Reuters published a very interesting report on February 2, entitled ‘Exclusive-In heated meeting, India seeks tougher action from U.S. tech giants on fake news’. Excerpt:
Indian officials have held heated discussions with Google, Twitter and Facebook for not proactively removing what they described as fake news on their platforms, sources told Reuters, the government’s latest altercation with Big Tech.
The officials, from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B), strongly criticised the companies and said their inaction on fake news was forcing the Indian government to order content takedowns, which in turn drew international criticism that authorities were suppressing free expression, two sources said.
I’d have thought any good-faith attempt to crack down on fake news on social media and news-aggregation platforms will inevitably crack down on right-wing content generation enterprises, including the BJP’s bot/troll armies, its ministers and ‘news’ outlets like The Daily Guardian, OpIndia, etc. So BJP government officials getting worked up over this issue is insightful: contrary to what I thought was usually implied, the government honestly believes news that is at odds with its narratives is fake – or, knowing that Google, Facebook and Twitter will push back, this is the government’s ploy to be seen to be taking fake news on these platforms seriously without eventually having to do anything about it.
The government has an able collaborator in Google at least, whose executives had a solution for the government officials’ problem: reduce transparency.
Executives from Google told the I&B officials that one way to resolve that was for the ministry to avoid making takedown decisions public. The firms could work with the government and act on the alleged fake content, which could be a win-win for both sides, Google said, according to one of the sources.
Interestingly again, according to Reuters, officials “summarily rejected” this idea because the “takedowns also publicise how the companies weren’t doing enough to tackle fake news on their own”. This “heated exchange” sounds like the real win-win to me: the party comes off looking like a) it’s opposed to fake news and b) its social-media legions aren’t engaged in manufacturing fake news, while these ‘tech giants’ don’t alienate the political right and protect their profits.
Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 7.2% of non-COVID-19-related and 17.2% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions of the paper.
Later: “A major concern with expedited publishing is that it may impede the rigour of the peer review process.”
So far, according to this and one other paper published by PLOS Biology, it seems reasonable to ask not whether preprints are reliable but what peer-review brings to the table. (By this I mean the conventional/legacy variety of closed pre-publication review).
To the uninitiated: paralleling the growing popularity and usefulness of open-access publishing, particularly in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, some “selective” journals – to use wording from the PLOS Biology paper – and their hordes of scientist-supporters have sought to stress the importance of peer-review in language both familiar and based on an increasingly outdated outlook: that peer-review is important to prevent misinformation. I’ve found a subset of this argument, that peer-review is important for papers whose findings could save/end lives, to be more reasonable, and the rest just unreasonable and self-serving.
Funnily enough, two famously “selective” journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, retracted two papers related to COVID-19 care in the thick of the pandemic – invalidating their broader argument in favour of peer-review as well as the efficiency of their own peer-review processes vis-à-vis the subset argument.
Arguments in favour of peer-review are self-serving because it has more efficient, more transparent and more workable alternatives, yet many journals have failed to adopt them, and have instead used this repeatedly invalidated mode of reviewing papers to maintain their opaque style of functioning, which in turn – and together with the purported cost of printing papers on physical paper – they use to justify the exorbitant prices they charge readers (here’s one ludicrous example).
For example, one alternative is pre-publication peer-review, in which scientists upload their paper to a preprint server, like arXiv, bioRxiv or medRxiv, and share the link with their peers and, say, on social media platforms. There, independent experts review the paper’s contents and share their comments. The paper’s authors can incorporate the necessary changes, with credit, as separate versions of the same paper on the server.
Further, and unlike ‘conventional’ journals’ laughable expectation of journalists to write about the papers they publish without fear of being wrong, journalists subject preprint papers to the same treatment that is due the average peer-reviewed paper as well: with reasonable and courteous scepticism, and to qualify its claims and findings with comments from independent experts – with an added caveat, though I personally think it unnecessary, that their subject is a preprint paper.
(Some of you might remember that in 2018, Tom Sheldon argued in a Nature News & Views article that peer-review facilitates good journalism. I haven’t come across an argument more objectionable in favour of conventional peer-review.)
However, making this mode of reviewing and publishing more acceptable has been very hard, especially for the demand to repeatedly push back against scientists whose academic reputation depends on having published and being able to publish in “selective” journals and the scientometric culture they uphold, and their hollow arguments about the virtues of conventional, opaque peer-review. (Making peer-review transparent could also help deal with reviewers who use the opportunity anonymity affords them to be sexist and racist.)
But with the two new PLOS Biology papers, we have an opportunity to flip these scientists’ and journals’ demand that preprint papers ‘prove’ or ‘improve’ themselves around to ask what the legacy modes bring to the table. From the abstract of the second paper (emphasis added):
We sought to compare the and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical test as a while as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents. The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supporting information sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model. We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint-peer-reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint. We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer-reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish.
It seems to me to be reasonable to ask about the rigour to which supporters of conventional peer-review have staked claim when few papers appear to benefit from it. The process may be justified in those few cases where a paper is corrected in a significant way, and that it may be difficult to identify those papers without peer-review – but pre-publication peer-review has an equal chance of identifying the same errors (esp. if we increase the discoverability of preprints the way journal editors identify eminent experts in the same field to review papers, instead of relying solely on social-media interactions that less internet-savvy scientists may not be able to initiate).
In addition, it appears that in most cases in which preprints were uploaded to bioRxiv first and were then peer-reviewed and published by a journal, the papers’ authors clearly didn’t submit papers that required significant quality improvements – certainly not to the extent to which conventional peer-review’s supporters have alluded to in an effort to make such review necessary.
So, why must conventional peer-review, in the broader sense, persist?
Plagiarism is a tricky issue. If it’s straightforward to you, ask yourself if you’re assuming that the plagiariser (plagiarist?) is fluent in reading and writing, but especially writing, English. The answer’s probably ‘yes’. This is because for someone entering into an English-using universe for the first time, certain turns of phrase and certain ways to articulate complicated concepts stick with you the first time you read them, and when the time comes for you to spell out the same ideas and concepts, you passively, inadvertently recall them and reuse them. You don’t think – at least at first – that they’re someone else’s words, more so if you haven’t been taught, for no fault of yours, what academic plagiarism is and/or that it’s bad.
