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.
Will ‘Surya’ launch bombs or satellites?
From Times of India, March 14, 2024:
ISRO chairman S. Somanath confirmed to TOI in an exclusive interview that the NGLV project, internally named “SOORYA”, will be headed by (Project Director/PD) S. Sivakumar, currrently the programme director (space transportation systems) at VSSC…
ISRO and DRDO really need to systematise their naming scheme here. The next iteration of ‘Agni’ ballistic missiles DRDO is working on has widely been called ‘Surya’. For ISRO to follow by calling its newfangled launch vehicle ‘Soorya’ – even if internally – complicates communications on this topic (not that it’s otherwise great).
‘Soorya’ and ‘Surya’ may have different spellings but they refer to the same Sanskrit word and meaning (‘Sun’). The typical aloofness of Indians vis-a-vis transliterating words between English and Indian languages will inevitably feed confusion over the technology to which a given instance of ‘Surya’ refers.
Another source of confusion is the existing overlap between the civilian and the military applications of suborbital and orbital flight technologies in India. This has its pros and cons and I’m not judging that now, but here we have a next-generation launch vehicle being called ‘Soorya’ and a next-generation missile being called ‘Surya’. Not helping.
Others have noticed this issue with other projects ISRO is working on and have suggested the organisation stick to its original, de facto naming scheming – e.g. one where the name of a next-generation launch vehicle is Next-generation Launch Vehicle. It’s boring, yes, but there will be no confusion.
The missile test before the polls
On March 27, 2019, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) conducted ‘Mission Shakti’: India’s first anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test. After the event, the national broadcaster broadcast an hour-long speech by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Since the Election Commission’s restrictions on poll candidates’ screen time was in effect ahead of the Lok Sabha polls that year, some of us surmised the test had been timed to allow Modi a reason to get on TV without explicitly violating the rules.
Yesterday, on March 11, the DRDO conducted a test of its new Agni 5 missile in its MIRV – short for ‘multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles’ – configuration, a powerful defence technology that allows a single suborbital missile to deliver multiple warheads (possibly nuclear) to strike different targets. This time, however, the Commission’s restrictions are not yet in effect nor has Modi tried to deliver a speech ostensibly about the test, although he has been in Pokhran today talking about ‘Bharat Shakti’, which I believe is the name of India’s programme for self-sufficiency in defence.
Surely this is some kind of pre-election muscle-flexing bluster? After the first Agni V test in April 2012, DRDO’s then chief controller of missiles Avinash Chander told Business Standard: “The primary modules of MIRV are in an advanced stage of development. Realisation and integration of them into a weapon is just a question of threat perceptions and the need as it arises.” This ‘need’ seems to be signalling to both agam and puram actors just before the national elections. It holds for the ASAT in March 2019 as well, when there was reason to believe India was ready with ASAT capability during Manmohan Singh’s tenure as prime minister, if not earlier.
In the broader view, China tested both MIRV and ASAT missiles before India, most recently in 2017 (DF-41 missile) and in 2007, respectively, notwithstanding some claims in 2008 that it was modifying its submarine-launched JL-2 MIRV to have ASAT capabilities as well. The post-test bluster by BJP leaders on both occasions was directed at China. What will India test come March 2029, I wonder.
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.
To the moon – or the stock market?
Now this is quite upsetting. I learn from Jatan Mehta’s Moon Monday #166 that Intuitive Machines – the maker of the Odysseus spacecraft that landed on the moon on February 22 – may have lied about the circumstances of the landing attempt in order to protect its market value, before ‘correcting’ itself later. Excerpt:
Previously, the publicly traded company prematurely stated post-landing that Odysseus is “upright”, only to correct it in a media briefing timed to the closing of the stock market an entire day later. Now it turns out even the NASA LiDAR onboard … actually did not assist Odysseus’ landing in the last 15 kilometers of descent due to a delay in processing its data.…Are we supposed to believe that descent telemetry on Mission Control screens … never made it clear to the company and NASA that the LiDAR readings weren’t coming through to the lander’s navigation system? Or that it wasn’t clear in the following few days either?…A [NASA] payload called SCLPSS was flown on Odysseus to specifically study the lander’s engine plume effects on lunar soil during the final descent phase. NASA says the payload did not do said imaging. And yet the agency states in the same release that “the bottom line is every NASA instrument has met some level of their objectives.” A subsequent report by Eric Berger [of Ars Technica] reads: “As of Wednesday [February 28], NASA had been able to download about 50MB of data. The baseline for success was a single bit of data.” Was this criteria for success made clear and public pre-launch?
