nonetheless pretty good sort of you know accounts
#
of the same and largely then in the development discourse about what you know both on both sides
#
what dams were meant to do and what dams did right like so critique of the attempts at sort of
#
what James Scott and others have called you know the Stalinist model of massive projects
#
massive dams massive steel plants that kind of thing and then why that was you know and
#
then on the other hand scholars like Amit Bhavaskar and others you know and many others who
#
spoke about what that meant on the ground displacement disenfranchisement and you know
#
Mahesh Rangarajan and others destruction of the environment and increasingly biodiversity etc
#
So that is where I you know that is where I found science and technology in the study of India
#
available in the available scholarship on contemporary India.
#
When I read just to give you an example the one of the books that we read for the for the course
#
on 20th century history of science and technology was called Lawrence and the Laboratory and it's
#
an important book for me because cyclotrons and when you read that book you understand
#
that science operates like a range of things of that scale and you know one might ask what
#
those are I think food is one etc which cuts across things but it registers of
#
of statecraft which is not quite the same thing as policy and so policy institutions
#
professional societies laboratory individuals right like not necessarily as a hierarchy but
#
you know and it it is realized through all of these registers and when you read Lawrence and
#
the Laboratory you understand what the second world effectively what the second world war
#
meant for someone working in a lab wanting to bombard targets with you know some kind of beam
#
or the other right or what kind of arguments they made to even get the equipment to be able
#
to bombard particles what relationship that had to the atomic bomb for example so it was politics
#
geopolitics scientific practice curiosity discovery ambition career disappointment
#
demoralization factory-like organization of the lab changing practice changing funding industry
#
what is not there because every it takes all of that to do it right it's not a genius who finds
#
its path it's not a bunch of geniuses who find their path it's not an institution that allows
#
it's not a funding agency that creates it's the convergence of all of these registers and slices
#
that occupy those registers that make science possible and science is not research alone it's
#
also education it's also you know going into industrial labs and producing bombs but also
#
other things it's producing reactors and energy it was i mean it's exhilarating right like when
#
you find out all of this it's like oh my god this is nuts and it's the same with lavaathan and the
#
pump when i read the book right it's like oh my god this guy's a mathematician why didn't i know
#
that before i didn't know that before right i took three degrees in politics i still didn't know
#
right i mean it's crazy so
#
in that class then i'm asking myself
#
surely even if no nobel prize or a bomb came out of it something like this must have happened in
#
india too and then started that journey and i went to a conference on scientific instruments
#
of the scientific instruments commission where i met the man i eventually married
#
and we were talking about equipment and i was like oh my god this is an interesting way to talk
#
about things because then i don't want to talk about people and institutions which is how we
#
are used to telling stories then that instrument embodies everything right it embodies like the
#
people the institutions the funders the possibility that you can make it at all what's in the market
#
not the nut and bolt that you spoke about right like the inches and the millimeters i mean
#
everything comes together in an instrument right like let's focus on that and that was sort of my
#
yes i'm going to do this kind of thing right like and i remember talking on the phone
#
to roland who's now my husband about this and i had that you know in the united states they use
#
these yellow legal paper writing pads right and i remember writing down fiercely and with my big
#
yellow pencil like yes yes yes yes and i remember circling the word cyclotron right like you know
#
like that's what i have to do and then i started the journey
#
i forgot to mention one thing just before the cyclotron the first summer so i'd zeroed it on
#
the the instrument bit and i came to because i mean so this is what right like we talk about
#
shankan imaginations i mean and shankan is not necessarily in a bad way they are constrained
#
because you know you you at the end of the day are victim of what you learn and what you what you
#
what you're exposed to so i went to something called the central scientific instruments
#
organization in chandigarh and since you're from chandigarh you'll probably know it
#
you don't no idea okay it was set up in the 60s just after the india china border event
#
when it it was acutely realized by both the political and the defense leadership that
#
india lacked electronics building capacity and so the swiss came in and helped set up csio central
#
scientific instruments organization so i went there to do my research i was like yes this is
#
instruments as obvious as it can literal as it gets and there's the war and there's you know
#
all of this and so what did they make etc so there i go i write an email i get an email saying
#
please come in whatever so i go
#
i spent two days in the library looking at things they don't have an archive obviously
#
you know like most other institutions unfortunately in india and i'm finding sort of
#
you know older annual reports trying to kind of put things together which is how i understood
#
why it was set up at all etc and how they organized sort of in the first couple of years
#
you know large conferences with defense personnel industry personnel you know okay what do we need
#
how do we do it etc not much detail but still enough to kind of build up that story third day
#
i get a i get called by someone in the administration saying you know like okay so you know so i say
#
hello and you know they're like huh so who are you what are you doing so i said you know as i
#
stated i'm whatever i'm doing my phd i'm in history of science and technology
#
i mean i still remember his face he said i'll say it in hindi first
#
you know so it's like and i was just stunned because he was expecting me to not be there
#
and he did not think it was appropriate of me to want to delve into the history of csio
#
so i went back empty-handed that year and i was broken because i was like if there are no archives
#
if this is what's going to happen what am i going to write
#
as it turns out after that the episode with the conversation with my with roland happened
#
and i went to meet him in novi which is where he lived at that point of time in the summer
#
there was a visiting professor from tifr at the norwegian university of science and technology
#
we met him oh he said come to tifr i'll introduce you to a few people and you can talk to them
#
so the first door opened that summer and then so his name was sari raja ramadurai
#
that door opened then some other doors open and some other doors open and some other doors open
#
and eventually lots of doors opened and you know i like i you know mention krishnan's papers i got
#
from his son the tifr archives were just being established is archives were being established
#
begged borrowed got permission from dae to photocopy
#
just sort of yeah so spent about close to two years after that just going from place to place
#
to place collecting papers collecting you know whatnot and the long and short of this story is
#
i ended up working in india which i wanted to run away from in the first instance but
#
it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do i studied you know six labs
#
because i was so afraid that there wouldn't be enough material to write a full thesis
#
as it turns out i could you know i didn't have to it was sort of the story nicely built itself
#
but i think also that story became apparent because i knew what came after right like so
#
that allowed me to sort of seal the story because it those stories reflected back on the first three
#
who tried to do experimental nuclear physics so yeah so that's that's sort of you know the
#
the story of sinking into the bog sounds a bit negative but basically that's how it's sort of
#
you know just happily drowned into into that world and and and i still am actually because
#
i still love it i still get very very excited when i find something new yeah and i still i still
#
like i often say to my team i still burn for it right like it's something i want to do i still
#
there's still a book that i want to write for which i've done a monograph i mean for which
#
i've done the research but i've simply haven't found the time to write which is a biography
#
of a statistical method called t2 malanobis distance basically
#
and that was in fact actually what i would have done for my phd if this had not worked out
#
so yeah i'm just so struck by you know earlier also you spoke about the role of contingency
#
and in a parallel universe there is another janvi who didn't go to that instruments conference
#
and meet roland and therefore wasn't in norway where she could have met this tifr guy
#
and so your professional life and your personal life and everything is completely different
#
so yeah in that parallel uh universe and i wonder what will happen when the two of you meet
#
and i'm just thinking that if there's a film ever made about cyclotrons and of course you made one
#
but if there's a you know feature film or an ott and the outer frame of that is your search your
#
journey into cyclotrons the first shot of that could just be of a handwriting something on that
#
yellow paper yeah and then the camera zooms in as you circle the word cyclotron so that's like
#
so sort of cinematic and and let me i'll try to sort of phrase what i understood of your love
#
for this and uh tell me if my paraphrasing is correct that whereas academia as you spoke
#
earlier is broken into all these different silos where you specialize specialize specialize and
#
that's it and it's boring and dull and you're kind of and everything is a trap you know in the words
#
roland use and everything is a trap but what is exciting about the history of science is that you
#
can embrace the complexity it involves because it is not a silo because if you're talking science
#
you are talking politics you're talking geopolitics you're talking colonialism you're talking
#
political economy you're talking everything right and that complexity then becomes incredibly
#
exciting and and then therefore my assumption is that the part of the frustration someone like
#
you and someone like me would feel if you're doing something too narrow is that yeah it's just it's
#
too narrow right and uh and here it is a a new field and b you can embrace that complexity you
#
can go where no one has gone before you can you know find your own lenses you can you know sort
#
go past those lenses is that a correct way of i think that yes i i would agree with that i mean
#
you know this is of course not to say that you know people who are excited by narrow work shouldn't
#
do that or that's somehow not valuable i mean we have incredibly valuable things that come out of
#
someone you know just obsessively looking for something and then finding it right looking
#
for something and finding something else actually usually but that they do it right so so that's i
#
think that's fine it's just that that doesn't as i found out that doesn't excite me but also
#
sort of certain the narrowness of certain questions you know because one can do even
#
politics differently i mean a study of politics differently so yeah yes i think what i what i've
#
the newness of it but you know i mean it's been 23 years now since i moved to history of science
#
so you know that it's been a long time and i haven't felt the trap right it still feels full
#
of potential there are still doors you know unopened it's i mean i lament all the time that
#
you know it's not possible to do enough of it in india i mean in fact there are times when i
#
when i have said and i believe in it in fact what they should have asked me to develop was a center
#
for the history of science and not a center for the public engagement with science because i think
#
that would have also kept me i mean there's a different joy i find in this and there's a
#
different sense of as you said you know i know this work needs to be done and it's incredibly
#
valuable no matter to what extent it gets real gets realized but so is history of science i think
#
we are so ill-informed about even things that have happened in this country that i that there
#
are consequences to it right like to not know yeah to not know about the indian association for
#
cultivation of science you know which i heard about the first time when i was watching one of
#
your talks here i'd never heard of it before early 20th century there's so much vibrant stuff
#
happening and i had no idea and the confidence with which in a way you know people occupied the
#
house of science so to speak right and demolished some of its walls and put up some shelves and you
#
know put curtains on the windows and you know warmed up some meal or cooked something new
#
made a garden you know that that's how they occupied that world today it's like we are
#
renting the space somehow you know and it feels a bit of course there are always you know i mean
#
one has to be careful there are always good people no matter what you do at the scale at which this
#
country is i mean there are of course good people there are islands of excellence and there are
#
people you know who who are in still good by any standard you want to use but for the bulk of it
#
it's astonishingly sad and mediocre is it also the case that another attraction of doing something
#
like this is not just the fact that you're not in a silo asking a narrow question but also the
#
fact that because it's a new field there are no academic fashions or conventions that you have to
#
cater to like within academia i think what often happens is that there are periods of time which
#
are dominated by certain fashions like today i think if you want to get funding the easiest
#
thing to do is maybe put climate change somewhere in the title or funding you know not that that's
#
not an area one should study but you get what i'm saying yes absolutely those fashions can get
#
constricting in terms of what is fashionable to fund and the fashions of what lens to use to look
#
at something can also get constricting and is that also part of the attraction that because
#
this is a new field you are in a sense charting your own territory absolutely i mean not only
#
that it's a it's a young field in itself and you know therefore you can open a lot more doors
#
the study of india in this field is very small you know i mean in the paradigm of studying imperial
#
science i mean india is one more instance of you know whatever so but the specificity of what
#
science in india means is possible to do now and you know there's very very very few of us
#
doing that so it's exciting even in the relatively young field what we are doing is even newer right
#
and so absolutely i mean you know it it's lonely at times and you also get asked questions that
#
you wouldn't be asked if you were working on america europe as my colleague would call
#
anthropological ethnographical questions right like so i still remember when i submitted my
#
manuscript for publication a very well-established scholar in history of science say you know wrote
#
the review and actually told me that they wrote the review it's supposed to be blind
