Congratulations, László Krasznahorkai, for winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
I still remember reading his The Melancholy of Resistance (1989). It was a mostly unnerving, somewhat frightening experience because I read it at a time of great uncertainty in my own life. In The Melancholy, chaos lurks in the banal mechanisms of civic life: when a train is delayed, when a town is disordered, when an old woman’s journey is warped by fear. Using a slow implosion of meaning, Krasznahorkai confronts the reader not with the spectacle of a dystopia, which is all but apparent, but with a particular character of it that’s otherwise often too fleeting to scrutinise — the slow death of coherence that makes catastrophe feel almost natural more than even inevitable.
While the town in The Melancholy remains unnamed, there’s a sense that we all know where it is. It’s a landscape in which every gesture of governance has been reduced to a ritual and where only the forms of order persist even as their substance rots. The circus that arrives at the town’s edge, trailing a colossal whale and the promise of revelation, becomes a parable of how societies yearn for meaning precisely when they lose the capacity to create it. The town’s population is numbed by routine and discovers, unfortunately too late, that it has already surrendered its collective will. If you look closely, you’ll see just this line appear throughout history, often on the cusp of great violence and generational trauma.
To me at least, The Melancholy was disturbing not because of its setting in late-socialist Hungary but because of Krasznahorkai’s method, which portrayed entropy as an ordinary condition of modern life. In fact the town’s decay seems to mirror our own saturation with information and disinformation today, our bureaucratised indifference, and our surrender to slow violence rather than sudden terror. Today’s dystopias are not built by tyrants (even if they abound) but maintained by exhaustion — by creating virtues of the same systems that no longer work yet continue to grind on. Krasznahorkai’s long, spiralling sentences mimic this endurance by trapping readers within the drawling syntax of futility.
In this world, resistance teeters on the brink of melancholy because it no longer imagines victory, even new kinds: it simply refuses to forget what dignity once meant. The novel’s citizens shuffle through darkness as a travelling monstrosity settles down in their midst, resembling the contemporary crowds scrolling through crisis after crisis, aware that something monstrous is underway but which are too enmeshed, too ground down, in old habits to act. The Melancholy endures in effect because Krasznahorkai turns dystopia inside out. He doesn’t ask what happens when civilisation collapses but how it can manage to lumber on even long after its meaning has departed.
And its terror, of course, lies in recognising that the end of the world, whenever it comes, will look and feel exactly like the world we already know.
Rubidium isn’t respectable. It isn’t iron, whose strength built railways and bridges and it isn’t silicon, whose valley became a dubious shrine to progress. Rubidium explodes in water. It tarnishes in air. It’s awkward, soft, and unfit for the neat categories by which schoolteachers tell their students how the world is made. And yet, precisely because of this unruly character, it insinuates itself into the deepest places of science, where precision, control, and prediction are supposed to reign.
For centuries astronomers counted the stars, then engineers counted pendulums and springs — all good and respectable. But when humankind’s machines demanded nanosecond accuracy, it was rubidium, a soft metal that no practical mind would have chosen, that became the metronome of the world. In its hyperfine transitions, coaxed by lasers and microwave cavities, the second is carved more finely than human senses can comprehend. Without rubidium’s unstable grace, GPS collapses, financial markets fall into confusion, trains and planes drift out of sync. The fragile and the explosive have become the custodians of order.
What does this say about the hierarchies of knowledge? Textbooks present a suspiciously orderly picture: noble gases are inert, alkali metals are reactive, and their properties can be arranged neatly in columns of the periodic table, they say. Thus rubidium is placed there like a botanical specimen. But in practice, scientists turned to it not because of its box in a table but because of accidents, conveniences, and contingencies. Its resonance lines happen to fall where lasers can reach them easily. Its isotopes are abundant enough to trap, cool, and measure. The entire edifice of atomic clocks and exotic Bose-Einstein condensates rests not on an inevitable logic of discovery but on this convenient accident. Had rubidium’s levels been slightly different, perhaps caesium or potassium would have played the starring role. Rational reconstruction will never admit this. It prefers tidy sequences and noble inevitabilities. Rubidium, however, laughs at such tidiness.
