Reflections

Now that I work fulltime in research I am beginning to have a clear idea of how the research establishment works and what it actually does. Research is today a holy cow. All emerging economies are told that the reason why the US and other major economies outpace us is their lead in innovative research. And this is undoubtedly true. Most of the world’s new discoveries which later become blockbuster commercial products are born in the US or in Japan. I cannot think of any Indian or even Chinese discovery in the last 50 which became a product in wide use. Thus, the mantra goes, you must spend money on research , particularly on the cutting edges of new scientific discoveries or risk being left more and more behind. India is slated to spend 2% of its GDP on research by 2012. This means a mindboggling sum of money and the Department of Biotehchnology, Department of Science and Technology and various others are flush with funds and grants are being written and sanctioned like there was no t...

A letter to the editor published in the Bengali Desh magazine drew attention to one of the forgotten pioneers of study of natural history in this country. Gopal Chandra Bhattacharya was born in the Faridpur District of erstwhile East Bengal (now Bangladesh) in 1885. He came from a modest background; his father eked out a living as a village priest in their native village of Lonsing. He studied until the matriculation and passed it in the first division. However by this time he had lost his father and family circumstances made it impossible for him to study further and he became a schoolteacher in order to provide support to his family. He later began to work at a mercantile firm as a telephone operator and it was at this time that he published his first article on bio-luminescence in the then popular Bengali periodical Prabasi. This attracted the attention of none other than Dr Jagadish Chandra Bose who, realizing his potential, organized a position for him at the Basu Vigyan Mandir...

Michel Danino who is by birth a Frenchman, but has lived in India for more than 25 years has written a marvelous book on the River Saraswati. This river was mentioned in the Rig Veda as the most important of rivers, a mighty river with grassy banks on whose shore the Vedic Rishis wrote the hymns that are universally accepted to be some of the most sublime philosophy ever written. The geography of the region that they lived in was well described. The Nadistuti Sukta, a hymn in praise of rivers enumerates 19 rivers which were of importance in the Vedic world. From east to west they were enumerated as the Ganges, Yamuna, Saraswati, Shatudru (Sutlej), Parushni ( Ravi) Asikni ( Chenab) Vitasta ( Jhelum) and so on. All the other rivers have been identified, but the Saraswati remained an enigma. However as Danino shows in his marvelous book published last year by Penguin India, the Saraswati had been identified with the Ghaggar system long ago, when the first British administrators came to th...