#
the question was falke fails to explain why
#
india and i forget the third place turkey it was i think should want to do
#
and think the same like physicists in america or europe right god what a joke it was i was i mean
#
it it was it was like a kick in the stomach because i mean that there are the layers of
#
assumptions in a question of that kind are are actually tremendous right and it also gives you
#
it also alerts you to what people who do science in india confront as well right so i think that
#
empathy i developed from the kind of responses i got from the kind of history i do i mean in fact
#
historians of science who work on india sometime have in in one of the one of the reviews of my
#
book accused me of identifying too much with the scientists i wrote about and you know basically
#
not critical enough and by critique critique they mean criticism and not critique in my opinion in
#
any way so is my reading of the of the of the claim in any way you know so so here's the thing
#
right like so it's it's it's like you you demand a cultural explanation primarily a cultural
#
explanation in history so the a senior colleague of mine in fact edited an encyclopedia of the
#
history of non-western well science in non-western cultures i mean the the never mind the sort of sad
#
title of the book that one has to work with and you know she had to work with
#
she started her presentation of that volume by saying there's history of science of the west
#
and the rest is anthropology because you're essentially studying indians doing science or
#
people doing science elsewhere as a curiosity as something that has to be culturally explained
#
not historically right so you're looking for the primacy of culture in wanting to understand
#
anything about india so india the study of india is ethnographic the study of the west is historical
#
historical right and and it i think i mean she she hit the nail on the head because the kind of
#
questions i got from scholars uh in europe and america it was always why should this matter to
#
the history of science that's the question you need to answer janvi and i was like why does
#
you know so so the parameters have been set elsewhere and you have to always establish
#
the relevance of what happened in india against those parameters you're measuring everything
#
against those parameters and i think those were those were some of the i mean some of the reasons
#
why i made the film i made the way i made it as well because it was so when you know when someone
#
asked me by then i'd calm down a bit in terms of my anger who's your audience that's the first
#
question people ask you well at least ask me when i made my film and i said i don't quite know
#
i have a story to tell and i want to tell it in a particular way and i want to find out who's
#
willing to listen because if i had pitched it to a funding agency or if i had decided on my audience
#
then who am i making it for it it would be then the story of the two tubes that are left and the
#
and the you know the sad demise of an instrument or the afterlife of an american instrument
#
or i don't even know what right for me what was important to tell was what does everyday science
#
look like in a regional university in india because that's what science looks like every single
#
way you know it's it's sometimes some people manage to have important manage to find important
#
things make make interesting things but for the most part it's day after day struggles resources
#
those kind of things right of course if you make a make a film about a cyclotron at the tifr or
#
tata institute of fundamental research would look slightly different but as you find out from my
#
book the instrument maker group in tifr also struggled so you know i think and
#
i mean another paradigm would have been a hand me down machine from america to india
#
i was not interested in playing of that angle also because this wasn't the only story you know
#
within the united states machines were handed down to different from one university to another
#
instruments went to mexico went to chile went to croatia went to greece you know so
#
this kind of a moral economy of gifting away equipment that could be used by someone else
#
is there what's interesting about that right i mean i i did write a little piece about
#
what's interesting about that gift as well because i think you know marcel mouse talks
#
about it right like gifts in a way seek to establish reciprocity like a relationship
#
of reciprocity so when you get a gift you return a gift you participate in that exchange
#
and i was wondering right like if this is a gift because it was not sold
#
to india the cyclotron to well to to hans and his colleagues and his position right
#
one can't even say india right what was it like what was it they were
#
expecting to if not expected to return i think it's i mean my the only thing i can say as of
#
now is that it's the act of belonging right like we you give this to us and we reciprocate by
#
conducting research inquiry and debate on the terms that your instrument now sets
#
right so we come to belong we come to participate right and that's that's what
#
that's the reciprocity this gift seeks which is one of setting the terms of inclusion i think
#
a more benign interpretation of this possibly could be that there is something that you don't
#
need and it's just taking up space and you give it away as an act of goodwill thereby feeling good
#
about your own generosity and that itself is a reward for what you're doing like you know when
#
i shifted house i gave away a few hundred books because bombay you know not enough space and my
#
books just keep accumulating and there's no reciprocity there i just gave it to the first
#
group of people who asked for them you know when i was clearing up my dad's house in fact i had to
#
sell um he had some six seven thousand books and i had to give them away and i did the first
#
library which asked for them i just gave it to them right and it's not that there is any
#
reciprocity but it is that hey i need to get rid of this it's a convenient way that's number one
#
and number two i guess is that it's also self-aggrandizement because when you do
#
something that could be called generous it is also an act of the ego because you can feel good about
#
yourself yeah so i mean i would not rule out any of those things but at the same time i think i
#
because i met harry fulbright the person who was behind the the you know the gifting of the cyclotron
#
to hans and his colleagues so all of this accrues of course you know they they did not need the
#
instrument anymore they felt good no doubt fulbright and his colleagues about giving away
#
the cyclotron but i do think there is that the expectation was one of participation right like
#
so so what are we making possible and and that's part of the aggrandizement
#
you know argument that you're making it was also there is a there was a lot of goodwill also
#
right like i mean it fulbright you know was a very how should i put it
#
i hate to say humble these days because i recently read rodrigo marquez's book farewell to garbo and
#
mercedes which is you know which he wrote after he lost his parents in which he has a striking
#
line where he says after all humility is my preferred form of vanity so i wouldn't call
#
him that but i i think there was there was that you know like you like you said earlier about all
#
these all these men unfortunately only men who find who find a drive in doing the work they do
#
and then finding out that you now giving away the cyclotron is going to make it possible for
#
some others to do that thing there was some of that right like there was there was a lot of that
#
in fact and so he you know he also came to india spent considerable amounts of time got grants to
#
make a vacuum chamber for the for people in chandigarh etc so he so he did all of that too
#
but again i mean you know i will not rule out the sort of more mundane parts of what
#
gifting away something that you no longer need can involve but also you know at the same time
#
sort of acknowledge that you know there is all there is that element of making something
#
possible that element of okay this is really going to be good because now they're going to
#
because he took students he took students that who were who were trained on the cyclotron then
#
in rochester worked hard to establish an exchange program and things like that right like so put a
#
lot of things in place to enable Chandigarh become you know a place for doing experimental
#
nuclear physics in the university in india where it was not happening pretty much anywhere else
#
other than in the department of atomic energy facilities fine of everything is complex and
#
multi-factor real and i was you know everything that you just said before that bit about all the
#
questions that you had to face about sort of history versus anthropology and all of that
#
and i can totally understand your anger like elsewhere you've also spoken of the burden of
#
location yes where you and of a western colleague can do the same damn course in the history of
#
science yes but then when you come to india you are a historian of science in india yes and they
#
are just a historian of science doing whatever the hell they are doing and i don't know whether
#
this is an orientalist gaze which is imposing those narratives upon you or they've just put
#
you in a box is this whole patronizing condescending nonsense and i would really be pissed off
#
and i think that the way out of something like that like what i think of most academia and
#
certainly the humanities as a kind of giant circle jerk where everybody is speaking to each other
#
and there's no interface with the real world and very often there is no relevance to the real world
#
either right and i think that uh and i think that's a tragedy because many good minds i think are
#
trapped playing that game because of the incentives involved and getting out is important and therefore
#
when you manage to get out and when you write a book like this or when you make a film like
#
cyclotron i think that's incredibly important because my answer to the question of what is
#
the audience for it would be that i am not just looking at my audience in space across geography
#
i am looking at my audience across time i am making it forever 20 years later people will
#
watch it and they will know it is not that no one did something about this these stories were told
#
and i think that is invaluable in and of itself right thank you yeah yeah no i i agree with you
#
i mean that i mean that coming out of you know the expectations right i mean i was never comfortable
#
with them as i you know sort of as i indicated by walking out on on my first phd program i think
#
i think humanities and social sciences education and research in india is so
#
it's again i mean i'm not going to say it's it's complex because obviously there i don't know
#
anything that isn't so on the one hand if you look at scholarship produced in india that has
#
informed world scholarship on certain areas that has been in the humanities and social sciences
#
so the subaltern school postcolonial theory and thinking came from india right and people
#
are now looking at studying well have been looking at studying at studying africa parts of latin
#
america and previously colonized countries through those lenses so you know the success
#
of scholarship from the humanities and social sciences in india that grew out of india and
#
indians that has informed and set the agenda for world debates has come from here and is about
#
here not so much in the natural sciences not so much in the engineering sciences i mean
#
the humanists and social sciences ruling american academia have or have ruled indian
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academia for some time i mean it's it's now no longer the case so there's that part second
#
in india there are like about two and a half places where one can do that kind of research
#
and obtain that kind of education right there are two central universities the jawar lal nehru
#
university hyderabad central university and maybe a few departments here and there like
#
bombay had an excellent economics department at some point pune has had an excellent gender studies
#
unit for example so you'll find units again islands here and there which which again do excellent
#
but where else where else do you go to do good research and be trained to be able to do good
#
research in the humanitarian social sciences in india i mean it's a tragedy the quality of
#
education is so poor i mean i don't i i didn't attend a single class when i did my master's
#
degree a single class because i just didn't think i was getting anything out of it i you know i
#
spent all the time reading whatever i wanted not even wanted whatever found actually and could lay
#
my hands on so we are underserving ourselves by doing this so so this is the thing right i
#
mean it's ironic almost right like uh not in the alanis morriset way hopefully but yeah so so there's
#
that and then coming to the content of what scholars in the humanities and social sciences do
#
i still think we are writing for a significant portion or proportion of the work that is produced
#
in these disciplines on india is in the service of imperial and colonial history still because
#
that's the archive that's available you get a scholarship you go to the british library you
#
spend a significant amount of time there you meet a number of interesting people you get to talk the
#
documents are well produced they are brought to you to your table you come back you sit in your
#
room you write a book you're ready for the world can't do that for contemporary history
#
right just can't do it and i and we are no longer in the position which social scientists of the
#
say 80s were in where you could do social science by sort of you know talking to people conducting
#
surveys those kinds of things right like that's all history now we are 75 post yeah we're 75 years
#
after independence so even if we look at the rule that some rule of you know 30 years
#
before i mean the archives close for about 30 years prior to and we're still i mean close to
#
50 years of history after independence which needs to be written and nobody knows how and
#
where to find the documents to write that history and so we remain obsessed with questions that
#
build a layer upon what needs to be studied without actually having strong roots in the
#
empirical material that is being studied because we have very very poor archives databases
#
and it's hard it's really hard two months in the archive versus one and a half to two years going
#
from place to place to place it's also resource intensive i mean i had two grants to be able to
#
do what i did i got a grant from the american institute for indian studies you know which in
#
fact uses the old pl 480 money the loan money that india returned and a grant from the national
#
science foundation in the united states two massive grants and at that point you know maybe
#
they were pretty big in 2003 i got some 13 000 dollars from the nsf and i got i think something
#
comparable or even more from the american institute to do my research in india and elsewhere
#
where do you bring that kind of money from right if you don't get the grants and so
#
so i think these are some of the sort of structural reasons why
#
why scholarship in the humanities and social sciences finds it hard to to engage with things
#
on the ground apart from sort of you know it's i think we are also i mean you know just to to
#
very shallowly pick up amartya sen's book title we are argumentative indians we like to pontificate
#
and if we can sit and you know discursively address an issue like we would in an adda why not
#
and we do it right we're not saying i'm not saying there's no depth to that thought