This is also why there’s a hierarchy of plagiarism. For example, if you’re writing a scientific paper and you copy another paper’s results, that’s worse than if you copy verbatim the explanation of a certain well-known idea. This is why former University Grants Commission chairman Praveen Chaddah wrote in 2014:
There are worse offences than text plagiarism — such as taking credit for someone else’s research ideas and lifting their results. These are harder to detect than copy-and-pasted text, so receive less attention. This should change. To help, academic journals could, for instance, change the ways in which they police and deal with such cases.
But if you’re fluent with writing English, if you know what plagiarism and plagiarise anyway (without seeking resources to help you beat its temptation), and/or if you’re stealing someone else’s idea and calling it your own, you deserve the flak and (proportionate) sanctions coming your way. In this context, a new Retraction Watch article by David Sanders makes for interesting reading. According to Sanders, in 2018, he wrote to the editors of a journal that had published a paper in 2011 with lots of plagiarised text. After a back-and-forth, the editors told Sanders they’d look into it. He asked them again in 2019 and May 2021 and received the same reply on both occasions. Then on July 26 the journal published a correction to the 2011 article. Sanders wasn’t happy and wrote back to the editors, one of whom replied thus:
Thank you for your email. We went through this case again, and discussed whether we may have made the wrong decision. We did follow the COPE guidelines step by step and used several case studies for further information. This process confirmed that an article should be retracted when it is misleading for the reader, either because the information within is incorrect, or when an author induces the reader to think that the data presented is his own. As this is a Review, copied from other Reviews, the information within does not per se mislead the reader, as the primary literature is still properly cited. We agree that this Review was not written in a desirable way, and that the authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but according to the guidelines the literature must be considered from the point of view of the reader, and retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors. We therefore concluded that a corrigendum was the best way forward. Hence, we confirm our decision on this case.
Thank you again for flagging this case in the first place, which allowed us to correct the record and gain deeper insights into publishing ethics, even though this led to a solution we do not necessarily like.
Sanders wasn’t happy: he wrote on Retraction Watch that “the logic of [the editor’s] message is troubling. The authors engaged in what is defined by COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) as ‘Major Plagiarism’ for which the prescribed action is retraction of the published article and contacting the institution of the authors. And yet the journal did not retract.” The COPE guidelines summarise the differences between minor and major plagiarism this way:
Not being fluent in English could render the decisions made using this table less than fair, for example because an author could plagiarise several paragraphs but honestly have no intention to deceive – simply because they didn’t think they needed to be that careful. I know this might sound laughable to a scientist operating in the US or Europe, out of a better-run, better-organised and better-funded institute, and who has been properly in the ins and outs of academic ethics. But it’s true: the bulk of India’s scientists work outside the IITs, IISERs, DAE/DBT/DST-funded institutes and the more progressive private universities (although only one – Ashoka – comes to mind). Their teachers before them worked in the same resource-constrained environments, and for most of whom the purpose of scientific work wasn’t science as much as an income. Most of them probably never used plagiarism-checking tools either, at least not until they got into trouble one time and then found out about such things.
I myself found out about the latter in an interesting way – when I reported that Appa Rao Podile, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, had plagiarised in some of his papers, around the time students at the university were protesting the university’s response to the death of Rohith Vemula. When I emailed Podile for his response, he told me he would like my help with the tools with which he could spot plagiarism. I thought he was joking, but after a series of unofficial enquiries over the next year or so, I learnt that plagiarism-checking software was not at all the norm, even if solutions like Copyscape were relatively cheap, in state-funded colleges and second-tier universities around the country. I had no reason to leave Podile off the hook – but not because he hadn’t used plagiarism-checking software but because he was a vice-chancellor of a major university and had to have done better than claim ignorance.
(I also highly recommend this November 2019 article in The Point, asking whether plagiarism is wrong.)
According to Sanders, the editor who replied didn’t retract the paper because he thought it wasn’t ‘major plagiarism’, according to COPE – whereas Sanders thought it was. The editor appears to have reasoned his way out of the allegation, in the editor’s view at least, by saying that the material printed in the paper wasn’t misleading because it had been copied from non-misleading original material and that the supposedly lesser issue was that while it had been cited, it hadn’t been syntactically attributed as such (placed between double quotes, for example). The issue for Sanders, with whom I agree here, is that the authors had copied the material and presented it in a way that indicated they were its original creators. The lengths to which journal editors can go to avoid retracting papers, and therefore protect their journal’s reputation, ranking or whatever, is astounding. I also agree with Sanders when he says that by refusing to retract the article, the editors are practically encouraging misconduct.
I’d like to go a step further and ask: when journal editors think like this, where does that leave Indian scientists of the sort I’ve described above – who are likely to do better with the right help and guidance? In 2018, Rashmi Raniwala and Sudhir Raniwala wrote in The Wire Science that the term ‘predatory’, in ‘predatory journals’, was a misnomer:
… it is incorrect to call them ‘predatory’ journals because the term predatory suggests that there is a predator and a victim. The academicians who publish in these journals are not victims; most often, they are self-serving participants. The measure of success is the number of articles received by these journals. The journals provide a space to those who wanted easy credit. And a large number of us wanted this easy credit because we were, to begin with, not suitable for the academic profession and were there for the job. In essence, these journals could not have succeeded without an active participation and the connivance of some of us.
It was a good article at the time, especially in the immediate context of the Raniwalas’ fight to have known defaulters suitably punished. There are many bad-faith actors in the Indian scientific community and what the Raniwalas write about applies to them without reservation (ref. the cases of Chandra Krishnamurthy, R.A. Mashelkar, Deepak Pental, B.S. Rajput, V. Ramakrishnan, C.N.R. Rao, etc.). But I’m also confident enough to say now that predatory journals exist, typified by editors who place the journal before the authors of the articles that constitute it, who won’t make good-faith efforts to catch and correct mistakes at the time they’re pointed out. It’s marginally more disappointing that the editor who replied to Sanders replied at all; most don’t, as Elisabeth Bik has repeatedly reminded us. He bothered enough to engage – but not enough to give a real damn.
