Category: Op-eds

Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provides managed hosting for WordPress sites; WordPress.com is owned by Automattic and it leads the development of WordPress.org. WP Engine’s hosting plans start at $30 a month and it enjoys a good public reputation. Mullenweg’s post however zeroed in on WP Engine’s decision to not record the revisions you’ve made to your posts in your site’s database. This is a basic feature in the WordPress content management system, and based on its absence Mullenweg says:

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

The first thing that struck me about this post was its unusual vehemence, which Mullenweg has typically reserved in the past for more ‘extractive’ platforms like Wix whose actions have also been more readily disagreeable. WP Engine has disabled revisions but as Mullenweg himself pointed out it doesn’t hide this fact. It’s available to view on the ‘Platform Settings’ support page. Equally, WP Engine also offers daily backups; you can readily restore one of them and go back to a previous ‘state’.

Second, Mullenweg accuses WP Engine of “butchering” WordPress but this is stretching it. I understand where he’s coming from, of course: WP Engine is advertising WordPress hosting but it doesn’t come with one of the CMS’s basic features, and which WP Engine doesn’t hide but doesn’t really advertise either. But I’d hardly call this “butchering”, much less in public and more than a decade after Automattic invested in WP Engine.

WP Engine’s stated reason is that post revisions increase database costs that the company would like to keep down. Mullenweg interprets this to mean WP Engine wants “to avoid paying to store that data”. Well, yeah, and that’s okay, right? I can’t claim to be aware of all the trade-offs that determined WP Engine’s price points but turning off a feature to keep costs down and reactivating it upon request for individual users seems fair.

In fact, what really gets my goat is Mullenweg’s language, especially around how much WP Engine charges. He writes:

They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

WordPress.com offers a very similar deal to its customers. (WordPress.com is Automattic’s platform for users where they can pay the company to host WordPress sites for them.) In the US, you’ll need to pay at least $25 a month (billed yearly) to be able to upload custom themes and plugins to your site. All the plans below that rate don’t have this option. You also need this plan to access and jump back to different points of your site’s revision history.

Does this mean WordPress.com is “strip-mining” its users to avoid paying for the infrastructure required for those features? Or is it offering fewer features at lower price points because that’s how it can make its business work? I used to be happy that WordPress.com offers a $48 a year plan with fewer features because I didn’t need them — just as well as WP Engine seems to have determined it can charge its customers less by disabling revision history by default.

(I’m not so happy now because WordPress.com moved detailed site analytics — anything more than hits to posts — from the free plan to the Premium plan, which costs $96 a year.)

It also comes across as disingenuous for Mullenweg to say the “cancer” a la WP Engine will spread if left unchecked. He himself writes no WordPress host listed on WordPress.org’s recommended hosts page has disabled revisions history — but is he aware of the public reputation of these hosts, their predatory pricing habits, and their lousy customer service? Please take a look at Kevin Ohashi’s Review Signal website or r/webhosting. Cheap WordPress in return for a crappy hosting experience is the cancer that’s already spread because WordPress didn’t address it.

(It’s the reason I switched to composing my posts offline on MarsEdit, banking on its backup features, and giving up on my expectations of hosts including WordPress.com.)

It’s unfair to accuse companies of “strip-mining” WordPress so hosting providers can avail users a spam-free, crap-free hosting experience that’s also affordable. In fact, given how flimsy many of Mullenweg’s arguments seem to be, they’re probably directed at some other deeper issue — perhaps what he perceives to be WP Engine not contributing enough back to the open source ecosystem?

A cynical archaeology

From ‘ASI submits Bhojshala survey report to Madhya Pradesh High Court’, The Hindu, July 15, 2024:

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) on July 15 submitted its scientific survey report of the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal-Maula mosque complex to the Indore Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court. … On July 4, the High Court ordered the ASI to present by July 15 the complete report of the nearly three-month-long survey on the premises of the disputed 11th-century monument, the subject of a wrangle between Hindus and Muslims. The Hindu community considers Bhojshala as a temple of Vagdevi (Goddess Saraswati), while the Muslim side calls it Kamal Maula mosque. The HC on March 11 ordered the ASI … to conduct a scientific survey of the complex … It then gave six weeks to the ASI to complete the survey. The ASI later sought more time for the report submission. The ASI began surveying the disputed complex on March 22 which ended recently.