#
but what you're talking about the missing sort of deep engagement with stuff on the ground right like
#
is i have to agree with you is missing i mean i i yeah yeah
#
i think of there being as different ways in which we carry out the pursuit of knowledge
#
and one way like if you if you're carrying out a serious pursuit of knowledge maybe 50 years ago
#
the best way to do so obviously is to you know do your ma do your phd do all of that study the
#
thing do all of that today i feel that in many ways like across fields what i see is that
#
the mainstream is collapsing everywhere across media across the creator economy across cinema
#
across perhaps nation states if we look at what globalization is doing the mainstream is collapsing
#
everywhere there is a lag between new institutions and structures coming up to take its place so
#
there is this sort of period of free floating chaos but the mainstream crumbling also means
#
that you know across all of these the tools of publishing and expression are open to everyone
#
gatekeepers do not exist anymore you are not restricted anymore by form or silos or fashions
#
and just in terms of the pursuit of knowledge it has become so possible for anyone to learn
#
anything today if they are connected to the internet now obviously there are limits to this
#
obviously if you're doing a serious academic discipline like anthropology or history there are
#
methodological ways and you actually have to go through the program and all that
#
accepted but by and large i feel that earlier you know that system with gatekeepers
#
was closed off to everyone but the privileged who could somehow get access and enter those
#
whom circumstances favored while today i think anybody can learn about anything to a certain
#
extent right like i keep talking in wonder about how robert sipolsky the great biologist who wrote
#
many other books he's got a series of incredible biology lectures that he gave at harvard or
#
wherever he teaches on youtube for free for everyone to pick up you know there are so many
#
things i've taught myself so not in an academic sense but just useful things just by going online
#
and doing a course or looking at explainer videos and all of that you know i'm i'm guessing that
#
your friend tanya who edited the film learned editing herself which you can today and it did
#
not have to you know do a course in it or something i mean uh i mean the finest illustration of
#
this is i'm currently teaching myself editing using something called da vinci resolve
#
and da vinci resolve in 2000 is today is free and you can download it to your pc or mac and it is
#
a brilliant editing suite a plus color grading tool 10 years ago 12 years ago it was only a
#
color grading tool guess how much it cost in 2010 2010 oh my i wasn't making my film then so i don't
#
know but lakhs several lakhs i'm guessing eight hundred thousand dollars and you had to buy a
#
special machine for it and all of hollywood would do their color grading there bollywood films would
#
add to their budget because they would send films for color grading there today everyone can like
#
i'm sitting in front of you with the laptop it's on this laptop right so everything is so i mean
#
this is just one example of the increased accessibility and therefore if i you know take
#
a step back and take another step back and just think about people want to know about the world
#
pursuit of knowledge and earlier there were these narrow limited ways with restricted access through
#
which you could pursue those paths and now i see that there are in different ways more parts opening
#
up more ways to learn right and what you're trying to do with the science gallery is also a part of
#
that you're saying that you don't have to come within a university structure you know you don't
#
have to be a science person or a arts person and stay in your lane and you know you're an engineer
#
you can't date a poet etc etc just come together you know let's let's play freely have fun and all
#
of that so what are sort of your yeah so i'll i'll take as much as my memory allows i'll pick up
#
a few words from what you said so you're absolutely right about the restrictions right like so i'll
#
come to narrowness in in a second but you know i've said this earlier and i'll say this again
#
we especially i mean across the world but we especially in india have been comfortable
#
for millennia with the idea that knowledge belongs to only some people and so that and that is also
#
why we can comfortably live with that and we've lived comfortably with that so i think that
#
the gatekeeping was there and gatekeeping is there today too right and it plays out in different
#
ways of course because you know no two times are alike so so it's there and i i i will celebrate
#
the breakdown of any gatekeeping activity because i just don't think knowledge is a public good
#
knowledge is a common and it belongs to everybody and everybody should have access to it absolutely
#
no doubt the narrowness is a tricky one so i mean i myself have struggled against it against it
#
it that having said there is value to inquiry that is very very focused i want someone to
#
understand how the shoulder muscle in a female body works differently from a shoulder muscle
#
in a male body i want someone to desperately understand that because when they perform a
#
surgery on my shoulder if i mean they don't have to but you know if they do i want it to be done
#
properly and therefore i want them to spend years and months understanding why the anatomies differ
#
right not why sorry how the anatomies define therefore how the surgery needs to be done
#
and so i think there is value to that there is value of course also to be able to step out of
#
that and see something for its whole because the muscle is not ending at my shoulder right it's
#
wrapped around my you know shoulder blade it's it and so and effectively my entire muscular
#
structure is embedded and why you if you you know i mean we've seen how interventions that are highly
#
siloed actually have very sometimes very bad consequences and unintended ones so it would
#
be good for someone to understand then at the second stage after the surgery why this might be
#
attended to in a particular way so i think there's value to both and we must
#
we must pay attention to that the third thing is access and therefore
#
feeds back to the first point which is yes access wonderful i think access functions
#
differently for for us differently in time right like you and i have been through reasonably
#
rigorous education as you know as painful as it might have been as much as i didn't attend class
#
as much as you know all of that you overestimate my education i did a BA in english literature and
#
i didn't i attended four classes in my three years of doing that so i understand not remotely
#
rigorous okay but there was a structure to it right like there's something there so all i'm
#
trying to say is here is that not all one limited point that i want to make here is that that
#
structure allowed us to think about knowledge in a particular way
#
okay in ridiculous ways which include peer learning reading the kind of sources we looked at
#
discernment judgment critical judgment our skills we picked up along the way i'm not
#
saying that these skills come only from education they can come from elsewhere i mean
#
farming communities have them you know that's just to pick up a very random example potters
#
but podcasters have them too you know it's that skill across activities is something you develop
#
because you are told that in this time period of your life you're going to learn
#
right and so all sorts of things happen right so if at 15 i accessed michael sandals lectures
#
or whose lectures did you speak about sapolsky's lectures and
#
a flat earther's lectures i might not necessarily have the tools to differentiate because now
#
the medium is the same if i have production quality which like you said now everybody has
#
production quality on my iphone i can make a pretty decent movie then
#
if you haven't had the opportunity to consider
#
in a structured manner what discernment what judgment what knowing
#
one thing from the other right the difference i'm not even saying good better best whatever the
#
difference of one from there and by that difference might matter if you don't have that the
#
availability of all of these resources is is is in fact a hindrance right i mean if of course
#
growing up in a family with a piano as the sweets say i will know that michael sandal is at is at
#
harvard and you know the flat earther is sitting in some corner and i don't know which place to
#
this now but um you know fictional place let us leave absolutely sitting in a fictional place
#
and you know generating uh high quality or well not high quality high production quality online
#
material how do how do i tell right and then that fight becomes all the more difficult because
#
every story is not equal all material put out in the public domain is not equal how do you create
#
the ability for judgment right and i think that i'm not necessarily saying therefore go back to
#
the classroom all i'm saying is that how do we create in the public domain the ability for this
#
maybe it comes from all sorts of places comes from family comes from journalism but with
#
everything as you say in a way on the decline the world over right like not we're not even
#
this is not even india specific and everybody having the tools of amplification for their
#
opinions and their judgments it's hard to find place for an argument that is already
#
complicated right like we're like yeah but you know yes but no but yes but no but nobody's
#
gonna listen nobody's got the time i mean so i think it becomes all the harder all the more
#
harder and so yes knowledge is a common yes knowledge must be in the public domain but
#
so should we have the ability if not institutions to create i don't know what to
#
do enable the development of discernment of judgment of discretion of yeah
#
so one i i i'd say that i wasn't implying that there's a dichotomy i was just celebrating that
#
there is also this yes and i'd also sort of add a counterpoint to your you know sandal versus flat
#
author example and say that you know that's in a sense cherry picked examples because
#
completely completely academics has been so wrong in critical consequential ways about so
#
many things like the classic example that comes to mind is nutrition where you had these dangerous
#
studies in the 50s and 60s by people like ansel keys and there was another guy at harvard whose
#
name i forget funded by the sugar lobby which led to dietary guidelines being instituted by
#
whatever the government organization was in in 1977 and your obesity epidemic starts then
#
because what they are basically saying is sugar is fine fat is poison and it is the other way
#
around it is sugar which is poison and i and forget what has happened to the rest of the
#
world becoming obese i know this viscerally because at the end of 2021 i was diagnosed
#
with type 2 diabetes and at the end of 2022 i had reversed it through diet doing the exact opposite
#
of what the entire academic field had a scientific consensus on quote unquote as little as 15 years
#
ago right and it is great that in the marketplace of ideas there can be new voices which can
#
challenge those sort of and a similar for example place where academics was wrong and consequentially
#
wrong is perhaps in that ridiculous belief that population is a problem that population density
#
is a problem and it had a consequence because the fort foundation when they came to india in
#
the 50s and the 60s they were pushing for population control and so on and so forth
#
and it was such conventional wisdom that then sanjay gandhi did the horrendous monstrous things
#
that he did you uh this thing and i've written various pieces about it and i keep talking about
#
it but people are brains not stomachs right population density is great that is why people
#
go to cities where population density is far greater and so is so are opportunities and all
#
of that so just kind of pet rants and i think it's incredibly important therefore that a there
#
is a marketplace of ideas absolutely and like you said what we need to discern that a flat earth
#
other or an anti-vaxxer is talking nonsense is a scientific temperament and what is at least
#
happening is that i believe that many more people have access to learning about the scientific
#
temperament and what it involves now than they did in previous ages where a bunch of people who
#
went to universities would have would you know know about proper and falsifiability but nobody
#
else so yeah no i mean look asking asking important questions is sorry asking critical
#
questions is extremely important like asking questions of this research that you spoke about
#
on on nutrition and diet and diets right is extremely important i mean you know and and
#
therefore those questions i mean you're right i i picked up examples at the extremes only to
#
you know to make my to make a point but those questions need to be asked of academic research
#
too in fact that is in what drives but but you know academics can't ask those questions
#
you know everyone who questioned that consensus at that time that sugar is fine and fat is the
#
problem they were hounded out of academia and i think the more critical so again so what is
#
the answer to this question so the colleague uh senior well yeah senior colleague Naomi Oreskes
#
wrote a book called merchants of doubt which you know which spoke among other things of the
#
tobacco industry for example or also the debates around climate change for example right like an
#
talking about how you know the the sort of complicated coming together of of industry
#
of research of academia right and and consequential as you very rightly point out so asking i mean
#
so your fundamental point that accessibility makes that critical in critical view possible
#
is absolutely essential and i mean it's it's wonderful that we will be able to do that my
#
my thing is that how do you enable that asking that question right like just because that
#
information is available doesn't mean you're going to be able to ask that question right
#
and i think so so there i think i mean academia has has its own fault researchers have their own
#
faults i think i mean that's what drives my in a way desire to create an institution like
#
science gallery is i mean we keep saying you know for example one of the things what does it mean
#
to bring science back into culture is to enable asking critical questions right like ask when
#
you're given a vaccine right like what are the right questions to ask it's not about i'm going
#
to take this vaccine or not take this vaccine it's like who made it and was it made why was it made
#
who's participating who's funding what how many trials what is the norm for trials how do you
#
establish the protocol of questions to ask and then look for that corresponding information
#
when not available ask for it you know so effect so i think that needs to happen in the public
#
domain right and it's wonderful that it's happening that research is no longer
#
you know that the research pathway is no longer lab to papers papers to clinic i mean in the case
#
of medical medically relevant research and then clinic to you know the rx that you sheet that you
#
that you get and then you go to the pharmacy and that's that right like where uh and and occasionally
#
occasionally articles in in press i mean you know there are professions like art critic
#
film critic there's there's where are where is the science critics right like why don't we
#
think that is even a potentially useful profession to have i mean it almost sounds like what you're
#
talking about science critic it sounds like you know you want to promote anti-vax no i mean