NASA has rightly defined the ideal standard for communications over the years by placing what data its probes collect as soon as possible in the public domain. (This responsibility even led to some tension in the book and the film The Martian.) So it’s really disappointing, and frankly a little infuriating, to see this bad-faith effort from Intuitive Machines.
Its Odysseus mission was funded by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme and it carried six NASA instruments (including SCLPSS) to the moon. Even if Intuitive Machines isn’t implicitly required to follow NASA’s communications policies, NASA needs to ensure the companies it contracts to fly its payloads – to ease its own path to the moon in future – do. As Jatan also pointed out, the onus to communicate lies with NASA: CLPS is publicly funded and without it missions like Odysseus wouldn’t happen. We need explicit policies to streamline these companies’ communications expectations to follow NASA’s rather than their share prices.
It’s also a poor look for NASA to celebrate Odysseus’s success the way it did (was it to protect Intuitive Machines again?). CLPS is a billion-dollar programme to ferry NASA payloads to the moon. How do you call the mission a “success” if the payloads aren’t collecting data?
We don’t want tax money to disappear into black holes like this that release no or, worse, misleading information.
When metastable systems fail to become stable…
‘Metastable systems’ is a technical term for something you’ve definitely experienced in your daily life, as much as scientists often encounter it when studying subatomic particles.
Say you’re sitting on a chair and are getting comfortable. You realise you’d be even more comfortable on a bean bag but you don’t mind staying in the chair. You’re too lazy to get up. In this scenario, the you-chair system is metastable: while you’re stable (because you have low energy), you’re not as stable as you can be (you can have even less energy), but you don’t have enough energy to move from one state to the other.
The same thing happens to proteins inside your body. Proteins are really folded-up when they’re made and sometimes they need to unfold to work properly, like get inside a cell. Its folded form is metastable and it needs to unfold to attain a stable state, which happens by thermal fluctuations (random deviations from its folded form driven by temperature changes).
In fact, based on measurements of the Higgs boson (which gives ‘mass’ to many subatomic particles) and the top quark (the heaviest known subatomic particle), physicists currently believe our universe itself may be in a metastable state. It has some low level of energy but could have even less, and someday it may move to this state and doom us all.
Scientists have used the behaviour of metastable systems to explain a variety of phenomena in many fields, including reaction chemistry, radioactivity, the integrity of large metallic structures (like ships and statues), and glitches in semiconductor manufacturing.
They’ve often modeled these phenomena using Arrhenius’s law, which states that the likelihood a system can be found near the barrier separating the high-energy and low-energy states and how often the system tries to become metastable can together model the dynamics of the metastable system.
To explore this further, researchers from the University of Alberta in Canada tried something clever in a new study: they looked at how much a metastable system tries to escape to a more stable state before it ‘gives up’.
This is interesting because, unlike you in the chair or the universe, metastable-to-stable transitions matter greatly in protein-folding. Misfolded proteins are responsible for many terrible diseases and figuring out how a protein might have got that way – in the course of its attempted transition – may help set it right.
“The properties of unsuccessful crossing attempts remain largely unknown,” the researchers wrote in their paper, “even though they can contain information about regions of the barrier not explored during successful crossing events.” The paper was published in the journal Physical Review X on February 14.
To access the information contained in unsuccessful crossing events, the researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, they confined two small beads in a pair of optical traps next to each other and tracked how often the beads crossed over from one trap to the other. (The system could be made metastable by increasing the energy in one trap.)
Each bead had thermal fluctuations. A few attempts to cross over succeeded but more often the beads would wander into the region between the two traps, where the attractive potential exerted by the traps overlapped, linger there for a few microseconds, and fall back into their traps. By collecting data about the bead, the researchers found they could model its progress in the area of overlapping potential as Brownian motion (the seemingly random motion of microscopic particles in a fluid as a result of constantly colliding with other particles in the fluid).
In the second experiment, the team attached beads on to the two ends of a DNA molecule (using ‘handles’ made of a polymer) and confined the beads in adjacent optical traps. A crossover happened if the DNA molecule folded up. In this case, the distance between its ends, called the DNA extension, would decrease and the beads would move a little bit as a result.