Isn’t it cynical of ASI to engage in these exercises? New structures will often be built on old ones. But undertaking a study, then preparing a study is just disingenuous. It is also disingenuous to appeal to science to settle questions that are otherwise devoid of reason. I wish history scholars and scientists spoke up more vociferously on this instead of engaging in this charade. It’s practically why a separate nodal agency of archaeological study and deliberation exists, and not to be a mute provider of ‘archaeological services’ when called upon…

On the Nature feature about the Sarafs, a rare disease, and time

Heidi Ledford has a tragic and powerful story published yesterday in Nature, about a team of scientists at the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology racing to develop a CRISPR treatment for Uditi Saraf, a young girl whose brain was losing neurons due to a very rare, very aggressive genetic condition called FENIB. The story’s power comes from what it reveals about several facets of developing new treatments, looking for a cure for a rare disease, the importance of state support as well as control, the fact of the existence of neglected diseases, the demands made of clinical researchers, self-sufficiency in laboratory research infrastructure, and of course the cost of treatment. Most of all, it is a critical study of time. Uditi passed away four months after one of the researchers working on a CRISPR-based treatment for her told her parents they’d be ready with a solution for her in six. But even before her passing, there was time, there was no time, there was hurry, and there were risks.

Uditi’s disease was caused by a mutation that converts a single DNA base from a ‘G’ to an ‘A’. A variation on CRISPR genome editing, called base editing, could theoretically correct exactly this kind of mutation (see ‘Precision gene repair’). … But Rajeev and Sonam saw an opportunity for hope: perhaps such a therapy could slow down the progression of Uditi’s disease, buying time for scientists to develop another treatment that could repair the damage that had been done. The Sarafs were on board.

…

There were a lot of unknowns in the base-editing project. And in addition to the work on stem cells in the lab, the team would need to do further experiments to determine which base-editing systems would work best, where and how to deliver its components into the body, and whether the process generated any unwanted changes to the DNA sequence. They would need to do experiments in mice to test the safety and efficacy of the treatment. They also needed to get Ghosh’s facility approved by India’s regulators for producing the base-editing components.

Then there was the pandemic:

In December 2019, the Sarafs moved back to India. … Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and in January 2021, Uditi was hospitalized with severe COVID-19. She spent 20 days in the hospital and her health was never the same, says Sonam. Communication became increasingly difficult for Uditi and she began to pace the house incessantly, rarely even going to sleep. The Sarafs decided to speed up the base-editing project by funding a second team in India.

Developing treatments take time. Uditi’s story was a one-off, a singular disease that few researchers on the planet were working on, so developing an experimental alternative based on cutting-edge medical technology was a reasonable option. And yet:

Meanwhile, Devinsky had petitioned a US foundation to devise a different experimental treatment called antisense therapy for Uditi. … The treatments didn’t work. And the experience taught Rajeev and Sonam how long it could take to get approval to try an experimental therapy in the United States. They decided Uditi’s base-editing therapy should also be manufactured and administered in India.

Uditi didn’t live long enough to receive treatment that could have slowed FENIB’s progression — hopefully long enough for researchers to come up with a better and more long-lasting solution. Now, after her death, the thinking and effort that motivated the quest to find her a cure is in the future tense.

It will take years to establish the techniques needed to create rapid, on-demand, bespoke CRISPR therapies. Most people with these conditions don’t have that kind of time. … Rajeev has urged Chakraborty to finish the team’s studies in mice, so that the next person with FENIB will not have to wait as long for a potential treatment. … “We are not really trying as aggressively as we did earlier,” he says.

When the health of a loved one is rapidly deteriorating, the clock of life resets — from the familiar 24-hour rhythms of daily life to days that start and end to the beats of more morbid milestones: a doctor’s visit, a diagnostic test result, the effects of a drug kicking in, the chance discovery of a new symptom, an unexpected moment of joy, the unbearable agony of helplessness. The passage of time becomes distorted, sometimes slow, sometimes too fast. People do what they can when they can. They will take all their chances. Which means the chances they encounter on their way matters. Technological literacy and personal wealth expand this menu of options. The Sarafs knew about CRISPR, had a vague idea of how it worked, and could afford it, so they pursued it. They came really close; their efforts may even prove decisive in pushing a cure for FENIB past the finish line. For those who don’t know about CRISPR-based therapies and/or don’t have the means to pay for it, the gap between hope and cure is likely to be more vast, and more dispiriting. And one chapter of the Sarafs’ journey briefly threatened to pull them to this path — and relentlessly threatens to waylay many families’ laborious pursuits to save the lives of their loved one:

The Sarafs studied what they could find online and tried the interventions available to them: Indian ayurvedic treatments, a ketogenic diet, special schools, seeing a slew of physicians and trying out various medicines.