Take condensed matter. In the 1990s and 2000s, solar researchers sought efficiency in perovskite crystals. These crystals were fragile, prone to decomposition, but again rubidium slipped in: a small ion among larger ones, it stabilised the lattice. A substitution here, a tweak there, and suddenly the efficiency curve rose. Was this progress inevitable? No; it was bricolage: chemists trying one ion after another until the thing worked. And the journals now describe rubidium as if it were always destined to “enhance stability”. But destiny is hindsight dressed as foresight. What actually happened was messy. Rubidium’s success was contingent, not planned.
Then there’s the theatre of optics. Rubidium’s spectral lines at 780 nm and 795 nm became the experimentalist’s playground. When lasers cooled atoms to microkelvin temperatures and clouds of rubidium atoms became motionless, they merged into collective wavefunctions and formed the first Bose-Einstein condensates. The textbooks now call this a triumph of theory, the “inevitable” confirmation of quantum statistics. Nonsense! The condensates weren’t predicted as practical realities — they were curiosities, dismissed by many as impossible in the laboratory. What made them possible was a melange of techniques: magnetic traps, optical molasses, sympathetic cooling. And rubidium, again, happened to be convenient, its transitions accessible, its abundance generous, its behaviour forgiving. Out of this messiness came a Nobel Prize and an entire field. Rubidium teaches us that progress comes not from the logical unfolding of ideas but from playing with elements that allegedly don’t belong.
Rubidium rebukes dogma. It’s neither grand nor noble, yet it controls time, stabilises matter, and demonstrates the strangest predictions of quantum theory. It shows science doesn’t march forward by method alone. It stumbles, it improvises, it tries what happens to be at hand. Philosophers of science prefer to speak of method and rigour yet their laboratories tell a story of messy rooms where equipment is tuned until something works, where grad students swap parts until the resonance reveals itself, where fragile metals are pressed into service because they happen to fit the laser’s reach.
Rubidium teaches us that knowledge is anarchic. It isn’t carved from the heavens by pure reason but coaxed from matter through accidents, failures, and improvised victories. Explosive in one setting, stabilising in another; useless in industry, indispensable in physics — the properties of rubidium are contradictory and it’s precisely this contradiction that makes it valuable. To force it into the straitjacket of predictable science is to rewrite history as propaganda. The truth is less comfortable: rubidium has triumphed where theory has faltered.
And yet, here we are. Our planes and phones rely on rubidium clocks. Our visions of renewable futures lean on rubidium’s quiet strengthening of perovskite cells. Our quantum dreams — of condensates, simulations, computers, and entanglement — are staged with rubidium atoms as actors. An element kings never counted and merchants never valued has become the silent arbiter of our age. Science itself couldn’t have planned it better; indeed, it didn’t plan at all.
Rubidium is the fragment in the mosaic that refuses to fit yet holds the pattern together. It’s the soft yet explosive, fragile yet enduring accident that becomes indispensable. Its lesson is simple: science also needs disorder, risk, and the unruliness of matter to thrive.
Featured image: A sample of rubidium metal. Credit: Dnn87 (CC BY).
In contemporary India, corporate branding has often aligned itself with nationalist sentiment, adopting imagery such as the tricolour, Sanskrit slogans or references to ancient achievements to evoke cultural pride. Marketing narratives frequently frame consumption as a patriotic act, linking the choice of a product with the nation’s progress or “self-reliance”. This fusion of commercial messaging and nationalist symbolism serves both to capitalise on the prevailing political mood and to present companies as partners in the nationalist project. An advertisement in The Times of India on August 15, which describes the work of nation-building as a “hustle”, is a good example.