In the first experiment, the two beads each moved a little bit randomly and eventually did or didn’t get to the other side, and the researchers could understand the system just by keeping track of the distance between the beads. The second experiment is more complex: the distance between the beads and the DNA extension are both affected by thermal fluctuations of the beads, of the atoms and molecules in the polymer handles, and of the large number of atoms and molecules in the DNA.
To really understand this system, then, the researchers would have to track all of these movements in a large, sophisticated apparatus with many knobs and controls – or, fortunately for them, use the work of Dutch physicist Hendrik Anthony Kramers.
In 1940, Kramers postulated that it’s possible there is a distance between two objects in a metastable system such that the system’s dynamics can be modelled as Brownian motion along the direction of that distance, plus the effects of frictional forces and some noise. The trick lies in choosing this distance correctly.
In their second experiment, the researchers found this distance to be the DNA extension. They recorded the DNA’s failed attempts to fold (crossover) and the points in different attempts at which it gave up trying to fold and fell back. They also calculated the corresponding solutions according to the Kramers model. When they compared the two results, they reported a match to within a small amount of uncertainty. There had been some doubt as to whether the Kramers model could apply in systems that evolve rapidly, in the order of microseconds, and the match proved that it could.
More importantly, the team also found the frequency with which the metstable system tried to become stable in the Arrhenius model couldn’t fully explain the dynamics, and that its role in the model would have to be reinterpreted through more experiments. Dmitrii Makarov, of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in Physics magazine that some of these experiments could combine “fluorescence experiments with force spectroscopy [to] provide a two-dimensional rather than one-dimensional picture of the dynamics”.
The study also opens the door to applications that involve metastable systems transitioning to stable ones. Consider molecular machines: assemblies of molecules that use mechanical forces to perform biological tasks. Last year, I reported the discovery of a particularly interesting kind of molecular machine for The Hindu. Excerpt:
In a 2016 paper, researchers from Australia and Germany reported that when an enzyme called Rab5 binds to a long protein called EEA1, the protein loses its taut and rigid shape and becomes floppy. This ‘collapse’ pulls two membranes inside a cell closer to each other.
In the new study, researchers have reported that EEA1 regains its rigid shape in another mechanism so that it can become floppy again to pull the membranes closer, creating a new kind of two-part molecular motor.
The researchers found that when it’s floppy, EEA1 can take one of several shapes, but when it becomes stiff, it has only one shape. Because the floppy state also has more entropy, they interpreted it mean it is also more “entropically favoured”, and when the protein goes from stiff to floppy, it exerts can “entropic force” on two membranes, which are pulled closer together.
Researchers can use the new study’s findings and the Kramers model to understand when, how, and why such molecular machines fail, and how their function can be restored.
Government by Supreme Court
On February 27, a bench of the Supreme Court upbraided Patanjali Ayurved and its chairman Acharya Balkrishna for continuing to disparage systems of medicine other than Ayurveda (technically, what it calls Ayurveda) and claiming its products offer “permanent relief” from “blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, asthma and obesity” in its advertisements, despite having assured the court in November 2023 that it won’t do so. The Indian Medical Association had filed the case in August 2022 alleging that Patanjali Ayurved had flouted the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act 1954 and its Rules.
It’s a straightforward case with an understandable outcome, but it isn’t unsurprising. That Patanjali Ayurved so openly violated the Act and the Rules – but also good sense, as Pushpa Mitra Bhargava pointed out in an excoriating essay in 2016 – forced the IMA to approach the court, and for some time now the courts have been the last democratic institutions in India interested in upholding the law (and even then it’s iffy). The ‘backstop’ the courts have offered against advertisements in particular running away with bullshit has been particularly useful because the laws are not so much outdated as unable to respond to the new ways in which advertisers are twisting words, taking advantage of grey areas, and, generally, “telling a lie in a way that it appears to be the truth,” in Bhargava’s words.
More importantly, advertisement regulation in India is weak. As Kaushik Moitra and Shreya Sircar wrote in 2022 (emphasis added):
Advertisers must address complaints regarding deviations from the ASCI Code. If such complaints are not remedied, ASCI may take coercive steps to regulate the (allegedly) offending advertisement. Illustratively, ASCI may recommend that broadcasters not air the offending advertisement and may also publish instances of non-compliance by advertisers on its website. ASCI may also report infractions to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.