Cash payments for poor mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. https://t.co/3rd06k0eih
First, it’s also a bad discovery (note: there’s a difference between right/wrong and good/bad). It is useful to found specific interventions on scientific findings – such as that providing pregnant women with iron supplements in a certain window of the pregnancy could reduce the risk of anaemia by X%. However, that the state should provide iron supplements to pregnant women belonging to certain socio-economic groups across the country shouldn’t be founded on scientific findings. Such welfarist schemes should be based on the implicit virtues of social welfare itself. In the case of the new study: the US government should continue with cash payments for poor mothers irrespective of their babies’ learning outcomes. The programme can’t stop if any of their babies are slow learners.
Second, I think the deeper problem in this example lies with the context in which the study’s findings could be useful. Scientists and economists have the liberty to study what they will, as well as report what they find (see third point). But consider a scenario in which lawmakers are presented with two policies, both rooted in the same ideologies and both presenting equally workable solutions to a persistent societal issue. Only one, however, has the results of a scientific study to back up its ability to achieve its outcomes (let’s call this ‘Policy A’). Which one will the lawmakers pick to fund?
Note here that this isn’t a straightforward negotiation between the lawmakers’ collective sensibilities and the quality of the study. The decision will also be influenced by the framework of accountability and justification within which the lawmakers operate. For example, those in small, progressive nations like Finland or New Zealand, where the general scientific literacy is high enough to recognise the ills of scientism, may have the liberty to set the study aside and then decide – but those in India, a large and nationalist nation with generally low scientific literacy, are likelier than not to construe the very availability of scientific backing, of any quality, to mean Policy A is better.
This is how studies like the one above could become a problem: by establishing a pseudo-privilege for policies that have ‘scientific findings’ to back up their promises. It also creates a rationalisation of the Republican Party’s view that by handing out “unconditional aid”, the state will discourage the recipients from working. While the Republicans’ contention is speculative in principle, in policy and, just to be comprehensive, in science, scientific studies that find the opposite play nicely into their hands – even in as straightforward a case as that of poor mothers. As the New York Times article itself writes:
Another researcher, Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard, reacted more cautiously, noting the full effect of the payments — $333 a month — would not be clear until the children took cognitive tests. While the brain patterns documented in the study are often associated with higher cognitive skills, he said, that is not always the case.
“It’s potentially a groundbreaking study,” said Dr. Nelson, who served as a consultant to the study. “If I was a policymaker, I’d pay attention to this, but it would be premature of me to pass a bill that gives every family $300 a month.”
A temporary federal program of near-universal children’s subsidies — up to $300 a month per child through an expanded child tax credit — expired this month after Mr. Biden failed to unite Democrats behind a large social policy bill that would have extended it. Most Republicans oppose the monthly grants, citing the cost and warning that unconditional aid, which they describe as welfare, discourages parents from working.
Sharing some of those concerns, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, effectively blocked the Biden plan, though he has suggested that he might support payments limited to families of modest means and those with jobs. The payments in the research project, called Baby’s First Years, were provided regardless of whether the parents worked.
Third, and in continuation, it’s ridiculous to attach the approval for policies whose principles are clear and sound to the quality of data originating from scientific studies, which in turn depends on the quality of theoretical and experimental instruments scientists have at their disposal (“We hypothesized that infants in the high-cash gift group would have greater EEG power in the mid- to high-frequency bands and reduced power in a low-frequency band compared with infants in the low-cash gift group.”). And let’s not forget, on scientists coming along in time to ask the right questions.
Fourth, do scientists and economists really have the liberty to study and report what they will? There are two ways to slice this. 1: To clarify the limited context in which this question is worth considering – not at all in almost all cases, and only when a study uncovers the scientific basis for something that isn’t well-served by such a basis. This principle is recursive: it should preclude the need for a scientific study of whether support for certain policies has been set back by the presence or absence of scientific studies. 2: where does the demand for these studies originate? Clearly someone somewhere thought, “Do we know the policy’s effects in the population?” Science can provide quick answers in some cases but not in others, and in the latter, it should be prevented from creating the impression that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence.
Who bears that responsibility? I believe that has fallen on the shoulders of politicians, social scientists, science communicators and exponents of the humanities alone for too long; scientists also need to exercise the corresponding restraint, and refrain from conducting studies in which they don’t specify the precise context (and not just that limited to science) in which their findings are valid, if at all. In the current case, NYT called the study’s findings “modest” – that the “researchers likened them in statistical magnitude to moving to the 75th position in a line of 100 from the 81st”. Modest results are also results, sure, but as we have come to expect with COVID-19 research, don’t conduct poor studies – and by extension don’t conduct studies of a social-science concept in a scientific way and expect it to be useful.
I’m partway through Renny Thomas’s new book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment. Its description on the Routledge page reads:
This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity’. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.
To be fair to Renny as well as to prospective readers, I’m hardly familiar with scholarship in this area of study and in no position to be able to confidently critique the book’s arguments. I’m reading it to learn. With this caveat out of the way…
I’ve been somewhat familiar with Renny’s work and my expectation of his new book to be informative and insightful has been more than met. I like two things in particular based on the approximately 40% I’ve read so far (and not necessarily from the beginning). First, Science and Religion quotes scientists with whom Renny spoke to glean insights generously. A very wise man told me recently that in most cases, it’s possible to get the gist of (non-fiction) books written by research scholars and focusing on their areas of work just by reading the introductory chapter. I think this book may be the exception that makes the rule for me. On occasion Renny also quotes from books by other scientists and scholars to make his point, which I say to imply that for readers like me, who are interested in but haven’t had the chance to formally study these topics, Science and Religion can be a sort of introductory text as well.