#
if you can accept film criticism if you can accept art criticism if you can accept food criticism
#
why can't you accept science criticism i think one of the key structural problems are in big
#
media and i'll tell you exactly why you cannot have a science critic is that a science critic
#
would have to at some level know a lot about science right and want to find out about science
#
and the problem is because of the way the media industry is structured today more and more media
#
houses are you know the journalists are generalists you know there are all those pressures of volume
#
if you have to do one story every day one day you do science next day you go and interview some
#
influencer and blah blah blah and the way the structure and you know beats are disappearing
#
earlier you'd have those beats you'd have your science beat you would have your whatever beat
#
you know there are a few like you know people like priyanka pulla and there are other
#
you know journalists who are like she writes about the medical industry and so on and so forth
#
so you have a few people like that in a few places but by and large they are disappearing
#
but anyone can still go out there and make those critiques which is great you don't have to depend
#
on the mainstream media but you know the other problem and and here i'll take a negative view
#
is that we are perhaps today engaged in deep narrative battles when nobody knows what the
#
hell is true what the hell is false it's too much for a common person to figure out
#
you know if you tell me that you know hey male shoulder is different from female shoulder in
#
this way and somebody else will say no no shoulder is a shoulder and a third person will say its
#
problem is not with your shoulder it's your gut bacteria and it's just way too much i can't
#
figure out what's happening fourth guy will say use blockchain so yeah yeah yeah absolutely
#
absolutely you know you're totally right i mean it's it's also this bombardment right like of
#
opinions that people have and so in a sense what you're left with is i mean how do i how do i sift
#
through all of this how do i parse what is meaningful out of this and i think that is hard
#
work you know just like in journalism you're saying you know beats are disappearing or dedicated sort
#
of you know people who will look at a particular domain are disappearing i mean it takes it takes
#
work it takes work to establish that kind of reporting or writing it takes work to establish
#
to establish that kind of judgment also in your own life where you're when you have 20 different
#
things being thrown at you i mean i guess there is no formula but the first thing you probably
#
sift through is what's relevant for me to think about now or what's important or significant for
#
me to think about now and then sort of you know follow that particular rabbit's trail you know
#
because otherwise there's just so much i mean it's like a camera right like basically you've
#
captured an image and there are a billion things in it where do i look and i think i recently bought
#
this funky new camera called the insta 360 so it basically takes a 360 degree view so i could set
#
it up here and it would take both of us and it would take both of us in the same frame because
#
you know you can manipulate it that way and it would take everything up and down so it is exactly
#
what you're talking about in an actual sort of sense and it's it's mad it's absolutely mad
#
because i think even our sight functions because we are able to filter out many things that
#
you know we are not concerned with at that particular moment our eyes are drawn to certain
#
things and you know we we because of various sort of reasons you know yeah no it's it's uh
#
it's we we are increasingly trying to make things easy and i think we're losing a lot in that and i
#
think the you know the thing that that it takes effort and that one has to go through discomfort
#
i think is something gosh i sound like an old man women can be men too so i know i'll go on to
#
sort of my next question uh double clicking on what you said about we want to make things easy
#
people don't want to work hard it takes hard work and i think that can also come down to the
#
way we look at history where the classic danger for someone who hasn't studied history when they
#
look at history is to commit the hindsight bias and assume that everything is inevitable because
#
you know we have to think about the future in a probabilistic way but everything that has
#
happened in the past we think of it i mean it's happened hundred percent or it's happened zero
#
percent so yeah you know it was almost destined to be and this is a mistake as you have pointed
#
that even historians make that you have to be careful of avoiding teleological narratives as
#
if everything was going in a particular way you've quoted you know with reference to the nuclear age
#
you've quoted jeff hughes saying the nuclear age is only now coming to be understood as a contingent
#
accomplishment rather than an inevitable outcome of scientific activity stop quote and you know
#
which tells you there are so many other things to bear on it and not just what scientists are
#
doing in their labs and you speak about how one of the things one of the misconceptions
#
that you wanted to fight at the start of writing atomic state was that the peaceful nuclear
#
explosion of 1974 almost seemed to imply a teleological narrative that everything that
#
was happening in nuclear physics in india was inevitably in inexorably going in that direction
#
and that is not true at all it's an incredibly complex story and you simply cannot boil it down
#
to that so tell me a little bit about then as a historian you know i guess there is a trade-off
#
that obviously if you have any kind of rigor and you don't want to commit the mistake of
#
deciding on a narrative before you even begin and you know laying a framework down
#
but at the same time you do need something to anchor you i'm guessing or can you just
#
enter the material and say that i'll just collect collect collect and then things will
#
form in my mind and then i'll you know so what is that process like because you know we've got
#
great stories in your book but what you've done is you've really embraced that complexity
#
i cannot for example scheme the pages of your book and get a simple story right which i can
#
put down in a paragraph there's a lot of shit going on and and you've you know told those
#
stories very lucidly and evocatively and made some of those human beings really come alive so
#
thank you for that because i enjoyed that so what was that process like of learning to do
#
history learning to write learning to think about history so i wasn't a historian when i started
#
studying history of science right like so for for proper historians i'm not a proper historian
#
neither is ramchandra guha it's okay credentialism is simple absolutely absolutely but i mean i i
#
don't know anyone else who works in the archives like he does i mean he's you know he's constantly
#
in the archive amazing really amazing so it was yeah so i think writing history if i now look back
#
at you know the effort little effort that i've put into it what emerges is that it's always
#
striking a balance between what story is there to identifying what story is there to tell
#
but always being aware of the fact that your criteria for relevance are going to be in
#
conflict with what ideas of relevance and significance your historical actors had
#
right and how do you then sort of establish a relationship between those two because there's
#
no writing away either right like and there is no i mean there is no such thing as you know you go
#
to an archive you find the documents whatever you know patchy documents you find and then
#
the story emerges right because it doesn't you go there because you chose to go there you chose
#
those documents because you know whatever so in a sense you are you are driving the story
#
one should never forget that your concerns arise from the present one can't forget that i mean you
#
know the quote that you you know generously read right now it you know tells you why i wanted to
#
write that book at all and while i might have been sort of you know somewhat successful in bringing
#
out what they thought was relevant at that point of time and therefore that you know the bomb was
#
the only relevant thing the fact that i wanted to tell the story is a very presentist concern
#
right like that that story was even important for me to tell or for us to want to consider
#
important is because something happened long after they were doing their work right like
#
at least 20 25 odd years after they started their work so that's so i think striking the balance
#
between what we consider what was considered relevant by historical actors and what you
#
consider relevant and being aware of the presentism that you bring to the table because
#
it's not only about what i consider relevant it's also i'm a product of my time i am a limited i'm
#
a creature limited by what i have learned and what i know i mean how dare i even presume that i will
#
know what like 20 individuals at that point in time in history knew or wanted or considered
#
relevant right like it's a great act of hubris to even think you can right so being aware of that
#
is is very very important but at the same time wanting to do justice right like
#
even when you critique someone to to be fair in your critique right like to
#
to not leave documents out to not leave evidence out right i mean i remember having a
#
sort of very very heated argument with a colleague of mine in at georgiatech
#
who was writing about well the details don't matter but essentially he wanted to leave one
#
document out because he said oh this is the only document where they mentioned that they wanted to
#
run this thing as a business
#
i was like how can you leave that out you cannot not because i want to come down heavily on what
#
you're writing about to say oh it was a business no that's not but that they were aware that this
#
was potentially among other things also a business is not something you can you cannot and so i think
#
that's why in a way approaching the document with an answer is a is a we know is a bad thing
#
i mean everybody will agree to that but being aware of what potential answers you already have
#
in your mind right even after you say you won't do it that is the that is the that is the battle so
#
i think i mean just sort of and how do you call it just speaking about labor of doing history
#
i mean i'm a how do you call it i'm nuts about you know how i manage the archival documents if
#
i get them all i am a tree killer because i can't read online very happily i'm just not able to i
#
need to scribble i need to sort of organize whatever so i get archival documents i maintain
#
them the way they came from the archive but i make photocopies of them and then i organize all of them
#
chronologically and mix it all up and then i read them one after the other because in time
#
they happen one after the other and then i sort of see what's happening who's you know and in some
#
cases when there are letters their answers two letters or references two letters from here to
#
their reports that mention letters reports that mention people and it kind of begins to
#
begins to fall in place and i think so that's sort of the starting point and then what happens after
#
that i have no idea but at the end of it is a is usually a chapter or a book
#
yeah but it's a lot of a lot of back and forth between the archival document and the paragraphs
#
you have a kind of knowledge management system you use i don't actually this is my this is my
#
system i i've toyed several times with the idea of softwares and different kinds of tools especially
#
after most archives allowed you to take started allowing you to take photographs
#
and so you come back with tons of photographs which means basically i mean earlier i at least
#
understood my archive now i go i click pictures i come back and i have no clue
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right because i'm like okay this file is relevant i'm taking pictures pictures pictures pictures
#
right like where as earlier we read you take notes and you know whatever so i think that
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relationship with the archive is a little broken the software etc might help organize except i just
#
um no hasn't worked for me yet what you you know mentioned earlier about the argument you had with
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your colleague in georgia where you felt that he knew that there was this one document but it didn't
#
suit his narrative so he wasn't going to include it and that of course is really common in journalism
#
where journalists have much less time much less rigor in india much less training so often they
#
will decide on a narrative for a story for example you could decide you're going to do a hit job on
#
someone and you'll speak to 50 people and you'll quote the five people who have something bad to
#
say about the person and you leave the other 45 out and what i always what i am beginning to
#
recommend and i've written a piece about and good data journalists like rukmini s and pramil
#
bhattacharya do this is that when they do a data story they also do a data dump of all the background
#
data they had so that if the reader wants she can go online herself and check that out and i've and
#
i've recommended that journalists also do this i mean as long as you're not compromising someone's
#
identity or off the record stuff or all of that keeping that aside you put everything out there
#
so the reader can then judge so the reader can judge is there a bias is there a different way
#
of constructing the story yes and is that uh is that a practice do you think it should be
#
a practice in say academia as well where for example if you're writing a book and you've got
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8000 photocopies of things or photographs or whatever that you also put it online with this
#
thing so that if someone else wants to go through the material and construct the narrative slightly
#
differently or find a nuance that perhaps you missed because there's so much material that
#
that possibility kind of becomes open and i think doing something like that would also set a good
#
incentive for either journalists or the academics themselves because they would know that scrutiny
#
is much more possible and therefore any bias that there is is a bias that you're practically
#
declaring by putting all the background stuff on them so i mean the sciences they do that already
#
right like all experimental data usually is sort of you know when they publish in journals they
#
put it in i mean for archives it becomes difficult right because the material is often either owned
#
by or in copyright of you know and and sometimes you have to get permissions to access certain
#
archives because they are not made open etc so in effect it's not your property right like it's
#
not data that you have generated it's data that you've accessed so it's it's uh it's hard to put
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it up like that and in my case i've seen even for my film right like i've got hours of interviews
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with people it i mean i'd have to seek their permission before i put it up online and they
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you know they speak about all sorts of things i mean you know so you never know what might come
#
and hold them later etc that having said these archives are open right like just like i could
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access i mean unless it's it's you unless when you seek special permission and someone else