Additionally, – and uniquely for a self-regulatory organisation in India – ASCI has been recognised as a self-regulator under the Cable Television Networks (Amendment) Rules, 2021. ASCI promulgations are advisory and can neither supplant nor supersede the law. Moreover, ASCI cannot compel compliance. However, any action brought against an advertiser for breach of ASCI promulgations will proceed on the basis that ASCIs position has statutory endorsement.
It’s ultimately up to some government agency to take action and to advertisers to check themselves. In 2010, ASCI had flagged more than “50 campaigns by ayurvedic and homeopathic drug makers offering a cure for COVID-19 in April alone” to the government. The charge was grounded not in the 1954 Act but in a Ministry of AYUSH order earlier that month prohibiting the advertisement of AYUSH-related claims about curing COVID-19.
In fact, between April 2014 and July 2024, a portal of the Department of Consumer Affairs said it had logged more than 1,400 misleading advertisements pertaining to AYUSH products and services. Similarly, the Pharmacovigilance Centres for Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Homeopathy Drugs reported 18,812 “objectionable advertisements” between 2018 and 2021. In 2022, the ASCI also reported 1,229 misleading AYUSH-related advertisements between 2017 and 2019. Yet the same ministry is unconcerned when Patanjali Ayurved offers unsubstantiated (possibly intentionally ambiguous) “permanent relief” from a variety of conditions. In fact, “unconcerned” is inaccurate. On February 19, 2021, the then Union health minister Harsh Vardhan endorsed a ‘drug’ developed by Patanjali Ayurved, called Coronil, and which the minister, Balkrishna (the chairman), and Baba Ramdev claimed was the “first evidence-based medicine for coronavirus”. It wasn’t; it was an untested quack-remedy backed by spurious claims that the WHO had certified it.
Such circumstances force those who are concerned about the effects of these advertisements to approach the courts for relief, and it is heartening that the courts among all institutions retain some sense. Yet this is also a tragedy: if the regulations that the government has put in place are followed and enforced properly by regulatory agencies, people wouldn’t have to approach courts for every remedy. Courts are already burdened with a large number of cases; equally, judges – while being equipped to examine the propriety of processes and adherence to the law and Constitutional principles – are not subject experts.
In the Patanjali Ayurved case, of course, the company was advancing clearly pseudoscientific claims backed by non-existent data, and its defence was easy to dismiss. What would happen when, say, the government approves a poorly tested vaccine with a known risk of injury in the event of a self-determined emergency; a civil society group files a petition asking for the approval to be rolled back; and the government contends that the group is spreading vaccine hesitancy? The court shouldn’t be expected to be able to examine the results of clinical trials, yet it may have to. In fact, contemporary environmental governance offers a real example of such a problem in action.
Unlike a specialised expert tribunal, Constitutional courts don’t possess the necessary skill and expertise to examine the technical and scientific correctness of any project. Judges are trained to examine and adjudicate on the legality and propriety of the decision-making process.
Environmental lawyer Ritwick Dutta wrote this in The Hindu following the Joshimath disaster, when the Union government halted work on the Helang-Marwari bypass. This work had received a green signal from the Supreme Court in 2022 to proceed, raising “questions about the validity of the apex court’s decision” (not that the Union government was opposed to the project).
The separation of powers is a division of labour, rendered more critical than other such divisions by the need to keep the greatest powers of the land in check. Yet it has often been flouted, such as the Supreme Court’s decision to set up the Central Empowered Committee, which stands in between the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife and the Union Cabinet when approvals for non-forest use of sanctuaries and national parks are at stake. If this committee disagrees with a decision of the Standing Committee, the committee can forward it to the Supreme Court with its own opinion for the apex court to take the final call – a clear violation of the separation of powers.
However, not everyone would have thought so at the time many such measures were instituted. The environment ministry created the committee in 2002 following a Supreme Court direction in T.N. Godavarman, “for the purposes of monitoring and ensuring compliance of the orders of the … Supreme Court covering the subject matter of environment, forest and wildlife, and related issues arising out of the said orders and to suggest measures and recommendations generally to the State, as well as Central Government, for more effective implementation of the [Environment (Protection)] Act and other orders of the Court” (source).