Ledford’s narrative doesn’t get into who these physicians were, but let’s set them and the special schools aside. Just this morning, I read a report by Rema Nagarajan in The Times of India that a company called Natelco in Bengaluru has been selling human milk even though its license was cancelled two years ago. The FSSAI cancelled Natelco’s license in 2021; a few months later, Natelco obtained a license from the Ministry of AYUSH claiming it was selling “Aryuevdic proprietary medicine”. When the Breastfeeding Promotion Network of India complained to the ministry, the ministry cancelled its license in August 2022. Then, a month later, the Karnataka high court granted an interim stay on this cancellation but said the respondents — AYUSH representatives in Karnataka, in the Karnataka licensing authority or from the ministry — could have it vacated. They didn’t bother. In June 2023, the ministry filed objections but nothing more. It finally moved to vacate the stay only in March this year.

Natelco’s case is just one example. There are hundreds of companies whose charade the Ministry of AYUSH facilitates by allowing specious claims ranging from “Ayurvedic toothpaste” to calling human breast milk “Ayurvedic medicine”. This is not Ayurveda: very few of us know what Ayurveda is or looks like; even Ayurveda itself doesn’t belong in modern medicine. But together with the FSSAI, the food regulation body notorious for dragging its feet when the time comes to punish errant manufacturers, and a toothless advertisement monitoring regime, the Indian food and beverages market has provided a hospitable work environment for quacks and their businesses. And inevitably, their quackery spills over into the path of an unsuspecting yet desperate father or mother looking for something, anything, that will help their child. When faced with trenchant criticism, many of these business adopt the line that their products are not unsafe. But they are terribly unsafe: they steal time to do nothing with it, taking it away from a therapy or a drug that could have done a lot. Such cynical alternatives shouldn’t be present anywhere on any family’s path, yet the national government itself gives them a license to be.

The cost of forgetting Ballia

In the day or so before June 1, 14 people died in Bihar of heat stroke. Ten of these people were election personnel deployed to oversee voting and associated activities in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and of them, five died in Bhojpur alone. On Friday, at least 17 people in Uttar Pradesh, 14 in Bihar, and four in Jharkhand had died of heat-related morbidity. And of the 17 in Uttar Pradesh, 13 deaths were reported from Mirzapur alone. This is a toll rendered all the more terrible by two other issues.

First, after the first phase of the polls, the Election Commission of India (ECI) recorded lower voter turnout than expected (from previous Lok Sabha polls) and blamed the heat. Srinivasan Ramani, my colleague at The Hindu, subsequently found “little correlation” between the maximum temperature recorded and turnouts in various constituencies, and in fact an anti-correlation in some places. By this time the ECI had said it would institute a raft of measures to incentivise voters to turn up. These were certainly welcome irrespective of there being a relationship between turnout and heat. However, did it put in place similar ‘special’ measures for electoral officials?

On March 16, the ECI forwarded an advisory that included guidelines by the National Disaster Management Authority to manage heat to the chief electoral officers of all states and Union territories. These guidelines had the following recommendations, among others: “avoid going out in the sun, especially between 12.00 noon and 3.00 pm”; “wear lightweight, light-coloured, loose, and porous cotton clothes. Use protective goggles, umbrella/hat, shoes or chappals while going out in sun”; and “avoid strenuous activities when Balliathe outside temperature is high”.

A question automatically arises: if poll officers are expected to avoid such activities, the polling process should have been set up such that those incidents requiring such activities wouldn’t arise in the first place. So were they? Because it’s just poka-yoke: if the process itself didn’t change, expecting poll officers to “avoid going out in the sun … between 12 pm and 3 pm” would have been almost laughable.

The second issue is worse. Heat wave deaths in India are often the product of little to no advance planning, even if the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has forecast excessive heat on certain dates. But to make matters worse, there was a deadly heat wave last year in the same region where many of these deaths have been reported now.

Recall that in the first half of June 2023, more than 30 people died of heat-related illnesses in Ballia village in Uttar Pradesh. After the chief medical superintendent of the local district hospital told mediapersons the people had indeed died of excessive heat, the state health department — led by deputy chief minister Brajesh Pathak — transferred him away, and his successors later denied heat had had anything to do with the deaths.

