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...

Help Tourism is an award winning tourism agency headquartered in Siliguri. It was founded in 1991 by a group of young men who had a vision of eco tourism which was rooted in the local ecology and wanted to involve the local stakeholders in the process of development. One of the founders of this unique movement was Raj Basu who I am proud to call my friend. Raj has been instrumental in guiding this group to the success story that they are today. They have received many accolades, awards from many influential tourist groups and have had the honour of being one of groups included by the National Geographic as the best adventure tourism groups in the world. They have put North Eastern India in the map of adventure tourism and they have made it possible for many well known scientists and birders to work in this area. If you look up any report of a bird watching expedition in this region, you are very likely to find that it was organised by Help Tourism. The most important part of their wor...

If you have the press on your side, you can do anything in India. And there are some personalities who are experts in manipulating the press as well as the online media. One such person is Baichung Bhutia and not too far behind is his mentor Bob Houghton. India was the worst team in the Asia Cup. Ok, it was a feat to have got there, but they qualified three years ago. Subsequent to this, the coach threw tantrums, made racial comments at referees, criticized the Federation, got an increase in salary which was totally uncalled for, and managed to spend most of the time abroad with his team or without. Baichung Bhutia was injured most of this time. When his club (then Mohun Bagan) began to ask why he could not play football while fully able to execute intricate dance maneuvers for a TV show, he managed to project it as a “poor player being targeted by heartless clubs”, broke his contract and landed with East Bengal, for whom he has not played a match for quite some time now. Jus...

I was in Penang for a business meeting last week relating to a study we are doing there in collaboration with one of the hospitals. Meetings over, I had some time to spare, which I decided to spend in taking a walk around the area where my hotel was. The biggest problem in Malaysia is the humidity which makes walking a bit of a tedious activity, but today there was a balmy breeze from the Malacca Straits which made life a lot more enjoyable. As I strolled down Northam Road, now named Jalan Sultan Ahmad Shah (re namers also exist in Malaysia, though not so virulent in their work as in Calcutta), I suddenly came across the Protestant Cemetery. It is a leafy walled enclosure full of tombs of Britishers, some Chinese, and Armenians who ended their life on this island. The first burial took place in 1789 just three years after the settlement was founded by Sir Francis Light in 1786. Francis Light was an interesting person. Probably the illegitimate son of a minor nobleman, Francis foun...

I have blogged about it before, but I want to say it again, the BBC Radio 3 programmes are perhaps the best in the world. And one of my favourites among them is the In our Time series in which the host, Mervyn Bragg,speaks to various experts on subjects that vary from Daoism to Byron’s Childe Harold to take two recent examples. It is obviously impossible to keep up with the actual broadcasts, but now we have the podcasts which allow me to hear his programmes over the weekend, at my leisure and in comfort. He recently hosted a show based on the Industrial revolution which changed the face of the world forever. As one of the experts pointed out during the course of the programme, before the industrial revolution, life could be unchanging for centuries, but after this, we are all aware, that life may improve or conditions may worsen, but things are definitely going to change. When I think about the communications revolution that has taken place over the past decade or two, with the rise ...