Since then, however, and in keeping with Dutta’s assessment, the Supreme Court has adjudicated on the “technical and scientific correct” of various projects. That the environment ministry has parallelly and persistently weakened safeguards to protect the country’s natural resources to favour ‘ease of business’ has only allowed the court to intervene further. But at the same time, because the politically instituted mechanisms to protect the lives and livelihoods of people and the well-being of flora and fauna living near sites of resource extraction exist more and more only in theory, researchers, activists, and others have also welcomed the court’s interventions to nix deleterious project proposals. (In September 2023, in fact, the environment minister replaced the Supreme Court’s committee with a new one of the same name, populated fully with members that report to the ministry.)
Simplistically, those in charge are making bad decisions and those not supposed to be in charge are making good decisions.
Why not increase ISRO’s budget?
This post is in response to a question on Reddit about why the Indian government won’t increase ISRO’s space budget.
There’s a good analogy in India’s research budget. As a share of the GDP, the national expenditure on R&D has fallen significantly since 1996, to the current value of around 0.65%. The world’s other ‘science superpowers’ – including the US, China, Germany, and South Korea – spend at least 2% of their GDP on R&D. Many experts have also said publicly that earmarking this fraction of the GDP for R&D may be a prerequisite for India’s desire to become an economically developed national by 2047. But this is one half of the story. The other half is that the Ministry of Science & Technology has consistently underspent the amount the Ministry of Finance has been allocating it.
One established reason for underspending is that there are too few avenues for uptake, meaning the ministry needs to setup those opportunities as well. In 2018, the then principal scientific advisor to the government, K. VijayRaghavan, had articulated something similar in an interview – two days ahead of India’s ‘March for Science’, an event that philosopher Sundar Sarukkai had criticised earlier for pushing the notion that more funding for science (participants wanted the government to spend 3% of the GDP on R&D) could halt the spread of pseudoscientific ideas in society.
It’s the same with ISRO. While there’s a reasonable case to be made to increase spending on space-related activities, we also need the right industries and research opportunities to exist and which demand that money. It’s possible to contend that this is really a chicken-and-egg problem and that by increasing spending, institutions and activities can, say, become more efficient and allow members of the extant workforce to ‘look’ for new opportunities to begin with. But the cycle needs to be broken somewhere, and as things stand, it’s not unreasonable for funds to be released as and when the right opportunities arise.
ISRO’s lack of effective PR or media outreach offers a good illustration: many observers and commentators have pointed at NASA’s higher budget (in absolute numbers) and then at its admirable outreach policies and programme as if to say the two are related. However, throwing more money at ISRO and asking it to set up an outreach unit will still only produce a less-than-mediocre effort because we’ll be attempting to improve outreach without enhancing the culture in which the need for such outreach is rooted.
A similar argument goes for claims about ISRO employees being ‘underpaid’: who decides their salaries and why are they what they are? I doubt the salaries haven’t been increased for want of funds – speaking to a recurring motif in India’s research administration. Setting aside the concerns about underspending and utilisation efficiency, India’s spending on R&D is low not because the government doesn’t have the money. It certainly does, and in the last decade alone has repeatedly allocated very large sums for certain technologically intensive enterprises (and puff projects to inflate the ruling party’s reputation) when they present the right, even if short-sighted, appeal.
As publicly funded R&D institutions go, ISRO is among the most efficiently organised and run in India, even if it isn’t perfect. This backdrop merits examining the cases to increase its capital expenses (for missions, etc.) and revenue expenses (for salaries, etc.) separately. In this post I’m skipping the latter.
The practice of funding mission proposals on a case-by-case basis rather than hiking overall allocation makes more sense because such a thing would force ISRO, and the Department of Space (DoS) ecosystem more broadly, into a culture of pitching ideas to the government and awaiting deliberation and approval. In fact, currently, the DoS is overseen by the prime minister and missions have to be approved by the Union Cabinet, which is also an iffy setup. If this individual and/or their party puts politics before country, we are liable to have politically advantageous missions funded even when they lack proportionate scientific and/or societal value.
Instead, there needs to be an expert committee in between ISRO and the Cabinet whose members vote on proposals before forwarding the winning ones to the Cabinet. This committee needs to be beyond the DoS’s remit as well as be empowered to resist political capture. Such a setup is the way to go now that ISRO is starting on very expensive and sophisticated missions like human spaceflight, space stations, reusable launch vehicles, and lunar sample-return.
(* In a previous version of this post, I also suspected the Indian and the US governments have allocated comparable fractions of their GDP for their respective space departments. I subsequently stood corrected.)