I remember in engineering college my class had a small-minded and vindictive professor in our second year of undergraduate studies. He repeatedly picked on one particular classmate to the extent that, as resentment between the two people escalated, the professor’s actions in one arguably innocuous matter resulted in the student being suspended for a semester. He eventually didn’t have the number of credits he needed to graduate and had to spend six more months redoing many of the same classes. Today, this student is a successful researcher in Europe, having gone on to acquire a graduate degree followed by a PhD from some of the best research institutes in the world.
When we were chatting a few years ago about our batch’s decadal reunion that was coming up, we thought it would be a good idea to attend and, there, rub my friend’s success in this professor’s face. We really wanted to do it because we wanted him to know how petty he had been. But as we discussed how we’d orchestrate this moment, it dawned on us that we’d also be signalling that our achievements don’t amount to more than those necessary to snub him, as if to say they have no greater meaning or purpose. We eventually dropped the idea. At the reunion itself, my friend simply ignored the professor.
India may appear today to have progressed well past Winston Churchill’s belief, expressed in the early 1930s, but to advertise as Zomato has is to imply that it remains on our minds and animates the purpose of what we’re trying to do. It is a juvenile and frankly resentful attitude that also hints at a more deep-seated lack of contentment. The advertisement’s achievement of choice is the Chandrayaan 3 mission, its Vikram lander lit dramatically by sunlight and earthlight and photographed by the Pragyan rover. The landing was a significant achievement, but to claim that that above all else describes contemporary India is also to dismiss the evident truth that a functional space organisation and a democracy in distress can coexist within the same borders. One neither carries nor excuses the other.
In fact, it’s possible to argue that ISRO’s success is at least partly a product of the unusual circumstances of its creation and its privileged place in the administrative structure. Founded by a scientist who worked directly with Jawaharlal Nehru — bypassing the bureaucratic hurdles faced by most others — ISRO was placed under the purview of the prime minister, ensuring it received the political attention, resources, and exemptions that are not typically available to other ministries or public enterprises. In this view, ISRO’s achievements are insulated from the broader fortunes of the country and can’t be taken as a reliable proxy for India’s overall ‘success’.
The question here is: to whose words do we pay attention? Obviously not those of Churchill: his prediction is nearly a century old. In fact, as Ramachandra Guha sets out in the prologue of India After Gandhi (which I’m currently rereading), they seem in their particular context to be untempered and provocative.
In the 1940s, with Indian independence manifestly round the corner, Churchill grumbled that he had not becoming the King’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. A decade previously he had tried to rebuild a fading political career on the plank of opposing self-government for Indians. After Gandhi’s ‘salt satyagraha’ of 1930 in protest against taxes on salt, the British government began speaking with Indian nationalists about the possibility of granting the colony dominion status. This was vaguely defined, with no timetable set for its realization. Even so, Churchill called the idea ‘not only fantastic in itself but criminally mischievous in its effects’. Since Indians were not fit for self-government, it was necessary to marshal ‘the sober and resolute forces of the British Empire’ to stall any such possibility.
In 1930 and 1931 Churchill delivered numerous speeches designed to work up, in most unsober form, the constituency opposed to independence for India. Speaking to an audience at the City of London in December 1930, he claimed that if the British left the subcontinent, then an ‘army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu’.
This said, Guha continues later in the prologue:
The forces that divide India are many. … But there are also forces that have kept India together, that have helped transcend or contain the cleavages of class and culture, that — so far, at least — have nullified those many predictions that India would not stay united and not stay democratic. These moderating influences are far less visible. … they have included individuals as well as institutions.
Indeed, reading through the history of independent India, through the 1940s and ’50s filled with hope and ambition, the turmoil of the ’60s and the ’70s, the Emergency, followed by economic downturn, liberalisation, finally to the rise of Hindu nationalism, it has been clear that the work of the “forces that have kept India together” is unceasing. Earlier, the Constitution’s framework, with its guarantees of rights and democratic representation, provided a common political anchor. Regular elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary reinforced faith in the system even as the linguistic reorganisation of states reduced separatist tensions. National institutions such as the armed forces, civil services, and railways fostered a sense of shared identity across disparate regions.