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is actually denied that permission for whatever reason most archives are open right like especially
#
i mean the european and the american ones are absolutely open the indian ones are a little
#
more tricky to access but some archives are and you can go you can look up those documents so if
#
you're interested you always can find that i mean although in india again we haven't had that
#
you know to come back to the narcissism of small differences where you know you have
#
you don't have the 20 biographies of Churchill or the 56 biographies of Da Vinci where you know you
#
actually say no you but you know that even he wrote that letter to that person i doubted he
#
was drunk he was sad or he was broken he was you know whatever and this came from this place you
#
know we we're not we're not even got anywhere close to that unfortunately yet but the archive
#
is technically accessible and open but you're right i mean you know if it was right in the
#
public domain again some archives are putting up scanned documents online less so in india more
#
so abroad but like i mean the gandhi papers are open for example right like and so so the
#
yes umberto's volumes are open so the more that begins to happen you're right that you know
#
someone actually finds something disturbing or astonishing or wonderful they can go and look at
#
the original source and make up their own mind about you know or learn more simply learn more
#
and you know delve deeper into something yeah no it would be it would be good yes yeah i don't know
#
how that would happen i mean you know i call myself a tree killer but i mean you know imagine
#
the energy required behind every single publication to put up all of that you should come and see my
#
apartment it's only paper and books sounds like paradise but no no it's not it's not it's not i
#
know because no you know so this is what i'm realizing now i mean after you know five years
#
of deprivation near deprivation i mean i've been reading some but not not not close enough and
#
writing next to nothing is that some of it actually comes in the way of of getting ahead
#
so in fact i'm going to now send away about i don't i think about 15 books
#
15 boxes of books small like you know two feet by two feet to to a library that a that a bunch
#
of friends run so that you know books that destroyed my mind can also destroy some other
#
young minds and and i'm going to call paper and you know there are certain there were certain
#
projects that i thought at certain points that i would do like the history of aeronautics project
#
for example which i you know eventually ended up just writing a chapter in in fact for rams
#
fish rift i don't think i'm going to pursue it any further so i don't think it makes sense to
#
keep any of that paper i'm just going to give it away and you know just keep a digital copy at
#
least i don't know i don't know see i mean you know i've got probably what another 15 maybe 17
#
years with lots of assumptions built in uh i'm saying put a digital copy out there rather than
#
give the papers to a archive or so so might well make them open and available but if you just make
#
it digital and upload it it's just there in the cloud forever anybody can access it at any time
#
possibly i'll have to scan it i have no bandwidth yeah let's now talk about
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science in india in in a slightly different sense a role that science plays in the culture and there
#
are a number of different aspects to this that you've written about and spoken about so let's go
#
over them one by one and for the first i want to take a quote from your book where you quoted
#
shanti swaroop bhatnagar and he wrote in 1941 the fate of the jewish scientific workers in germany
#
is one out of the many glaring examples of the fact that science is not allowed to live up to
#
its reputation as a profession of seekers after knowledge and truth owing to the comparatively
#
lower degree of growth of the moral side of our modern civilization stop quote indicating that
#
there is this kind of conflict where culture and civilization is one thing and science is
#
kind of something else and in fact i think you critiqued him for implying that science was more
#
modern than modernity itself but leaving that aside if i look at it in an indian context
#
you know i recently did an episode which was extremely popular when very gratifyingly so
#
about with dr abby phillips who's known as a liver doctor on twitter where we took on what is known
#
as alternative medicine though we'd rather call it quackery and we took on and spoke of the dangers
#
of homeopathy siddha and ayurveda you know which otherwise get a good rap people even think of
#
you know ayurveda as oh this is you know traditional medicine and it's fine and it's
#
herbs and they are harmless but 80 percent of ayurveda medicines contain giloy and there are
#
like more than a hundred papers we're showing how dangerous that is it's one of the leading
#
causes of lead poisoning in this country you know they go through none of the scrutiny that
#
proper medicines go in terms of testing and regulation and all of that and it's just
#
dangerous and yet for most people there is this warm fuzzy feeling that this is part of our culture
#
this is part of our tradition and so on and science is just something happening in a lab
#
somewhere it is removed from our lives so you know chavanprash which by the way is
#
i think is banned in canada you know it's a part of every household almost it's almost like a
#
cultural thing you know and and yet science is not part of our lives in such an organic way
#
right and i know you and you've spoken about eloquently about how that is one of the things
#
the science gallery is trying to change you're trying to change the engagement with science
#
that is not just something you think of in a professional sense but it is
#
part of our everyday lives we are dealing with it every day we are thinking about stuff you know
#
and so what is your sense of how that is happening because in a sense india like inhabits three
#
centuries at once right 1920 or 21st and science and the scientific temperament is just a very tiny
#
aspect of this and even there like dr phillips was at pains to point out that he knows cardiologists
#
who will recommend homeopathy or ayurveda even though you've imagined that boss they've done
#
that degree they've spent all those years learning science if they are cardiologists but still they
#
are recommending that quackery which indicates that everything they learned was in the typical
#
classic indian rote learning kind of way you dig the boxes you go through the motions but you
#
don't really internalize scientific method or scientific principles and all of that so it just
#
seems that even in the community of scientists science is not internalized right so tell me a
#
little bit more about what because i'm sure you you obviously thought about this at way more depth
#
so tell me a little bit about you know the this very superficial distant role that science plays
#
in our culture and what are the possible ways of ameliorating it like what do you see what are the
#
things that can be done this is a minefield right this is a minefield at in at several levels in
#
several different registers let me try to see how many how much i can actually answer let me start
#
by saying that i think discredited knowledge has no has or should have no place in well in in you
#
know in medicine or in anything right like what has been discredited and i'm and i'm talking about
#
discredited i'm not talking about sort of you know necessarily discarded because you know further
#
work was not done or anything like that discredited people can of course still pick it up when new
#
tools and new perspectives and new ideas emerge and that can be examined again and you know
#
whatnot but their circulation in the public domain is counterproductive if they have been
#
sufficiently rigorously discredited i'm aware right now acutely that i am walking the rope of
#
mixing the normative and the analytical right like so having a perspective so as a historian
#
for example as a historian of science for example what is interesting to me or what you know what
#
what should be interesting to me is when is something called science and when is something
#
not called science and why that might why that matter to the historical actors who debated about
#
it and to what consequence as a historian of science i'm not expected to and i don't want
#
myself to opine on what is science and what is not science and whether something is to be discredited
#
and or discarded or not it's not what i do what i do is i understand when and why and how that
#
happens now of course then i go and suicidally sign up to make science gallery bengaluru right
#
so how does one negotiate with that right and i i think i still want to maintain my historian's
#
position that this is interesting for me to learn more about about how also how also the
#
how also practicing scientists draw draw lines between science and non-science discredited and
#
credited legible and illegible legitimate and illegitimate all of that right like so that's
#
interesting nonetheless to me and i'd like to be able to maintain that perspective but obviously
#
i can't no longer i can no longer just stop at that right because i have to do something with it
#
if i'm saying on the one hand that i want science to inhabit everyday life and culture as you very
#
sort of eloquently summarized actually i don't think i've summarized it in quite that way you've
#
summarized it much better these are all practically your words no no no so uh you know so so if i if
#
i want that to happen then i have to have a stand on what needs to be what can occupy the public
#
domain and whatnot because i'm going to take that i am taking that decision on a pretty much daily
#
basis and that's extremely hard now again historians of science have a very nice tool
#
see how i'm buying time which is you know what is science science is what scientists do
#
right but again you'll come back to the thing of so what then right like now now what and i think
#
coming back to what i started with i think what has been discredited like you know products that
#
contain things like lead stuff that is harmful to health etc and is established simply must be
#
there have to be regulatory bodies that you know make sure that such ideas and products are no
#
longer available in the market there's a ministry called the ministry of ayush which is set up not
#
to regulate but to promote these industries and these products in the earlier of in the early
#
years of independence also ayurved and siddha and yudhani and siddha was promoted right like as as
#
forms of medicine that you know and as in china i mean barefoot doctors and traditional chinese
#
medicine for example right like so it's i think regulation right like so research and research
#
backed regulation must be put in place right like and that has to function as that and that has to
#
be weeded out that said i think open-ended questions should still find place in the domain
#
of research not necessarily in the domain of practice to be played with to be understood and
#
then allowed or not allowed in you know through through fair regulation you know because if you
#
you know if you think of it right like we i mean just yesterday i was at a meeting where people
#
were talking continuously about western science right and i'm like what is this thing there's
#
just western science right because i mean i have colleagues who are writing papers about when
#
science became western right like i mean in a sense when when europe in a way claimed the authorship
#
for producing a knowledge system now there's no doubt that a lot of work happened in europe but
#
the paradigms as they were being built were had been and were continuously in conversation with
#
knowledge systems elsewhere so i mean if you you know the most cited example is that of the
#
hottest malabarikas where there are tables with sanskrit i think tamil and malayalam names for
#
botanical specimens that were taken from india to the netherlands so now if that was knowledge that
#
was you know absorbed into a larger system and made a part of you know whatever the legitimacy
#
of that the the power equation all of that the epistemic justice of all of you know the questions
#
of epistemic justice that that gives rise to i mean all of those things aside
#
lock stock and barrel or baby and baby bath water bathtub you know out of the window is also perhaps
#
not the right approach to take because what at the end of the day is is is knowledge it's an engagement
#
with the physical world around you with nature of which we are a part and we want to understand it
#
and you know human beings have tried to do that in different ways in different locations at different
#
times in different ways at this moment we are working with a system that has been formalized
#
over the last 400 odd years 450 odd years and that has been fed with data and we all know data is not
#
neutral data answers questions that have been asked of nature that has been fed into it that
#
has been systematized and there are conclusions or there are how do you say truth claims
#
right provisional truth claims that are forwarded at every step which are either then disproved
#
and discarded or put aside not even discarded or put aside for further use or no use or taken
#
forward so if this if this kind of generosity is possible to assume for processes of knowledge
#
production then to sort of without any qualifications rule out everything
#
because the political moment in a way expects you to if you want to you know may take a stand
#
is also problematic I think the way I would say is you know think of this couple of things
#
one is that one is not saying that this system is better than that system yes one is simply
#
saying that science is paramount and there it's a very clear binary for example when it comes to
#
medicine it's a binary I will take a medicine if it's passed a double blind randomized control
#
test and it's proven to work if it hasn't I won't take it now I don't care what the origin is
#
the origin could be an ancient knowledge system or the origin could be what is coming out of you know
#
modern medicine labs and all that I don't care about the origin show me through the scientific
#
method that it works so that's one point it's a clear binary there and there is no prejudice
#
about origin or anything like that and the other way of thinking about but not everyone's asking
#
that question not everyone's asking that question and everyone should the other way of thinking
#
about it is that prima facie I am more likely to trust a medicine that is based on a scientific
#
understanding that I know to be correct right Ayurveda originated at a time uh in fact centuries
#
before the germ theory was known before we why we knew why diseases was so all the root cause
#
explanations are voodoo they are just wrong right we know that now so if somebody you know you
#
cannot give me a plausible explanation for why x ayurvedic medicine works there is no explanation
#
that goes to any root causes that make sense because the root causes we now know are all wrong
#
you know homeopathy was based on things like the memory of water and blah blah blah again germ
#
theory and all of that wasn't there so prima facie there should be distrust but there should
#
be an openness to accepting whatever the scientific method tells you which is i think a problem in
#
the sense of having you know when i saw the uh massive response to the episode abby and i did
#
i just feel that people don't talk about it so much but more and more people are really getting
#
it you know and somebody heard the episode and said i i threw every ayurvedic episode medicine