A Q&A about philosophy in journalism
Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his article with The Wire on March 2, 2024.
I’m pasting the conversation the two of us had in full below, with Varun’s permission. Varun also wrote the introductory note, as a preface to the questions. His questions are in bold; my responses are in normal type.
Preface
Newspaper journalists, while writing on a topic, use theories and ideas from history, sociology, economics, sciences and other disciplines to establish the relevance of the topic and analyse the pertinent questions. However, rarely do they draw from philosophical theories that are equally relevant to the topic. Why is it that, for instance, we do not see social/moral/political philosophers’ views also being presented in articles on social topics? Similarly, while presenting a scientific topic, it is not common to find insights from the philosophy of science. Why is that philosophy glaringly absent in newspaper journalism that otherwise seamlessly synthesises views from numerous domains while presenting on a topic?
The non-engagement with philosophy is a characteristic of journalism across the world. There have been a few initiatives – both from journalists and philosophers – to bridge this gap in the Global North. One of the well-known projects in this regard was the column The Stone at the New York Times. Irish Times still runs a philosophy column Unthinkable. There have been very few journalists who have expressed their fruitful engagement with philosophy. (See here and here.) Also, the new kind of journalism brought by Aeon and The Conversation has provided the much-required niche space for philosophy.
The situation in India, however, is abysmal. Indeed, this is largely due to the poor state of philosophy in India and this is not a new point. However, what is not known is the story from the other side. What is Indian journalists’ perception of philosophy and why is that they do not use philosophy? Regarding this, I want to interview a few print/online newspaper journalists and editors. I am also planning to converse with a few journalism faculty as the non-engagement with philosophy might be a symptom of the journalism curriculum that is largely taught in India.
Understanding the perspectives of journalists, I think, is the first step towards remedying the gap in the Indian context. This can open up the conversation between journalists and philosophers to create meaningful journalism projects to make philosophy relevant to the Indian public.
Q&A
1. Why do you think journalists do not draw from philosophical theories/ideas while analysing a topic and writing articles? I am asking this because online/print newspaper journalists draw from theories/ideas of other disciplines (social sciences, history, sciences) in spite of these being nuanced and complex (for both writers and readers).
It depends what exactly you mean by ‘philosophy’ because from where I’m sitting I disagree with the assertion in your question that Indian journalists don’t use philosophical ideas or theories in their work. They use it both directly and indirectly. They use it directly when making decisions about what kind of events, stories, and phenomena they’d rather cover and why. When I say I’m a journalist biased towards principles encoded in the Indian Constitution, there’s a philosophy of journalism at work there. I’m mindful of the philosophical position of falsifiability when I conclude there’s no point trying to fact-check or rebut a claim like “Sanskrit is a good language for AI”. Journalists use philosophy indirectly when drawing on all those other fields, which have been informed and honed by philosophical deliberations unique to them. For example, a philosophy of history determines how we narrativise the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation in addition to archaeological, genetic, and climatological data.
If your question is why journalists don’t write articles containing ideas from philosophy and the views of philosophers, there are two answers.
First, all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea a) what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all.
b) Even if I was familiar with what philosophers are experts on, I’d imagine philosophy as a field of study faces the same resistance to being represented in the news as exotic fields (from the PoV of the publics) like high-energy physics or mathematics. When I’m trying to write on the latter, I’m banking on some sort of numerical literacy on the readers’ part. It’s impossible to explain the Langlands programme to someone who doesn’t know (or care) what functions or sets are. I haven’t had the chance to consider the level of philosophical literacy in India but I don’t think it’s very good. So broaching that kind of thinking and reasoning in an article – especially in a news article – requires the author to lay the groundwork first, which is precarious. The more words there are, the more careful you need to be about holding a reader’s attention.
There also need to be concrete developments and they need to be in the public interest, and unless a writer and/or an editor comes along who can extract these nuggets from a paper or in conversation with an expert – and in interesting ways – it’s going to have no engagement. Worse, it’s going to impose a disproportionately high opportunity cost on news-producers’ time and labour by expecting them to be able to separate philosophical wheat from chaff. I believe this goes for both whole articles about philosophy and articles that include philosophical considerations in the mix. The Hindu is trying to step around this ‘concrete developments’ requirement with two daily pages called ‘Text & Context’ and one online-only (for now) science page every weekday. These are both fairly recent developments, which is to say securing such space in a newspaper or any news-focused outlet is difficult and needs the underlying organisation to be ‘healthy’ as well as a sound editorial justification of its own.