Equally, integrative political movements and leaders — including the All India Kisan Sabha, trade union federations like INTUC and AITUC, the Janata Party coalition of 1977, Akali leaders in Punjab in the post-1984 period, the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, and so on, as well as Lal Bahadur Shastri, Govind Ballabh Pant, C. Rajagopalachari, Vinoba Bhave, Jayaprakash Narayan, C.N. Annadurai, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and so on — operated despite sharp disagreements largely within constitutional boundaries, sustaining the legitimacy of the Union. Today, however, most of these “forces” are directed at a more cynical cause of disunity: a nationalist ideology that has repeatedly defended itself with deceit, evasion, obfuscation, opportunism, pietism, pretence, subterfuge, vindictiveness, and violence.
In this light, to claim we have “just put in the work, year after year”, as if to suggest India has only been growing from strength to strength, rather than lurching from one crisis to the next and of late becoming a little more balkanised as a result, is plainly disingenuous — and yet entirely in keeping with the alignment of corporate branding with nationalist sentiment, which is designed to create a climate in which criticism of corporate conduct is framed as unpatriotic. When companies wrap themselves in the symbols of the nation and position their products or services as contributions to India’s progress, questioning their practices risks being cast as undermining that progress. This can blunt scrutiny of resource over-extraction, environmental degradation, and exploitative labour practices by accusing dissenters of obstructing development.
Aggressively promoting consumption and consumerism (“fuel your hustle”), which drives profits but also deepens social inequalities in the process, is recast as participating in the patriotic project of economic growth. When corporate campaigns subtly or explicitly endorse certain political agendas, their association with national pride can normalise those positions and marginalise alternative views. In this way, the fusion of commerce and nationalism builds market share while fostering a superficial sense of national harmony, even as it sidelines debates on inequality, exclusion, and the varied experiences of different communities within the nation.
I recently started reading a book entitled The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay. It is historical fiction, immaculately detailed, with three excellent protagonists surrounded by a band of almost as admirable allies navigating a middle-era Spain in which three powerful politico-religious factions are vying for greater power. The Lions is endlessly beautiful both for Kay’s writing and the stories he has decided to narrate as much as those he won’t. The time in which the book’s tales are set was no stranger to casual brutality, but The Lions rises above it by what women and men striving constantly to be their best selves are capable of even in the presence of profound injustice, and of course the price they must inevitably pay. But even so, The Lions makes for superb reading.
A happy Lord of the Rings Day to you. 🙂 As I’ve written in many past editions of posts marking this occasion, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series surpassed JRR Tolkien’s novels and stories of Middle Earth — which was until then the high-water mark of epic fantasy to my mind — when I started reading the former. However, the Malazan series also surpassed, in some cases by distances I’d never imagined possible, all other works of fantasy I’d read until then. I finished reading it just as I completed my engineering studies and shortly after began a career as a journalist. And just a couple more years on, I had a sobering epiphany: I seemed to have lost my book-reading habit. Of course I regularly read shorter written material, from brief news reports to extended essays, but somehow I wasn’t been able to bring myself to read books of fiction — even of epic fantasy fiction, a genre I love very much.
The Lions broke this spell. I’d recently visited a close friend’s home and asked him to recommend a good book of fiction. I half-expected to be told there was nothing left to read or, should my friend somehow be able to recommend a book, fully expected to not read it all. After rapidly going through a list of books he’d liked and which I’d already read, he dove into his bookshelf for a minute and returned with The Lions. Both he and another close friend recommended it highly, which was something special because these two people have high standards of fiction — as they should — as well as are ravenous consumers of creative work produced by others and published authors themselves. So I decided I’d give The Lions more of a shot than I’d given other books of late, and boy was I glad.