For example, in one place, Renny quotes some 150 words from Raja Ramanna’s autobiography, where the latter – a distinguished physicist and one of the more prominent endorsers of the famous 1981 ‘statement on scientific temper’ – recalls in spirited fashion his visit to Gangotri. The passage reminded me of an article by American historian of science Daniel Sarewitz published many years ago, in which he described his experience of walking through the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. I like to credit Sarewitz’s non-academic articles for getting me interested in the sociology of science, especially critiques of science as a “secularising medium”, to use Renny’s words, but I have also been guilty of having entered this space of thought and writing through accounts of spiritual experiences written by scientists from countries other than India. But now, thanks to Science and Religion, I have the beginnings of a resolution.
Second, the book’s language is extremely readable: undergraduate students who are enthusiastic about science should be able to read it for pleasure (and I hope students of science and engineering do). I myself was interested in reading it because I’ve wanted, and still want, to understand what goes on in the minds of people like ISRO chairman K. Sivan when they insist on visiting Tirupati before every major rocket launch. And Renny clarifies his awareness of these basic curiosities early in the book:
… scientists continue to be the ‘special’ folk in India. It is this image of ‘special’ folk and science’s alleged relationship with ‘objectivity’ which makes people uneasy when scientists go to temple, engage in prayer, and openly declare their allegiance to religious beliefs. The dominance and power of science and its status as a superior epistemology is part of the popular imagination. The continuing media discussion on ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) scientists when they offer prayer before any mission is an example.
Renny also clarifies the religious and caste composition of his interlocutors at the outset as well as dedicates a chapter to discussing the ways in which caste and religious identities present themselves in laboratory settings, and the ways in which they’re acknowledged and dismissed – but mostly dismissed. An awareness of caste and religion is also important to understand the Sivan question, according to Science and Religion. Nearly midway through the book, Renny discusses a “strategic adjustment” among scientists that allows them to practice science and believe in gods “without revealing the apparent contradictions between the two”. Here, one scientist identifies one of the origins of religious belief in an individual to be their “cultural upbringing”; but later in the book, in conversations with Brahmin scientists (and partly in the context of an implicit belief that the practice of science is vouchsafed for Brahmins in India), Renny reveals that they don’t distinguish between cultural and religious practices. For example, scientists who claim to be staunch atheists are also strict vegetarians, don the ‘holy thread’ and, most tellingly for me, insist on getting their sons and daughters married off to people belonging to the same caste.
They argued that they visited temples and pilgrimage centres not for worship but out of an architectural and aesthetic interest, to marvel at the architectural beauty. As Indians, they are proud of these historical places and pilgrimage centres. They happily invite their guests from other countries to these places with a sense of pride and historicity. Some of the atheist scientists I spoke to informed me that they would offer puja and seek darshan while visiting the temples and historically relevant pilgrimage places, especially when they go with their family; “to make them happy.” They argued that they wouldn’t question the religious beliefs and practices of others and professed that it was a personal choice to be religious or non-religious. They also felt that religion and belief in God provided psychological succor to believers in their hardships and one should not oppose them. Many of the atheist scientists think that festivals such as Diwali or Ayudha Puja are cultural events.
In their worldview, the distinction between religion and culture has dissolved – and which clearly emphasises the importance of considering the placedness of science just as much as we consider the placedness of religion. By way of example, Science and Religion finds both religion and science at work in laboratories, but en route it also discovers that to do science in certain parts of India – but especially South India, where many of the scientists in his book are located – is to do science in a particular milieu distorted by caste: here, the “lifeworld” is to Brahmins as water is to fish. Perhaps this is how Sivan thinks, too,although he is likely to be performing the subsequent rituals more passively, and deliberately and in self-interest, assuming he seeks his sense of his social standing based on and his deservingness of social support from the wider community of fellow Brahmins: that we must pray and make some offerings to god because that’s how we always did it growing up.
At least, these are my preliminary thoughts. I’m looking forward to finishing Science and Religion this month (I’m a slow reader) and looking forward to learning more in the process.
The Print has just published a bizarre article about Niraj Bishnoi, the alleged “mastermind” (whatever that means) of the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. I know nothing about Niraj Bishnoi; the article’s problem is that it has reproduced the Delhi police’s profile of Bishnoi and indications in that profile, provided by police personnel, of Bishnoi’s alleged deviancy sans any qualification. I’ve reproduced relevant portions of the article below (with a left-indent), and my annotations are intercalated.
But first, according to Sukanya Shantha, my colleague at The Wire: “These stories are quite common. They mean nothing in court. Defence comes up with such BS everytime before arguing on quantum of punishment. We saw similar stuff during Shakti Mills, and Delhi rape too. Even Ajmal Kasab was called ‘mentally deranged’ by his lawyer.” While such claims like those by defence lawyers may be common, I don’t understand why the media – and especially independent media – has to amplify them without sparing a thought for what they ultimately imply.
Suspected ‘Bulli Bai’ app creator, 20-year-old Niraj Bisnoi had 153 porn film downloads and lewd, sexual content in his laptop, sources in the Delhi Police claimed Thursday. The evidence in his laptop suggest Bisnoi is a “porn addict” and “has abnormal desires towards elderly Muslim women”, the sources added.
This para – the first – sets the tone for what you can expect from the rest of the article. And The Print considers the most important point vis-à-vis this article to be that Niraj Bishnoi had 153 pornographic films on his laptop, that he is a “porn addict” – presumably the Delhi police’s words – and that he harboured “abnormal” desires “towards elderly Muslim women”. We may never know how either the police or the author of the article leaped from pornography and fantasies to an implied justification for Niraj Bishnoi’s alleged crimes.
A 2015 article in Psychology Today did a good job summarising what we knew about pornography until then, and I think the conclusions still stand: a) there’s both good and bad to viewing pornography, b) the bad that is often attributed anecdotally to pornography is grossly at odds with the effects that psychologists have found; and c) even so, causal links between consuming pornography and holding specific beliefs or committing specific acts don’t yet exist. Against this context, what The Print has found fit to print is an unfounded opinion of the Delhi police and not a cause by any stretch.
Also, echoing Sukanya Shantha’s point, why is the Delhi police rising to Niraj Bishnoi’s defence, instead of Bishnoi’s lawyers? (Assuming of course that this is a defence…)
According to sources in Delhi Police, Bisnoi was introduced to the virtual world at the age of 15 and first hacked a website a year later, as “revenge”, after his sister was denied admission by a school.
