Thank you, Dr. Rao!

Professor C.N.R. Rao, the first scientist to be nominated for the Bharat Ratna award since C. V. Raman, has in a recent interview done yeoman service to the nation by shattering some long held and most ridiculous myths about this country – though I am sure that very few Indians will thank him for it. Here is the link to the relevant news item. The text of the report on the front page of my newspaper is slightly different, but no matter.

This is also a subject I have written on, and not once, on this blog. Something very close to my heart, perennially.

I discovered that very little science is done in India – as westerners (who have, let’s face it, done 99% of all the science in the last 200 years) understand doing science – and that very badly, when I was still an adolescent. Otherwise, I might quite possibly have gone in for higher studies in some branch of science myself (and wanted my daughter to do the same): I had the brains, and upto quite an advanced age, sufficient interest. I am glad to be vindicated in my views by a scientist of such preeminence, though it has come rather late in the day, and Professor Rao, being in a very high public position, has pulled a lot of punches, as I don’t have to.

Still, I am glad that he has said a) IT has very little to do with science, and might actually be blamed for having done a lot of harm to science as a whole in the last 20 years (as cricket has done to every other kind of sport), b) a lot of scientific fields have been grossly and persistently neglected, c) the IT-rich (and other rich, and successive governments) have done much less for the advancement of science in this country than they should have, d) our scientists, many of them lazy careerists with too little interest in their work, too little nationalistic pride and ambition, must take a big share of the blame too, e) since Nehru’s time, there might actually have been a sharp retrogression in the development of a scientific temper in our society, f) neither science nor God have anything to do with superstition, which is what is rife in India, g) without spread of mass education with a stress on nurturing the scientific temper, there can be no real and long term development, no matter what the stock market says. I find myself agreeing with every bit of the above.

I wish India would become a truly cultured and progressive nation again. Which would mean being far less fanatical about fads (and I call the recent madness over Chennai Express as well as Sachin’s retirement – not Sachin’s career itself, mind you – fads), far less blindly, narrowly, stupidly, cravenly materialistic, far less superstitious (which – and I am with both Tagore and Subramaniam Chandreshekhar here – means being far more seriously interested in God, art, beauty, justice as well as real science, as distinct from technical gimmickry and dhandaa and hogging and partying), far less interested in pubbing and mall-crawling, far more keen on good reading, far more serious about real education (look up my posts under the label education: cramming a bit of physics and chemistry has very little to do with it). Which means that greater people than Nandan Nilekani and Chetan Bhagat and Anna Hazare must be called visionaries. Which means going back to the golden – or at least silver – age we had just before and after independence, when cerebral men living simple lives were accorded the highest social esteem, at least among those who dared to call themselves educated, when no mere bania, politician, doctor or engineer would have dared to talk as though he were the equal of Satyen Bose or Bibhutibhushan Banerjee or Nandalal Bose or Alauddin Khan sahib, when teachers were accorded the respect due to them because society at least dimly understood the value of what they do, and every Tom, Dick and Harry couldn’t become a teacher, when corruption would become a minor irritant and non-issue simply because the vast majority would have realized that life is not to be wasted making a bit of sleazy money…

P.S., Nov. 19: This editorial in my newspaper today, in connection with Sachin, science and the Bharat Ratna,  is one of the sanest things I have read in a long time.