#
i was in my house i flushed it down when i heard the episode and thought about it which was sort
#
of gratifying the other thing is that when you say more regulation is required at a normative
#
level that is like saying we should have world peace which is like yeah fine uh you know i know
#
i think i mean regulation of drugs that enter the market as medicine labeled as medicine not not
#
cosmetic not herbal tea medicine i mean that's not world peace that's that's i mean that's that's
#
how the pharmaceutical industry runs no but in india it is in india if you want ayurveda and
#
homeopathy to be regulated that is as elusive as world peace right you literally have a ministry
#
which is uh promoting them and going after uh people like abby and myself you know i had the
#
ministry of hayush complained to the times of india about a column i wrote just imagine you
#
know a ministry complaining actually going after critics but that's not even the central point i'm
#
saying that doesn't matter even if we uh even if the state takes an unscientific stand it doesn't
#
matter because what is more important is the state in a sense is supply responding to demand
#
and i am more interested in sort of cultural attitude towards this stuff that is what really
#
matters and and that is where you know i'm interested in seeing that is there any kind
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of change possible is it changing because then what happens is that especially in these fraud
#
political times if you criticize a system that has come down from centuries and is in a sense
#
you can cast it as part of tradition then it almost becomes a nationalistic question you know
#
people could then say that hey you're being anti-national you are a deep deracinated western
#
elite type of person which is actually true but you know so uh all these other complicated
#
questions get in of politics and all these other narrative which are all the registers in which
#
science functions anyway yeah yeah no no absolutely yeah no i mean look i mean people
#
will have to ask questions i mean i'm hesitant to so again you know with my historian's hat on
#
i am i am hesitant to say that's a discredited system entirely and therefore we want nothing
#
to do with it because today it's colored so much that it becomes a vineyard colored so much by what
#
the political movement demands of it or expects of it is that you know essentially that there is no
#
other way to say yes or no right like and that binary is problematic because if knowledge from
#
a system that existed a while ago fed into what has become you know new knowledge then
#
it that system wasn't necessarily entirely false but i'm not talking about systems i'm talking
#
about i'm talking about i mean the binary i'm talking about is between the scientific method
#
and what is the scientific method well in the in the context of medicine the scientific method
#
very clearly would be see most people wouldn't consider medicine as proper science
#
but it's following the method of falsification it's you've got your double blind randomized
#
control trials so all of that is happening so i mean i don't know what i mean it's not pure
#
sciences it's not nuclear physics but i'm just saying that when you talk about the scientific
#
method and scientific thinking so again i'm not talking about systems you know i i don't really
#
care putting a label i mean you know people will say for example like when you say discredited
#
you know it's like for example some people have the mistaken notion that atheism
#
means that you don't believe in god that in your eyes god is discredited that's not what
#
atheism means it is an is an absence of belief you know it is as it is not a belief in the same
#
way that not collecting stamps is not a hobby right it is an absence of belief so similarly
#
i ask for that same skepticism when it comes to any medicine that is given completely agree
#
i completely agree i think that kind of skepticism and that kind of question
#
has to be asked of no matter what be it medicine be it astronomy be it you know how your pencil
#
works be it how your new bike works be it your new car i mean if we didn't ask those questions
#
we would have never found out that volkswagen was was you know manipulating the emission data
#
of their of their of their car engines for example right so no i completely i mean i i think those
#
questions need to be asked of no matter what whatever and i there should be no room for doubt
#
there what's the response to the science gallery to the things that you are doing because the the
#
response that i would hope for is just a response where i would expect childlike joy in some people
#
to get in there and you know so tell me a little bit about that so i'll tell you you know it's
#
going to sound really mushy when i say this but i am going to say it because i mean we've existed
#
we're a young institution we started programming just before the pandemic so in a sense we haven't
#
been around that long and the bulk of our programming has happened during the pandemic online
#
right so the very first exhibition that we did was called elements and it was a to mark 150
#
years of mendeleev's periodic table and you know we tried to kind of make bring the periodic table
#
alive we did a range of things and we held it at the rangoli metro art center so it's a gallery
#
like sort of structure that's created just below the mg road metro station in bangalore here
#
and so random people who were just walking around walked in and walked out you know and they saw the
#
so it was an audience that didn't come to a museum like space or an exhibition they're just people
#
walking around and they're like oh yes something's happening let me go in went out and i think this
#
was day four and it was a 10 day long exhibition was day four and a family of four walked in
#
mother father son daughter like you know it's almost like the pictures given to you
#
and you know they looked like a family that didn't lack much but they were certainly not wealthy
#
and they walked out of the exhibition space they sat there was a little bench like thing there they
#
sat all of them there now just doing my usual thing of here there whatever whatever and then
#
i saw the girl go and we had a box for suggestions and all our programming is for free right like
#
so the end user should not pay for it i saw the girl go to the box and put a 100 rupee note in there
#
i saw the girl go to the box and put a 100 rupee note in there
#
and i was like did they misunderstand that that was for collecting contributions whatever because
#
we've not said anything like that and so i smiled and i said you know did you enjoy
#
and the mother said we've never seen anything like this before
#
it was really a very very very touching moment
#
and so you know and then we gave t-shirts to those two kids and you know we gave them
#
sort of posters at the periodic table whatever but it was it was you know it it convinced me
#
what we were doing was worth doing and we've continued that there's been there's been that
#
there's been great joy i mean they've been young kids so so the second exhibition you know so with
#
the public lectures so you know we the what do i mean by research festival right like it's a it's
#
at the heart of it is an exhibition at the heart of which are several exhibits the exhibits are
#
cracked open at two ends workshops and master classes with people who make it
#
workshops at the other end to ask new questions from that place public lectures tutorials public
#
lectures of people across disciplines so you know historians filmmakers film festival discussions
#
between scholars and filmmakers performances so we had you know rahul ram for example come and
#
talk about so you know he has a phd in toxicology and he spoke about so his journey from toxicology
#
to narmada bachawandolan to indian ocean and then singing folk songs about water basically his whole
#
life only is toxicology you know it was fabulous right like and and so you know so to have someone
#
like him talk about water as opposed to you know saying oh water is this water is that you know
#
water dams this place and you know there are folk songs like just wonderful right and and of course
#
I mean he's charismatic and whatnot so we have that layer and so we closed our exhibition on
#
contagion with contagion cabaret we had you know hamlet during psyche etc so we have all of that
#
so that's during the tutorial sessions we get scholars the idea was intergenerational
#
conversation because young people who are not in a university you know in a high ranking university
#
will not get the chance to talk to an expert one-on-one so we have like a we restricted it
#
to a group of 15 to 20 euro sorry 15 to 20 in number age group of course 15 to 30 maximum
#
and then they sit in a room after the lecture where there's been a public Q&A talking to the
#
person and then they would ask questions the whole idea is get them to ask questions there's
#
a set of readings also around which they convert those questions like why did you do what you do
#
why this research question did you fail did you did your parents force you to do this you know
#
things like that right you're creating competition for me
#
so you know there were times when the kids would not let the lecturer leave for like two hours
#
and they stayed right they stayed and i had one professor from the indian institute of science say
#
you know i got one or two questions here that were better than the ones i got at academic conferences
#
and i think you know that speaks so there's hunger there's desire there's aspiration more
#
than anything else there's aspiration so so far i have to say the only complaints we have is from
#
people who are over the age of 30 saying why can't we participate or from parents of much younger
#
children well young children younger than 15 oh well sorry yeah young people younger than 15
#
saying but my child is a prodigy and my child can understand this and my child should participate
#
and younger children need this more younger children should participate and you know why
#
aren't you kind of with all the complainants here you know but you know the thing is you can't do
#
everything and everything i think we need to build bridges with other institutions there need to be
#
more other institutions so yes but let me put it this way we haven't had negative responses so far
#
i mean keeping my fingers crossed and knock on wood that you know
#
none of that comes our way you know i'm just thinking aloud that you know you spoke about all
#
the troubles you had in the last five years and how it's sometimes so frustrating and makes you
#
so angry and all that and i'm just thinking that something that people say about forecasters and
#
something that i say about people in the creator economy and i think is you know could be true of
#
you as well is that sometimes we tend to overestimate the short term and underestimate
#
the long term oh god yeah yeah yeah so you know that if there is that scope for that one family
#
to come in and be blown away every family is that family so the possibilities you know as we were
#
talking about totally totally i mean you're you're right and there are days like that
#
and then there are other days you know because you have to get through them right like that's
#
the thing you have to get through them and yeah do you see yourself as playing the long game
#
i mean i i've just signed up to do this for another five years yeah but even five isn't
#
long but do you sometimes think that you know because i think what and i was discussing this
#
with rohani nilikani when i spoke to her yesterday fellow elfin stronian of yours oh god all of you
#
people yeah same small so and and about how when a lot of people get into the social sector
#
if they have come from the corporate sector it's hard for them to adjust because they want that
#
immediate gratification which you get in the corporate world right and here very often there
#
is no i mean sometimes there is immediate gratification sometimes you see your family
#
tearing up but sometimes there is no immediate gratification you have the faith that 20
#
years down the line that some kid who is who is walking in today maybe that same kid who put the
#
100 buck note in 20 years later 30 years later she's somebody big somewhere not even a scientist
#
but maybe a politician maybe a bureaucrat who's been shaped by what you started right so in that
#
sense do you think of the long game does does it you know how hard is it sometimes these trouble
#
the short-term troubles that kind of come up and and is it like a lonely path you sometimes feel
#
extremely lonely it's extremely lonely and i think it's true for anyone who works in a position of
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this kind right because so you know in fact i was summing it up to a friend a couple of months ago
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that you know i report to a board and i recruit and mentor a team i have no peers and coming from
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academia you're used to working with peers i mean that's a sort of a peer saturated world to the
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point where you want to get rid of some of them this is you know no peers right like i mean there
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are bangalore interestingly now has a number of female museum directors and we were we were on a
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panel for the first time in december was it december or january i think january yeah the
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decan harold organized a panel and we were we were all on the on the stage thought you know but the
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thing is i think while i can talk to them about the institution building part of it
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i come to it with those those questions that i spoke about at the start right like i want to
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think about building that relationship to the object of scientific inquiry for example
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so i have an ambition of this project which is you know despite my so-called claim to changing
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careers and switching not switching gears actually to changing cars i carry a lot of weight
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with me right not all of it is good but some of it is very very worthwhile having like i really
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want to do that work i really want to address this i want to do the beginning of this thing
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right and again it's not a beginning as in the first time because there are several people who
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question this i have i am incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to build something
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you know at least a sort of small but significant scale to say this needs to be done right
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so i think there it's hard to find peers because those who are in the science i mean those who are
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in academia invested in a different kind of reward system and career game those who are in the museum
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world are invested in a different kind of reward system and you know growth path so
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i thought i yeah so it's it's hard to find peers i found friends which is which again is a strange