We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need (in space and time) to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.
Now the second answer: If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.
2. I think the previous question needs to be invoked at the editorial level as well. Given that editors do request the writers to make changes (like including some data on the topic or getting a comment from a particular expert), the absence of philosophy in articles might largely be due to editorial decisions and policies: what is considered as “pertinent”, “readable”, “good” etc. For instance, one of the unsaid editorial policies seems to be that philosophical discussions are best suited for op-ed columns. This kind of presumption has resulted in the ghettoisation of philosophy to certain zones in newspaper journalism.
2a. As an editor, what are your thoughts on the points? What might be the actual, pragmatic challenges journalism faces in this context?
2b. Since editors play an equally important role in “setting the agenda” and changing the reading styles of the public, what might be the ways to overcome these challenges? How to break the wall around philosophy in journalism, so that it can be accommodated/incorporated in mainstream journalism?
Imagine the industry of journalism to be like a wave propagating through a medium. Let’s divide this wave into two parts: the wavefront and the wake. Newsrooms operating at the wavefront are distinguished by the resources to experiment and innovate, take risks, and pay more than competitively for the best exponents of particular skills in the market. Newsrooms in the wake are just about staying profitable (or even breaking even), innovating in incremental fashion, avoiding risks, and trying to pay competitively. Of course neither group is monolithic – most sufficiently large news organisations have some departments that are doing well and some that are fighting to stay alive – but this is a simplification to illustrate a point. I believe your questions are about newsrooms in the wake; they’re definitely more interesting in this context. With this in mind:
2a) Newsrooms need to make money to pay their journalists without compromising editorial independence and editorial standards. This is the single largest challenge right now. In the face of this challenge, especially since the rise of news aggregators and social media platforms as sites of news consumption, so many publications have shut shop, downsized or relinquished independence, or some combination of all three. Once a newsroom’s finances are sufficiently in the green and they can graduate from the wake to the wavefront, pertinence, readability, etc. can and do become the first questions an editor asks. Of course, I may not be saying any of this if the times weren’t what they are.
2b) I’m not sure there’s a wall around journalism that blocks philosophy. In fact journalists don’t have the freedom to choose (or decline, for that matter) what they consider to be ‘news’. But the flip side of this is no particular enterprise can be said to be entitled to a journalist’s attention. The reason this is so is because of how public interest is constructed.
For example, there’s a contest – very simply speaking – these days between a journalism that holds we’re doing the country a disservice by turning our heads away from everything that’s going wrong and another that’s particular about pointing its head in the opposite direction. Another example of a similar contest is centred on whether journalists should make plain their biases – because everyone is biased in some way – or if they should cover the news without losing (a reasonable) equipoise.
In these or any other scenarios, whatever constitutes the public interest is built jointly by journalists and the consumers of the knowledge they produce, and will vary from one publication to the next. The Hindu, The Wire, and The New York Times have different covenants with their readers about what public interest looks like, or ought to look like. The construction of the public interest is a shared and complicated enterprise that takes time.
As a result, most journalism, in the present era at least, follows some publics; journalism doesn’t lead them. This also means – taking all of these business, economic, and social forces together – that when people aren’t interested in philosophy-related matters, there’s not much an editor (in a newsroom-in-the-wake) can do to change that.
3. I need your comment on another editorial decision about the op-ed columns that have a specific implication for the Indian context. One of the ways academic journalism scales up the dissemination is by publishing the articles with Creative Commons licence. For instance, The Conversation and Aeon are using this method. The idea seems to be working very well. Create a niche space for academic journalism that usually does not have space in mainstream journalism and make up for the readership through free or paid syndication. This approach seems to be working well, and has provided a good working model.
However, in an uneven world, this does not favour everyone equally. Given its international scale/level/reach, this works well for the Global North academicians who have access to these platforms. Indian scholars do not have easy access to Aeon or The Conversation. And Indian online platforms have easy access to quality articles without having to deal with Indian scholars.
These issues are pertinent for most of the academicians in India. But I want to articulate the problem from the perspective of philosophy. This method of republishing further widens the gap between philosophers and journalism in India. This way of operating does not provide enough motivation for Indian newspaper editors to work with Indian scholars. In spite of publishing philosophy articles, Indian editors do not seem to be interested/invested in working/collaborating with Indian philosophers and commissioning articles. (Republishing international articles has a further implication: it deepens the imbalance between Western and Eastern philosophical systems.)