“At the age of 16, he first hacked a school’s website when his sister didn’t get admission,” a source in Delhi police claimed.
“Introduced to the virtual world”. How clandestine.
First off, this is access journalism of the worst kind – neither to make sensible claims nor to name your sources. Public officials, including the police, shouldn’t be allowed to get away with being anonymous sources in articles; if they absolutely must remain unnamed, the publisher should specify the reason that the publication has decided to grant anonymity, on every occasion. (The Wire Science recently adopted this protocol, inspired by The Verge). Otherwise, as a reader, there is no one to hold accountable.
Second, I once ‘hacked’ a website to find out the class XII board exam score of a friend. However, does it count as ‘hacking’ when the website loaded the results for all roll-numbers as HTML, on its source page, but didn’t display them on the front-end, so all I had to do was right-click on the displayed page, click ‘view source’, and be able to access all the data? How good a hacker is depends both on the hacker’s skills and how well the object of their hack is guarded; if the object is barely concealed, we can learn nothing of the hacker’s prowess. And in this case, since Niraj Bishnoi allegedly hacked a school’s website, I sincerely doubt he did more than I did.
According to police sources, the code script of the Bulli Bai app has been recovered from his laptop — a high-end gaming machine, with a heady duty graphic card. Sources claimed the laptop only had games and porn.
Please, I’m laughing. A high-end gaming machine? My laptop is a high-end gaming machine. Any devices with Apple M1 or AMD Ryzen chips are high-end gaming machines. Many smartphones these days are high-end gaming machines. And what is “only games and porn” supposed to imply? Other of course than that the case against him apparently rests on one of the most tiresome snowclones of this age.
Those who know Bisnoi personally, also claim him to be a “loner”, someone who is more active in the virtual world than in the real one around him.
Sources in Delhi Police told ThePrint that Bishnoi displayed “abnormal behavioural traits” in his interaction with the police and has threatened to commit suicide multiple times since his arrest.
“He has told the police that he will fatally hurt himself — cut his veins with a blade, hang himself to death,” the source mentioned above claimed.
A second source added: “He doesn’t eat, has to be forced to eat. Today he skipped lunch. We had to order food from outside to feed him around 3.30 pm.”
This seems like the beginnings of some kind of personality profile that’s supposed to imply that Niraj Bishnoi was mentally unsound in some way – but which is psychotic in its own right for forgetting that none of these are excuses for what he allegedly did. I’m only prompted to recall the excuses many alleged perpetrators bandied about during the height of the #MeToo allegations – that they had PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc.; some only alluded to vague mental health concerns. These individuals may actually have had these conditions or disorders, as the case may be, but none of them implied any consequences that would have prevented the individuals from knowing that what they were doing – at the time they were doing it – was wrong. Yet such excuses persisted, and only served to further stigmatise others who were unwell in the same way, especially in the company of their parents, employers and others.
The probe so far has revealed that Bisnoi is addicted to the internet and his laptop, claimed sources. They also claimed that the 20-year-old is accustomed to creating fake accounts and user handles on social media platforms.
Is my tax money paying for this probe? Also, I once created 22 GMail accounts, simply because each one comes with 15 GB of space on Google Drive. The point is none of this is dispositive proof – or even points towards dispositive proof – that Niraj Bishnoi did what he allegedly did. Wouldn’t the bit about fake handles on social media platforms be true for every troll out there? The story so far only suggests that the Delhi police is building a loseable case and/or that it is colluding with Niraj Bishnoi’s lawyers to manufacture sympathy for his plight.
“Bishnoi has said that he doesn’t talk to anyone much in the outside world, that he doesn’t like to talk to anyone and that he has no friends in the real world. His only interactions are under assumed names and identities in the virtual world. His day starts and ends with the internet and laptop,” the second source claimed.
Police claims of the accused’s being a recluse are repeated by acquaintances who knew Bishnoi while he was a school student, and who spoke to ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
All of them described the accused as a “loner”, someone who was used to staying “aloof” and “didn’t interact much with the outside world” since he was a teenager.
“He has created his own virtual world around him,” claimed an acquaintance doesn’t want to be identified.
Ah, the stereotype has landed. As another colleague of mine said, Niraj Bishnoi probably lives in his mother’s basement, too.
And Naomi Barton, yet another colleague, said: “Also, lots of people are loners who spend the majority of their time in digital spaces – and that can be both good and bad, for instance queer children who don’t have any community in real life. What this story is doing is pretty much just blowing innocuous, if generationally different, habits out of proportion to scare-monger.”
Referring to another of the accused’s behavioural traits, the second police source claimed: “Whenever the interrogation hits a certain peak, he urinates in his pants. He has done this three-four times. We have checked if this is because he has a medical issue, but he doesn’t.”
If The Print hadn’t already crossed a line, it has now – by forwarding as it if were a knock-knock joke on WhatsApp the Delhi police’s claim that Niraj Bishnoi can urinate on demand when the “interrogation hits a certain peak”. Hits a certain peak? Is this a euphemism for the intensity of the interrogation? And what sort of ‘behavioural trait’ is this in which the bearer of the trait urinates – the insinuation being that he does this for reasons other than what might make people pee in these situations – for anything other than because something has prompted him to?
According to the source, the 20-year-old has also not expressed remorse for his alleged involvement in the ‘Bulli Bai’ app.
“He said he did the right thing,” claimed the source.
Finally, something that doesn’t sound ridiculous, although it isn’t worth publishing.
Ultimately, if Niraj Bishnoi – and others, to be sure – was responsible in any part for the ‘Bulli Bai’ app, he needs to be brought to justice and he needs to have a fair (and sensible) trial. But what we could all do without is a ‘news report’ that brings the nonsensical claims of the Delhi police – words that appear to be designed to exonerate the alleged actions of Niraj Bishnoi, but which may yet backfire, and nothing to remain sensitive to the people that the app has harmed – out to thousands of readers, if not more, without qualifying/rebutting them as warranted instead of letting them rot in the rooms in which they were manufactured.