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thing because at this age i didn't expect to kind of you know in five years have a few few friends
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which you know don't keep them for life but no i don't have peers
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in your in cyclotron there is this funny bittersweet kind of moment also an inspiring
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moment when the boxes arrive right and the boxes arrive and hans and govind and all are like okay
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now what the fuck do we do because it's just pieces they have no idea how to put it together
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they have to figure out how to put it together so possibilities are endless but yeah first you
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got to put it together make everything work do you feel like that do you feel that the box is
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opened and now how do i put this yeah and in fact actually you know i mean it's both amusing and
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actually quite good that you see that because you know it is right because these boxes now
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for building the gallery are historical boxes like the ramen lab the you know the the wundakama
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and the old museum bagate of history of science are learning from the indian system sort of you
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know all of it is kind of in those boxes together and how does it all come together right like and
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yes you don't know right you don't know because you haven't seen it so it is kind of somewhat
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like that especially i think you know when once the building opens how is the lab complex going
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to work with the exhibition complex and you know and i and i i was like i need a building which is
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like a fishbowl because i want people who are coming to see the exhibition walk past the labs
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and see how messy smelly grindy science you know science work is and so build like a visual
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relationship to them etc etc etc i mean i've been a nightmare to my architects not that they've not
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been a nightmare to me to to get this done right oh how it will play out and how people will use
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it and i think a dear friend who keeps reminding me that you know yes all of this sounds really
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fabulous and all of this is really exciting it's exciting to you and me but just be prepared for
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the fact that when people eventually walk into the building both the public as well as people
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the fellows who use the labs they will have their own plans and you have to be ready to let go
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to for for what has to emerge to let it emerge itself and i i think again like i was theoretically
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ready to work in india when i move back i'm theoretically ready for that to happen
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i don't know how things will be when that actually happens because you know it's it
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it doesn't happen in a straightforward way right like you get hurt on the nose you get bruised
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along the way things fail things blow up you know those things will happen there's absolutely no
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doubt in my mind that will but in the end if it kind of assembles itself in an interesting way
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such that in 20 years 30 years you know it's an it looks like it was worthwhile to have
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created this experiment but also i think before that already in the near future if
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people from outside begin to empirically understand what they at least some of our
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colleagues have said to us which is that they said you know i mean one of my colleagues at
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the natural history museum in london said you guys are pushing museological boundaries
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you know like what you're pushing the boundaries of what a public space for science should look
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like and i mean for me i'm borrowing historical ideas but what is emerging is not that which
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is emerging is new and i don't know what that is because i am not the only user in it right
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and so yeah so you know ready for it excited for it repetitions repetition more of
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of not that the use will be different but that it will fall into
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it will fall into becoming something we are already so familiar with like
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like an incubator for prototyping or you know an exhibition where people go and like you know
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nothing against sort of you know places of worship but like go do darshan and leave
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right like come see the exhibition work out nothing has changed
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that i think would that will destroy me but again i mean i wouldn't be the first person
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to be destroyed by something that didn't get realized so it's fine i mean you know
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it'll be fine i mean i won't be fine but it'll be fine so that's yeah it's
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it'll be fine you'll be fine you know i gotta i gotta yeah yeah it's kind of eerie how much
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you're like me in this sort of pessimistic negative kind of way but you know i'm sitting
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across you and you know i was watching all your videos obviously on youtube and everywhere where
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you've spoken and the one thing that struck me is when you spoke about the science gallery when you
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spoke about this work there was just so much passion there was so much joy on your face and
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i'm seeing that now so you know how can it not work of course it will work because it's not
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dependent only on me you know very little work and uh you know i should tell my listeners that
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you know you mentioned the messy sweaty gritty business of science and one of the things that
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struck me about cyclotron is that in the first couple of minutes i was thinking
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because i could hear the background hum of the machine and uh you know there were parts where
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i could hear some static electricity kind of thing happening and i was thinking
#
but then i realized at about the 10th minute that it's deliberate it's deliberate because you're
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recreating that mahal that life that environment and it works so beautifully all the way through
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and you know the different places where they come up so you know so just a film made with so much
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integrity and this is something that a lot of people won't notice right that they'll be like
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but you know you went with it anyway so kudos for that a bunch of final questions and uh the first
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one is that if there are people of any age listening to this and thinking that yeah man
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you know she's right science has not been a part of my life it's been some arcane thing that's out
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there or whatever but now i want it to be part of my life it sounds like so much fun you know i want
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it too so what can they do with intentionality what can a common person like me do to embrace
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science and bring it into their lives so i think i'm going to sound so trite when i say this but
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be curious right be curious and be be curious and skeptical of whatever is thrown at you that's the
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first thing you can do without even stepping outside your living room or getting off your sofa
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when when you read anything when when you watch anything just ask questions like why, how,
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like you know think of think of either you know an irritating two to three year old like why,
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how, what, whatever or the japanese seven why's right like for every why and then why that and
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then why that and then why that and then why that there are seven only i think so i mean they say
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at least ask seven why's and then you know basically so essentially push everything you can and you're
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able to you know to to ask good to i mean that that that would be the first thing i mean you know that
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not even about good questions whatever questions just try to figure out what is happening you know
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i mean it's like a yeah look look at it like a like a puzzle that you need to need to put in
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place and we have enough i mean most of us who have the privilege of having been you know to
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school to to university have a life have a career etc have enough intellectual tools to be able to
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ask those questions i think that there that i mean you know there's just no excuse for not doing that
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that would be the first thing the second thing is for for again relevance right like so where
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things kind of meet your life so to speak right like so if you're offered a new new
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genetic treatment for example or if you're offered a new therapy for example ask those questions
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who developed it where where was the funding coming from why etc all those questions that
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people should have asked when you know the sugar fat research came out for example right
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so i think you know follow the money as they said is is an important thing right like so so why
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certain things are done so i think that that would be the second thing they're very irrelevant
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to your life because these are critical matters that will determine the quality of your life
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right and it could be anything from buying a car to accepting a new technology to reproductive
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support to you know whatever whatever whatever third thing would be to to read beyond your
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silos and disciplines right and today we are in a place like and you know you very rightly pointed
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out there are resources that are available to you if you have the intention to do so right like so
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podcasts magazines it's like podcasts so many of us commute i mean some of us drive don't do
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that when you drive probably but otherwise right like listen to listen to things i think is my
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best friend i know i i put my headphones on luckily i don't drive which is why i'm able to do it
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but listen to things beyond your discipline right like i mean if you are if you and listen
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especially to things that appear contradictory to opinions you hold no matter what they are it
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doesn't mean you have to change your mind it means you want to understand why people believe
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there is a position that is not the same as yours it is extremely important even to strengthen your
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own position to understand what is contrary to your position so i think reading beyond your
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comfort beyond the comfort of your discipline or your profession or your career but also especially
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beyond your own belief your own your own judgment your own standpoint right so as i mean you know
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as as they say i mean you know these things kind of get thrown at you especially on instagram and
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facebook right like know your enemy better than your friends kind of thing right like so i mean
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there are no enemies i think in the world of ideas engage with ideas different and especially
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contradictory to yours so i think that would be something else i would say and then the fourth i
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would say is when my when science building is open please come along because there'll be a
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range of things but it especially so we are also generating open courseware for example and here's
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again the learning right like so i've taught in the university i came with the belief that you
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know we'll open something like mit open courseware you know because we generate a lot of material
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through the lectures through the discussions with the filmmakers plus we always make our research
