What India Needs To Transform To Outthink The West

We must act against the colossal bureaucratisation of science. Once, Indian science tried to answer fundamental questions. Today, it encourages technical answers to technical questions

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

NOSTALGIA is a concept often misused to create distance. It captures with transparency the beauty of an era, and then distances itself from it. Nostalgia distances utopia and perfection from reality. One senses this when one talks about the early days of Indian science. What marked it was the conviviality of the eccentricity, creativity and play.

Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and first biographer of Jagadish Chandra Bose, captured one such slice when he said what Indian science needs was good myth. A child fed with powerful myths by five is a potential scientist in two decades. Bose, in that sense, was a legend. I remember a cousin of mine who attended Nobel laureate William Shockley's lectures at Princeton. Shockley said Bose was a genius and then added, "The rest is toilet paper."

The same sense of play and confidence could be seen in C V Raman's career. Few people realize that the Indian Nobel winner declared he was getting the prize six months ahead of the declaration and arranged for his travel to Stockholm. There, with a quiet intensity, he informed the audience that he was receiving the prize on behalf of a free India and not the colonial regime.

There is an aftermath to this story that is even more hilarious. After researching flowers for a decade, Raman told his wife he deserved a second Nobel. Lokkasundari looked at him and retorted, "With one Nobel, you were intolerable. With the second you will be impossible."