Whenever I hear someone rhapsodize about how much more computer power we have now compared with what was available in the 1960s during the Apollo era, I cringe. Those comparisons usually grossly underestimate the difference.
And I cringe whenever I hear someone rhapsodise about computing power – however accurately – sans the context of its ubiquity. Those comparisons usually grossly miscommunicate what it means to have such power. It recently struck me that, contrary to the problem of presentism that frequently undermines what amateur historians have to say about events of the past, assessments of computing power are frequently undermined by pastism: of the tendency to quantify the computing power we have in our pockets (smartphones) or on our laps (tablets and laptops) as multiples of the computing power available to the people who launched the Apollo missions.
These are often thinly veiled exhortions to people to use the computers at their disposal more wisely, and they’re often bad advice as well.
But I wonder, are we using all that computation effectively to make as much difference as our forebears did after the leap from pencil and paper to the 7090?
Same source as above
Since the advent of the personal computer and then the internet, the ubiquity of computers – and the information that they can carry, distribute and access – has transformed the context in which information exists, and is required. Instead of talking about how our laptops have a quadrillion-times the computing power that exist in an IBM 7090 mainframe, and therefore simply inferring how much more we can do with it, I think it would be better to imagine that the 7090 had one-quadrillionth the power of a modern laptop.
More than illustrating the progress we have made to improve the speed with which some well-known computers perform calculations, looking at the past as being in possession of a small fraction of the computing power we can access today could help us remember, say, the quantities at which information can be useful (depending on the context) or how quickly innovations in information-processing technologies from the mid-20th century changed our lives. Mainframe systems operating with magnetic tapes helped some people obtain, accumulate and analyse large amounts of information and synthesise enough knowledge to get people into orbit around the planet and land them on the Moon. Half a century later, there were enough of these machines going around to make the accumulation and processing of information not the goal but often the problem, in some contexts even the problem.
And this is just one way to look at it. Another is illustrated by the following example: I use lots of power relative to, say, some calculation involving the G-force that a rocket motor might have to adjust for to update my blog and make sure as many people on the planet as possible can access it, preferably within a second of them clicking the link. This is thanks to the democratisation of computing power. In the 1960s, only large organisations could afford the machines required to host and operate computing engines. As a result, when we think about computers of the past, we have only a few examples to consider – such as NASA launching astronauts to space. But think of computers today and you get to think about a mind-boggling array of activities, each of which may not use nearly as much power but which together use a lot more than was available in the Apollo era.
I’m sure social scientists do but too many news articles and social media commentators don’t stop to think that as our relationship with information changed, the expression of computing power as multiples of that in the mainframe era became less useful. Put another way, the past still matters – but using the language of computing power to talk about it sweeps our altered relationship with information, and the kinds of economy and enterprise it has spawned, under the rug.
There’s a phenomenon in high-energy particle physics that I’ve found instructive as a metaphor to explain some things whose inner character may not be apparent to us but whose true nature is exposed in extreme situations. For example, consider the case of Charles Lieber, an American chemist whom a jury found guilty earlier today of lying to the US government about participating in a Chinese science programme and about having a Chinese bank account.
Through our everyday interactions with protons and neutrons – sitting in the nuclei of their respective atoms – we’d have no reason to believe that they’re made up of smaller particles. But when you probe a proton with another particle at an extremely high energy, such a probe can reveal that the proton is really made of smaller particles called up and down quarks.
Similarly, Lieber’s case is an extreme instance of a national government clashing with the nation’s scientific enterprise for engaging in a science-related activity with immutable political implications. In our everyday interactions, there is no reason to believe that the government, or any other relatively more powerful political entity, could have a problem with what some scientist is working on or has to say. But sparks start to fly the moment the scientist’s work, words or even thoughts begin to have political implications.
It’s not like the protons are not made of up and down quarks when probed at lower energies; it’s that the latter don’t reveal themselves. Similarly, it’s not like science isn’t a political activity even when it lacks political implications; it’s that the relationship between science and politics, in that limited context, is too feeble to matter. But it’s there.
According to a New York Times article explaining Lieber’s case, by Ellen Barry so you know it’s well-written, the Trump-era ‘China Initiative’ to “root out scientists suspected of sharing sensitive information with China” has been accused of “prosecutorial overreach”, but also that Lieber also shot himself in the foot by denying his involvement in the Chinese programme when “he was specifically asked about his participation”.
Barry’s article makes the point that scientists are scared because the US government criminalised otherwise innocuous activities – activities that scientists have spent decades learning to not fear. At the same time, it would be unfair to spare Lieber – an accomplished nanoscience expert employed at Harvard University – the expectation to know what the consequences of his actions might be and the risk of ignoring them.
Perhaps he harboured a sense of exceptionalism vis-à-vis his cause; perhaps he thought the ‘China Initiative’ that had knocked on the doors of other scientists wouldn’t knock on his; perhaps he just assumed it wouldn’t matter. But any which way, more than just being “about scaring the scientific community”, as one of Lieber’s former students says in the article, the initiative’s victory in the Charles Lieber case should also remind scientists that the best way to beat the initiative is for the scientific community to proactively engage in political issues.
Lieber’s excuse, according to tapes of his interrogation by FBI officers, was that he wished to train younger scientists in a technology he had developed and thus increase his chances of winning a Nobel Prize. This is the science-politics link coming back to bite Lieber, and others like him (notably Brian Keating, whose act of ‘coming clean’ on this sentiment I continue to find admirable), who risk ruining their careers just win the prize (see addendum).
One major impediment to acknowledging that politics is suffused in every human enterprise – including science – that happens in any organised society whose people govern themselves is that people often misunderstand politics to be “what their politicians say/do” instead of “the practice of self-governance”. But by understanding it to be the former, there’s a hoopla every time some political leader or other apparently oversteps their remit.
Addendum
Three comments.
First, somewhere between the early 20th century and the early 21st, the prize’s perception went from being “do good work and you’ll win it” to “do good work and then hack your way to winning it”.