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available to our audience right like so for during contagion for example we we put up i think
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something like 530 resources right like so podcasts films books papers games things to read
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and do right and then we realized that navigating through 500 things is also a task so why don't we
#
sort of tag them so we tagged them then we saw that actually we have to direct people to it
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then largest impact is if you actually are able to reach people who reach young people
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so i had earlier started out not wanting to do sort of teacher engagement i thought we should
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be all about individuals but i find that actually teachers are important in the system and often
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underserved under resourced overworked over stressed underpaid you know name it and you
#
know name the oppression and they are subjected to it humiliation so we spoke to a bunch of
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teachers and what they said is let's see you can't change curricula in india at whim
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but if you want us to bring new perspectives to classroom make smaller modules that we can run in
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one lecture and give us the supporting material around it so that that can be then inserted
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and that changes how the course is perceived or you know it also helps us because it relieves
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us of some effort on on you know on one of the many things that we are meant to do etc
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so that's what we are doing now so we're creating sort of you know surrounded a lecture that is
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surrounded by range of things right like films whatever all those things that we collected
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so we're developing that so you know again with the same purpose that you know to kind of create
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sort of you know okay so carbon and art like what is around carbon and art you know why how
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that kind of stuff right so i think i think and there are other such resources i mean MIT open
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course where of course is is there but you know range of things like Coursera this that so if
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you know if you're if you're a software engineer go listen to Michael Sandel because you know you
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otherwise never studied properly philosophy or you never heard an eminent philosopher speak
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when you were young and learning do that because that's now available and never stop reading i
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think that's those would be some of the things i would say to a young person that you know they
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they might want to do and oh actually no i'll take i'll i'll there's one which is which comes
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even above all of this which is talk i mean if you don't like talking to people of course all
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of these things are there and they will always be good but talk to people you mean conversions
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because listening also talk and listen because people are good talking absolutely no you're
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right converse with people have a conversation listen talk have a meal with them go out for a
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coffee with them go for a walk there aren't many places to walk unfortunately left in cities but
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you know just do that because engage understand right that's no and it's wonderful advice
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especially because more or no in the modern world we become atomized in the sense that even
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if you're together with a bunch of people we're all staring into our screens so what you're saying
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converse with them go for a meal go for a walk in the park and you have such an incredible park
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here kaban park yeah oh god i'm so jealous uh and i'll add one more uh item which i feel strongly
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about to this excellent list of yours which is know thyself it's one thing to say that you should
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be curious about the world and of course you should but you have a direct selfish incentive
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to understand your own body like i understood a lot when i got a continuous glucose monitor or cgm
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and i could just you know make out the impact of every single thing i ate on myself in real time
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and that can give you so much knowledge and insight i mean you have one body you have one life
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you know despite what some narratives may tell you so uh you know just look after it and look
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after yourself and so on absolutely i mean you know care of the self is
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is priority and it's not a selfish thing to do at all because if there is no self then you know i
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mean what of the world i mean you know it has no meaning there is no relationship left yeah now
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you're again talking like me soon we'll be saying in chorus we're all going to die and life is
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meaningless well we all do anyway yeah see there you go so you know penultimate question what can
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people do to help you in your mission so people are listening to this there may be people with
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money who are saying that hey you know this sounds like something i can invest in i can put my money
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in and there might be people with time and energy who who can donate some of that you know contribute
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some of that so what can they do these two categories i mean my team and i will be grateful
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for any kind of support we get because as i said the model is such that the person who comes into
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the exhibition or to use the labs or the or the public science spaces should not and does not pay
#
anything and so the onus of making sure the resources both the intellectual and the financial
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and in-kind resources is on us and so recently we've received a generous donation from uh you
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know three of our board members we have another one another announcement coming out in a couple
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of days hopefully some more so it and we have to keep the machine running right and it's a
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large-ish machine i mean it's a cyclotron size machine exactly well even bigger bigger than my
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baby cyclotron actually that's true not as big as cern though it's you know about 140 000 square
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feet the building so you know media it's a medium-sized institution so that's the point
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i wanted to make so we'll be grateful for anyone who would want to come in with you know financial
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resources to to you know to offer the institution but also uh in-kind i mean you know we we are
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always on the lookout for mentors so you know we work with young adults we offer them the
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opportunity to be mentored by up to four mentors so you know reversing that equation of one mentor
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and four mentees just do it the other way around so that you can so the young person can talk to a
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designer a mathematician or whoever and whoever right like so that kind of so come and help mentor
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the young adults come participate in our programs you know submit proposals to the labs there's a
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range of ways in which people can you know come in and as a young adult just come just come and
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enjoy you know just come and enjoy and make it worthwhile you know for us to have made those
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programs so yeah is there a url they can go to to volunteer the services or so i mean i think
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so on our on our on our website there's there's places i mean you know there are opportunities
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to intern opportunities to participate opportunities to mentor so all of that and
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i'll link all those yeah thank you thank you very much so uh final question um which is like
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a traditional question for all my guests who come here that you know i want you to you know recommend
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for me and my listeners books films music any kind of art which means a lot to you which has
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given you so much joy so much childlike joy even that you want to just scream to the whole world
#
here read this or listen to this or watch this oh okay so read any and all of Raymond Carver
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he's just he's incredible absolutely incredible i mean so pithy so you know and so oof cathedral
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always gets me oh god yeah and now i'm going to forget his first name Epstein Jeffrey Epstein
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Jeffrey Epstein is a guy who died in jail right yeah he's he died in jail are you really going
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to recommend him uh not him Joseph Epstein yeah so Joseph Epstein it's uh i mean it's
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yeah since you asked for books that basically left me stunned and happy and
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i love the slova simposka's poems i think she uses words like i don't know how just incredible
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absolutely incredible so i love her poems what else what are the books that i go back to again
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and again the foundation series and what else i think that should be enough by way of books
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yeah yeah i mean okay and uh i mean if i think of any i'll tell you but in terms of music
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abbey road i can listen to that on loop david bowie man of all the world
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yeah uh diva of course which was sort of my yeah
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i think my first grown-up listening to music i mean i i could of course say
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participant but we started with that so i don't think i need to say anything
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yeah that's the music films please keep watching
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absolutely fantastic a book that left me weeping like weeping weeping weeping was
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uh my brain is a sieve because i i don't know since when i think it's 400 blows right through
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four yeah just saw it and cried and cried and cried that so i i think it's it's it's a movie worth
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thinking about another film i'd really like is delicatessen
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it's just completely insanely mad i mean it's you can't tell whether it's humorous or tragic
#
or brutal or you know uh it's yeah okay so i really like that and lion the hate which came out i
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think in the mid 1990s set in set in uh inner city paris was again it's again a film that you
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know the things that you don't forget right like you watch them and you don't forget
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yeah i think that's what i can think of now these are the things that come straight to mind when
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asked and i will check out whichever ones of them i haven't seen yet janvi thank you so much it's
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been such an honor talking to you thank you so much for having me it's it's it's it was baffling
#
after i saw him i was like oh yeah okay srinath's gone there you know you've spoken to ram you've
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spoken to many others and now i find out that you've spoken to three other elphinstonians right
#
before myself so it's been a pleasure um and uh you know as they say it's uh i think there was
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there was a point in my life when it was embarrassing to talk about myself uh and now i think i can do it
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without uh hopefully without hope is but also without embarrassment so it's it's been very good
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fun thank you for your openness and generosity if you enjoyed listening to this episode share it with
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whoever you think might be interested do pick up janvi's awesome book atomic state big science in
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20th century india you should also check out her documentary cyclotron the link and the password
#
are there in the show notes you can follow her on twitter at janvi falke i've given the link in the
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show notes you can follow me on twitter at amit for my a m i t v a r m a you can browse past
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episodes of the scene in the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening
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