So even if the IMD hadn’t predicted a heat wave in this region for around May 30-31, the local and national governments and the ECI should have made preparations for heat exposure leading at least to morbidity. Did they? To the extent that people wouldn’t have had to be hospitalised or have died if they’d made effective preparations, they didn’t. Actively papering over the effects of extreme weather (and of adverse exposure) has to be the most self-destructive thing we’re capable of in the climate change era.

Featured image: Representative image of a tree whose leaves appear to have wilted in the heat. Credit: Zoltan Tasi/Unsplash.

The BHU Covaxin study and ICMR bait

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it’s also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren’t required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can’t be in anyone’s interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t “provided any financial or technical support” to the study and that the study is “poorly designed”. Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR’s makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: “While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials.”

I’m not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I’ve written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven’t watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP’s nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample (“While ‘The Vaccine War’ movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the “ICMR owes it to the people of India” — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I’m not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn’t have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: “It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.

India can do it!

Against the background of the H5N1 pandemic in birds and an epidemic among cattle in the US, the Government of Victoria, in Australia, published a statement on May 21 that the province had recorded the country’s first human H5N1 case. This doesn’t seem to be much cause (but also not negligible cause) for concern because, according to the statement as well as other experts, this strain of avian influenza hasn’t evolved to spread easily between people. The individual in question who had the infection — “a child”, according to Victoria’s statement — had a severe form of it but has since recovered fully as well.

But this story isn’t testament to Australia’s pathogen surveillance, at least not primarily; it’s testament to India’s ability to do it. In Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War — purportedly about the efforts of Bharat Biotech, the ICMR, and the NIV to develop Covaxin during the COVID-19 pandemic — Raima Sen, who plays the science editor of a fictitious publication called The Daily Wire, says about developing the vaccine in a moment of amusing cringe on a TV news show that “India can’t do it”. Agnihotri didn’t make it difficult to see myself in Sen’s character: I was science editor of the very real publication The Wire when Covaxin was being developed. And I’m here to tell you that India, in point of fact, can: according to Victoria’s statement, the child became infected by a strain of the H5N1 virus in India and fell ill in March 2024.

And what is it that India can do? According to Victoria’s statement, spotting the infection required “Victoria’s enhanced surveillance system”. Further, “most strains don’t infect humans”; India was able to serve the child with one of the rare strains that could. “Transmission to humans” is also “very rare”, happening largely among people who “have contact with infected birds or animals, or their secretions, while in affected areas of the world”. Specifically: “Avian influenza is spread by close contact with an infected bird (dead or alive), e.g. handling infected birds, touching droppings or bedding, or killing/preparing infected poultry for cooking. You can’t catch avian influenza through eating fully cooked poultry or eggs, even in areas with an outbreak of avian influenza.”

So let’s learn our lesson: If we give India’s widespread dysregulation of poultry and cattle health, underinvestment in pathogen surveillance, and its national government’s unique blend of optimism and wilful ignorance a chance, the country will give someone somewhere a rare strain of an avian influenza virus that can infect humans. Repeat after me: India can do it!

Justice delayed but a ton of bricks await

From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.

Cheers for everyone but the bustard

Behold, the legerdemain of spinning bad news into good:

Setting aside the meaningless headline, we have a lede (and the rest of the article, for that matter) that claims the Supreme Court of India “struck” a fine balancing act between the transition to renewable energy and protecting the great Indian bustard by rolling back a complete ban on overhead cables in the birds’ habitat.

Accepting sustained arguments from attorney general R Venkataramani, solicitor general Tushar Mehta and additional SG Aishwarya Bhati, the bench said, “India’s commitment to promoting renewable energy sources, particularly in regions like Gujarat and Rajasthan, aligns with its broader sustainable development objectives.”

Pats on the back for everyone.

Except while the Supreme Court is switching between imposing and revoking a ban on overhead cables and the newspaper declaring this a pro-climate triumph, there is no indication in the report that the petition before the Supreme Court is to move the power cables underground, protecting both the endangered bustards and the region’s power-generation potential.

The apex court has now asked an expert committee to examine the feasibility of underground cables and their costs, which the promoters of solar- and wind-power projects in the region have contended are too high. As such, the court’s order has created a false balance between the birds and the profit margins of these promoters, as if to say they’re equally legitimate and equally valuable.