Would like to know your comments/thoughts on the above note.
I’m uncomfortable with providing a general comment. Please let me know if you have specific questions.
Free/paid syndication option of articles in international platforms indeed provides straightforward access to quality content for Indian platforms. And given the restriction of resources like time and finances, and largely the dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public, it is understandable what the Indian platforms are doing. Having said that, do you agree that there are implications of this shortcut approach? The first implication is about the politics of knowledge and representation, whose views are represented, etc. The second implication is the perpetuation of Indian journalism’s impatience to work with local scholars. If it does not invest and work with, say Indian philosophers, even for op-eds, the problem persists.
I agree wholeheartedly with the first implication. To republish from publications in the US, Europe and the UK that syndicate their articles on a Creative Commons licence is effectively to represent the views of the scholars quoted in those articles – mostly from Global North countries – instead of the views of others, especially those from India (from the PoV of Indian newsrooms and readers). However, it’s important to ask whether this really imposes the sort of opportunity cost that prevents Indian journalists from still trying to work with and represent the views of Indian scholars in other articles. My answer is ‘no’ simply because of the difference in the amount of effort expended in republishing an article and reporting on a scholar’s work, views, etc. Put another way, it takes me a few minutes to identify an article on, say, The Conversation that will work ‘well’ on my site and a few more minutes to republish it. Doing so won’t subtract from the responsibilities of or resources available to a reporter on my team. So if/when a publication says it is making do with stories from The Conversation, the problem arises with people in the newsroom who are choosing not to engage with Indian scholars – irrespective of whether it can or does republish articles from other outlets.
I also want to clarify something about the “dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public” in your question: there isn’t so much a dearth of good academicians who can write, there’s a dearth of academicians who believe communication at large is important at all. I’ve been fortunate enough to find more than a few scientists who are eager to write, and to be frank their numbers are increasing, but my experience is that the vast majority of scientists working in India distrust the media too much and/or don’t believe that the scientific work they undertake needs to be communicated to non-scientists – much less that they need to be the ones doing it. (I’m also setting aside the fact that many of the better scientists working in the country also shoulder many responsibilities beyond teaching and research, especially important administrative tasks, and communication – especially of the form that their employers may not recognise when considering people for promotions, etc. – only adds to this burden.) My point here is that the task of finding scientists to write is a lot more arduous than might seem at first glance.
I feel the same way about the second implication you’ve set out in your question: journalists are not impatient per se; what you may perceive as impatience is likelier than not the effect of newsroom mechanics that expect journalists to be productive to a degree that precludes prolonged engagement with scholars. Also, the distinction I pointed out in my first set of replies matters greatly. If you’re writing for a magazine or if you’re writing a news feature, you’ll have the time and the word limit for such engagement. But if you’re writing a news report for a newspaper, you will have neither the time and the word limit for nor – importantly – any expectation from your readers of slow-cooked material in the article. Finally, while I’ve tried to describe what is, I don’t think I’m prepared to call it justification. I think large newsrooms, especially those departments of such newsrooms that are closer to the wavefront than others, should try (honestly) to establish opportunities for slow-cooked material in their products.
Lookout duty
When a user asked, “Is modi a fascist”, Gemini AI responded that Mr. Modi had “been accused of implementing policies that some experts have characterized as fascist”.
“These are direct violations of Rule 3(1)(b) of [the IT Rules, 2021] and violations of several provisions of the Criminal code,” Mr. Chandrasekhar said on X, formerly Twitter. His sharp reaction reveals a fault line between the Indian government’s hands-off approach to AI research, and tech giants’ AI platforms which are keen to train their models quickly with the general public, opening them up to embarrassing confrontations with political leaders.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
‘Gemini AI’s reply to query, ‘is Modi a fascist’, violates IT Rules: Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar’, The Hindu, February 23, 2024
We all understand why this is an asinine statement by the IT minister, motivated possibly by having to fuel a news cycle to distract from something else. Importantly, the people who demonstrated and popularised the habit of twisting statements out of context — e.g. reacting to “experts have called his policies fascist” as if it meant “he is fascist” — are now seemingly duty-bound to keep track of and react to each one of these opportunities in the appropriate way. Woe betide them if they slip: their own foot-soldiers might turn on them!