Second, I’ve seen this tendency of going ‘over and beyond’ to ensure one wins a Nobel Prize predominantly among scientists of the US – which in turn is hard to separate from the fact that most winners of the science Nobel Prizes have been from the US. There is perhaps a academic-cultural issue at work, and there’s certainly a competition issue at work. People are first nominated for a prize by eminent individuals and former laureates, and thanks to a historical skew of the laureates’ countries of citizenship (in favour of the US thanks to the rise of Nazism in Europe) and the way industry and the scientific publishing enterprise are organised today, both these groups of people as well as new laureates are skewed US-ward. What happens when a country produces “too much” good work for one prize, and its inexplicable rule to award only three people at a time, to consider? Surely Lieber believed this and wanted to get ahead of others, leading to his bullheaded actions?
Last week, India voted against a resolution in the UN Security Council to allow the council’s core members to deliberate on climate issues because, in the resolution’s view, they impinge on national security. Russia and India, among others, voted ‘against’. Russia is a permanent member so its rejection sunk the idea; India’s rejection, on the other hand, turned out to be the most articulate – at least according to a video circulating on the web of India’s permanent representative T.S. Tirumurti delineating India’s stance. Senior Indian officials seldom have anything to say these days that’s working taking seriously; this was one of them. India’s position, according to the statement Tirumurti read out, was centered on the following point:
This draft resolution is a step backward from our collective resolve to combat climate change. It seeks to hand over that responsibility to a body which neither works through consensus nor is reflective of the interests of the developing countries. India had no option but to vote against.
Read Devirupa Mitra’s explanation of the significance of India’s vote here and Aathira Perinchery’s report on what climate policy researchers made of it here. Fundamentally, war gives rise to the most ridiculous ideas because war also gives rise to one of the most anti-democratic of what Lewis Mumford called the authoritarian technics: anti-accountable decision-making. In the context of India’s vote, arguments against the resolution were also rooted in the fact that one permanent member – the US of A – continues to drag its feet on useful climate action, especially domestic and international climate finance. As if to set the ground for the resolution, the US Department of Defence published a report in October this year that said:
The risks of climate change to Department of Defense (DoD) strategies, plans, capabilities, missions, and equipment, as well as those of U.S. allies and partners, are growing. Global efforts to address climate change – including actions to address the causes as well as the effects – will influence DoD strategic interests, relationships, competition, and priorities. To train, fight, and win in this increasingly complex environment, DoD will consider the effects of climate change at every level of the DoD enterprise.
While these may be legitimate considerations, holding closed-door meetings to, say, weaken climate action because doing otherwise could weaken national security – which, if India’s example is anything to go by, could be as arbitrary as you need it to be – would just be a backdoor that undermines already weak climate pacts and treaties. As Tirumurti said:
It sends a wrong message to the developing countries that instead of addressing their concerns and holding developed countries responsible for meeting their commitments under the UNFCCC, we are willing to be divided and side-tracked under the guise of security.
A less ridiculous but still precarious idea is that responding to climate-change-fuelled natural disasters could distract the armed forces from the training required to fight the country’s enemies abroad. While it’s reasonable to argue that there aren’t enough properly trained people to respond, specifically as first responders, to an extreme weather event, it’s hard to square America’s defence spending (and somewhere in there its Department of Defence being the world’s single-largest consumer of oil) with the view that such ‘distractions’ may cost American lives in wars abroad.
Fundamentally, including vis-à-vis the Security Council resolution, it would be a case of putting war before the climate. And now that I’ve put it that way – the most ridiculous examples I’ve come across of this variety (H/T to Samir Malhotra) is a research opportunity that the Small Business Innovation Research programme of the US government issued in 2017: bullets loaded with seeds that sprout plants once they have been in the ground for many months.
The US Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) has demonstrated bioengineered seeds that can be embedded into the biodegradable composites and that will not germinate until they have been in the ground for several months. This SBIR effort will make use of seeds to grow environmentally friendly plants that remove soil contaminants and consume the biodegradable components developed under this project. Animals should be able to consume the plants without any ill effects.
PHASE I: In Phase I the contractor develop a process to produce biodegradable composites with remediation seeds that can be used to manufacture 40mm-120mm training rounds. These Training rounds shall meet all the performance requirements of existing training rounds. The contractor should also explore avenues to produce biodegradable composites with remediation seeds for use in products outside the defense sector.
PHASE II: In Phase II the contractor will prove out the fabrication process and manufacture prototypes that demonstrate the process is ready for industrial use. Provide a sufficient number of prototypes for the government to perform ballistic tests.
PHASE III: Contractor will coordinate with PEO Ammunition and ammunition prime contractors to establish a transition path for the SBIR technology.
Paralleling its government’s viscous approach to international climate action, it seems like the American military establishment has also been looking for ways to make war for the environment.
On December 12, Iron Man, a.k.a. Robert Downey, Jr., and David Lang coauthored an op-ed in Fast Company that announced a grant-giving initiative of theirs designed to help fund scientists doing work too important to wait for the bureaucracy to catch up. Their article opened with a paragraph that, to my eye, seemed to have many flaws in reasoning, or at least overlooked them, perhaps in favour of getting to their limited point.
If there were a Nobel Prize for Overcoming Bureaucratic Adversity, do you know who would win it? Katalin Karikó. Her story of enduring decades of little to no support for her research into the properties of mRNA, which led to the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, has transcended science. It exposes a blind spot of our current scientific institutions to find and nurture every passionate scientist and line of inquiry.
Except it isn’t a blind spot.
I think it’s a romantic ideal that dreams of funding every idea scientists have. You can, there’s nothing wrong with it, except you’d need lots of money. The current system is designed – even if it hasn’t been implemented – to ensure at least a certain percentage of good ideas are identified and funded at the right time and in parallel to maximise that percentage. What Iron Man and Lang imagine in their article is a system that will fund all good ideas, including those that The System has let slip. It’s a welcome move, perhaps, but it isn’t more virtuous, even when it rewards adversity that, again, The System has let slip, simply because The System’s way – which is effectively the tax-funded government’s way in most parts of the world – is the most efficient for its limited corpus of funds and its responsibility to organise research output to maximise societal good, directly or indirectly, instead of letting it all be open-ended.