Such are the perils of government by Supreme Court.

Reassurance by electoral bond

The electoral bonds release has been reassuring on one count. For some time after the (new) BJP first rose to power in 2014, with a groundswell of support (but arguably also because of the ‘first past the post’ system) I used to think it represented an ideology that I’ve been ignorant about, that the INC allowed to take root and overlooked – the way Obama’s second term seemingly laid the groundwork for Trump. But with the bonds being released and the associations we’re finding in the data, it’s becoming asymptotically more clear that there’s no ideology at work here, just as it has on many occasions before. We haven’t missed or overlooked anything, at least nothing other than the inner workings of the legerdemain we’ve found at the ends of every other rainbow drawn by this party. Brutes have taken to power, using the social media and people who wanted to get rich, in order to get rich themselves. Correlation isn’t causation but that doesn’t mean we’re going to ignore the enormous mountains of correlation, especially when read together with the BJP government’s practice of surgically withholding exactly those bits of data that establish causative links. I’m also increasingly convinced that any of the other good stuff they’ve actually managed to do (not unconditionally so, of course) – a.k.a. the foundation of the bhakt‘s whataboutery-based defence – could have been done by any other party. Because other than that, there’s only the desire to continue to occupy the national government for its own vapid sake and the pseudo-ideology that that’s okay to do.

Farce and friction over an Indian astronaut

When we met Mr [Morarji] Desai, he was totally relaxed even after the long journey from Delhi. Squatting on a carpet in the Kremlin and spinning his favourite charka, he received us very gracefully and congratulated us on the impressive achievement [the launch of Bhaskara-I on June 7, 1979]. He then proceeded to express his own view against sending an Indian astronaut on a Soviet mission saying, “How will it help the country if an Indian astronaut goes up into space and comes down?” He was extremely pleased to note that our views coincided with his own and jokingly told Prof. Dhawan, “Why don’t you convince Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, our foreign minister sitting in the next room, who is keen on sending an Indian into space?” Even more interesting was that he turned to me saying, “This is in line with what Vikram believed, isn’t it?”

– UR Rao, India’s Rise as a Space Power (2014)

But then times did change after Desai’s term ended and Indira Gandhi, who was more enthusiastic about Leonid Brezhnev’s offer to fly an Indian astronaut on a Soviet mission, assumed power in 1980. Thus, Rakesh Sharma’s flight happened in 1984 – although not without the Indian bureaucracy raising its ridiculous head…

When H.J. Bhabha wrote the extraordinary one-page constitution of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was later adopted by the Department of Space, he had specifically invested the commission with appropriate powers to avoid ‘the needlessly inelastic bureaucratic rules of the Government’. About a year prior to thr actual flight of Sq Ldr Rakesh Sharma, who was finally selected as the prime candidate for the joined manned mission with Mr [Ravish] Malhotra being designated as the standby, Ministry of Defence came up with two trivial bureaucratic objections. The first was whether both of these officers who were undergoing training on ground at the Star City were eligible to receive a flying allowance of Rs 500 a month. The second was whether the announced reward of a modest amount of Rs 25,000 should be given to both the candidates or restricted only to the astronaut who finally goes to space. Mr R Venkataraman, who was the then Minister of Defence and who later became the President of India, invited Prof. Dhawan and me to discuss the above two issues. Both Prof. Dhawan and myself told the defence minister that it is regrettable that silly suggestions such as stopping the flying allowance and not extending the honorarium to both the chosen candidates were brought up for discussion at the highest level. Fortunately, Mr Venkataraman after listening to our righteous indignation not only agreed with our view but also pulled up the bureaucracy for bringing up such outrageous issues, resulting in both the chosen astronaut candidates continuing to receive the flying allowance and becoming eligible for receiving the honorarium.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, of course, the tables have turned somewhat, with the enthusiastic support of his office for the ambitious Gaganyaan mission allowing work to proceed as smoothly as possible. Bhabha’s and Sarabhai’s visions for the Indian space programme fundamentally included ease access to the upper echelons of decision-making in the nascent new national government, with avid reciprocation by the prime ministers of their time (especially Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi). But as these barriers no longer exist for the space programme and the national government is using the programme as a way to project its own power and vision, it is time to insert some ‘friction’ between ISRO and the government, more so since its missions are now becoming more sophisticated and expensive, and nudge it to the levels of accountability expected of other public-sector institutions.