Susmita Mohanty, the founder of India’s first private space company, Earth2Orbit, wants India to claim bigger piece of the space-launch pie.She is CEO of Earth2Orbit, which recently launched its first client satellite. An aerospace entrepreneur and spaceship designer, she has worked at NASA and Boeing, and holds a PhD in aerospace architecture How active is India’s space programme? The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), which was founded in 1969, launches rockets, builds and uses satellites extensively for earthly applications and has recently started planetary exploration. [...]

Here is a picture that represents the gestation of Project Prakash. In order to get a first-hand sense of childhood blindness in India, Prof. Pawan Sinha visited a few places in the country, distant from the ambit of urban medical care facilities. Here he is working in a village with a young girl who gained sight in one eye at the age of 7 years. She is 11 years old in this picture. Also seen in the picture is Dr. Asim Sil, an ophthalmologist who [...]

Praveen Anand is a Chennai-based chef trained in western cooking. Today, his passion is authentic South Indian food. His embrace of the traditional is significant in a nation that has quietly begun discarding some of its food customs. In his two-decade long career, he has researched foods of various communities in Southern India bringing dishes from each of them to a wider audience. The fruits of his labor are evident at Dakshin, listed as one of top 20 restaurants in Asia in the authoritative Miele [...]

Abha Sur is part of the humanities faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a physical chemist, she taught the subject and also published several papers on laser spectroscopy, her field of specialization. Then, the focus of her research shifted, taking her from the lab bench to the library archives. She wanted to find out more about the life and times of India’s first Nobel Laureate. Sir C. V. Raman’s (1888- 1970) name is immortalized in science because he demonstrated the molecular scattering of [...]

Margaret Lowman is a pioneer in canopy science, a subset of field biology, and the author of the best-selling Life in the Treetops. She also co-authored It is a Jungle up there with her two sons. A professor at North Carolina State University and Director of the Nature Research Center in Raleigh, she is currently a Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar to India. Q Why is it so important to study life in the treetops? A Forest canopies are the interface between atmosphere and earth — [...]

Prof. Rohini Godbole, particle physicist, is a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In a parallel universe, she would have been a Bank of Maharasthra employee: she was offered a job after she topped Pune University in B.Sc., Physics. “The salary was almost as much as my father’s at that time,” she recalls. A scholarly life, she decided, would suit her better. Today, she is part of a select group of scientists who will decide the design of the next-generation particle accelerator based [...]

We humans use a combination of our five senses — sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste — to navigate the everyday world. Among those who operate without the benefit of one or more of these senses, the blind and the deaf have our immediate sympathy. But what of a person who cannot smell — an anosmic? Can we even begin to fathom her frustration? Smell is an undervalued sense. When we can drink in the scents and odors around us, it is hard to appreciate [...]

Can tablet computers “parachuted” into remote areas transform childhood learning, asks Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind One Laptop per Child You’ll helicopter computers into remote areas so the children there can teach themselves to read and write. Where did the idea come from? One Laptop per Child (OLPC), even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised along the following lines: “Negroponte believes that you can give a child a laptop and walk away.” Whether I ever believed that or not is now [...]

The poem was written on a sort of impulse. It was triggered by a comment I heard from a friend of mine – quite a culture-vulture himself – about another writer based in Bombay. My friend said that this writer was “so Bombay”, meaning so typically a Bombayite or a Mumbaikar. It got me thinking about how he or others might see me and so this poem got written. At the core of it, of course, lies my own love for the older version of [...]

Angela Saini is an award-winning independent journalist based in London. Before going freelance, she worked as a reporter for the BBC, but her very first journalism job was with The Hindu’s Frontline magazine in New Delhi. Later, in 2009, she took a trip to Mumbai to write a story about lie detectors and was amazed by the breadth of government science initiatives and the sudden burst of R&D centres all over the country. A book idea was born. For Geek Nation: How Indian Science is [...]