Granted, in times of great adversity, it might be foolish to wait for evidence before waiting to act, and a ‘wartime’ funding paradigm during a pandemic makes some sense, even if it’s a solution designed for wartime alone. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic – and the ‘fast grants’ for pandemic research that seem to have inspired Downey, Jr. and Lang – is a different kind of adversity than climate change. The latter is longer-lasting and more persistent, is a wicked problem (i.e. has multiple interrelated and/or emergent causes), has significant social implications that complicate the relationships between causes and effects, and is decidedly inter- and multi-generational. These differences could in turn render unbridled rapidity counterproductive.
A part of the reason for the authors’ outlook, concerned with ‘catching’ good ideas before it’s too late, sticks out in the first sentence, in which Iron Man and Lang single out Katalin Karikó for praise for her work on mRNA vaccines as well as signal that they consider the Nobel Prizes to be the ultimate reward. If you’ve been reading this blog, you know where I stand on these prizes. But more importantly in the current context, the use of these prizes in particular and the choice of Katalin Karikó as an example of the sort of scientist they’d like to fund is… jarring.
Iron Man and Lang seem to believe, as they write, that it’s important to catch brilliant ideas quickly (and that “the major impediments” to funding scientific work “are the obvious limitations of decision-making by committee”). First, one cause, among many, of the bureaucracy’s slowness is the bureaucracy’s need to be accountable to the polity about how it spends the polity’s money. And I don’t know if Iron Man and Lang are making room for any kind of slowness, and the corresponding paperwork, in their grant-funding programme. ‘Risk-seeking’ shouldn’t become an excuse for ‘accountability-avoiding’. On a related note, to zero in on ‘speed of funding’ as the principal problem with not funding the “right” kind of environmental research is also to ignore other, potentially more fundamental problems hiding behind the slowness – like “the party currently in power is not interested”.
Second, many of us have lambasted others for singling out individuals – typically white men – as the sole originators of great discoveries. However, many people have identified Karikó more than anyone else with creating the idea of mRNA vaccines, aided by long profiles published by major newspapers about her work and her role in BioNTech, yet haven’t elicited the same or even similar reactions. If adversity is our measure, i.e. “we’re going to associate the person who struggled the most to make a meaningful contribution to an important idea”, then Karikó is by no means alone – nor is she likely to be, as just the post-war history of science has taught us, if we’re focusing on women. She couldn’t have worked alone, and even if the people we’re ignoring as a result are white old men, it’s still problematic to say Katalin Karikó is deserving of a Nobel Prize – at least not without, at the same time, admitting that it would be legitimate for the Nobel Prizes to award two or three people for the invention of mRNA vaccines.
(I discovered that Nature News published a deep-dive in October on the “tangled history of mRNA vaccines” after I started writing this post, discussing the work of a long line of people, including Karikó, who contributed to this enterprise. So on a related note, if Karikó’s story is being used to illustrate new science-funding ideas, what might the professional experiences of all those other people say about how science is funded – as well as about how we apportion credit?)
Third, it’s kind of a bummer that, heartening though it is for major Hollywood actors to get interested in the relatively more obscure problems of science administration and funding, and in turn to become part of a concrete solution instead of running their mouths on Twitter, this new initiative refuses to break from the tradition of devising new solutions to old problems instead of fixing existing solutions – an admittedly much less glamorous enterprise. The only other person who’s compared to Iron Man as frequently as Robert Downey, Jr., one Elon Musk, is infamous for this kind of thinking vis-à-vis ‘revolutionising’ personal transport. Musk wants more people to own cars – especially the ones his company makes – but will go so far as to dream up Hyperloop and The Boring Company to avoid considering fixing existing public transportation options.
Similarly, Downey, Jr. and Lang, and their supporters, will go to the extent of setting up a whole new platform, or getting on a relatively new platform (same difference), instead of building on the things The System is already getting right. And this is a problem for at least three reasons. First, the new system will set up its own forms of discrimination and in-ness. For example, Downey, Jr.’s and Lang’s idea goes like this:
FootPrint Coalition is funding early research in brand new environmental fields, and doing it under the direction of esteemed Science Leads who can move quickly and fund at their discretion. The FootPrint Coalition Science Engine builds off suggestions made in the Funding Risky Research paper. It operationalizes the “loose-play funding for early-stage risky explorations” but doesn’t bind it to universities.
We’re doing it “in public” on the Experiment funding platform, a website for crowdfunding science research projects, so anyone can participate as a cofunder.
As a platform that you get on, describe your idea and convince potential funders that your work is worth funding, ‘Experiment’ fundamentally requires you to be able to communicate clearly and with the same sensibilities as your future funders, most of whom are likely to be English-speakers of the US or Europe, if you expect to be successful. This in turn quickly eliminates a panoply of scientists who aren’t great communicators or aren’t even fluent in English. And in the specific case of the ‘Science Engine’, your work needs to appeal to the ‘Science Lead’ and fit into their sense of what’s important and what isn’t. A version of this problem already exists with scientific journals – where major journals’ editorial boards are often filled with editors who turn down papers because they’re not as enthusiastic as the authors might be about, say, the nutritional properties of an ant species endemic to Odisha.
In addition, not all ideas to save the environment are great ideas. For example, climate geoengineering is popular with the US government because it needs to make up for historical emissions without compromising on current economic growth, it needs to placate the local, powerful energy industry and it wields the clout to disregard how much geoengineering solutions could screw up the weather in other parts of the world.
Second, as a system designed to patch “leaks” in the “scientific talent funnel”, it still presumes the existence of a funnel for its own success even as it does nothing to fix the funnel itself. This is self-serving. And third, allowing scientific work to achieve success based solely on what gets funded quickly – that too based on descriptions on platforms on the internet, unmoderated by the criticism of other scientists (have you visited PubPeer?) or even by the critical attention of competent science journalists, and based on what people who are already rich think is “cool” – can be a short path for things the world could really do without to get funded.
So, do I think Iron Man’s and Lang’s pitch is a good idea? I still don’t know.
Featured image: A screenshot of Iron Man in action in Avengers: Infinity War (2018). Source: Hotstar.