I don’t like the city of New Delhi in and of itself. But I have some great friends there and experiencing the city with them simply transforms the place. The world of The Lions is just like that: riven with the kind of cruelty and hardship that only small-minded, parochial power is capable of inflicting on those it deems lesser than themselves, yet brightened and enlivened by the story’s protagonists, the physician Jehane bet Ishak, the military leader Rodrigo Belmonte, and the counsellor of kings Ammar ibn Khairan. When I turn into a page that opens with even one of them, I become [gasp] hopeful. What a luxury!
Whereas The Lord of the Rings is constantly pitching forward, The Lions allows the reader to rest and dwell every now and then — which is remarkable considering The Lions moves faster than the trilogy of books every does. Swept along, I started to wonder just as I crossed the book’s midpoint if I was beginning to recover my reading habit after more than a decade. As The Lions gently but surely built up to its crescendo, I even asked myself if the habit really went away or if I’d just been picking the ‘wrong’ books to read all this time. But just as I got within 150 pages of the book’s finish, I was brought to a crashing halt: I found myself having an increasingly tough time keeping on. I discovered a mind within my mind intent on keeping me from accessing my interest in reading the book. Its purpose seemed to be to have me stop reading right now, so that the people in The Lions could continue to remain where they were in the narrative without being consumed by the impending climax, where at least war — and the attendant prospect of death — lay, and still lies, in wait. But I know I must keep trying: Jehane, Rodrigo, and Ammar have already lived their lives and they would have continued to do so on their own exacting terms. If I am to claim to know them, I must not be afraid of following their lives to the end.
Either it’s only a matter of time before fantasy fiction writers start featuring among the laureates of highfalutin literary awards or the literary world’s irrational prejudice towards stories of lived lives will continue to be laid bare for what it is. If only to me, The Lord of the Rings, the Malazan series, and The Lions of Al-Rassan are of a piece with any and all fiction, whether in prose or verse, in terms of humans or aliens, located somewhere or nowhere. There are differences, of course, but that is also a tautological statement. Differences abound between The Lions and The Lord of the Rings as much as they do between, say, Half of a Yellow Sun and Objects of Desire. Yet they all play on the same borderless field.
Even magic needn’t make a difference. I used to think that it did when I first read The Lord of the Rings and realised how much better it was than anything else I’d read until then. But I’ve learnt that they’re not all that different, whether in kind or degree. Magic, if you’ve read the Malazan series but also if you’ve dabbled in the Elden Ring lore or played a Dungeons & Dragons campaign or two, can be found to be a thing of the world, this material world, occupying the space between you and me as surely as sunlight and birdsong. This is ultimately why I keep returning to The Lord of the Rings at least once a year, and why I find echoes of stories imagined much later by authors from different worlds in its old, familiar pages. Casting a spell to harm someone is no different from hitting them with a stick or bullying them when they’re helpless. Just as well, choosing not to do any of these things even when the incentive presents itself is equally virtuous.
The Lord of the Rings first brought me to this borderless field: even if I’m not frolicking yet, I’m not going to leave either. Now, back to The Lions…
After US troops withdrew from Afghanistan after two decades in 2021, the Taliban returned to power. In its oppressive regime many groups of people, but especially women, girls, and minorities, have lost most of their civil rights. In this time, Afghanistan has also suffered devastating floods and an ongoing famine, and has mounted tentative attempts at diplomacy with countries it could count on to be sympathetic to Afghanistan’s plight, if not the Taliban’s. Separate from other goals, it seemed like a bid by the Taliban to improve Afghanistan’s ability to survive future disasters.
But New Delhi’s willingness to so much as engage with Taliban-appointed diplomats — even while declining to acknowledge the political legitimacy of the Taliban government — has elicited strong words of caution from former diplomats.
Similarly, when the International Cricket Council (ICC) allowed the Afghanistan men’s team to participate in the Champions Trophy tournament despite a rule that it won’t recognise any country without both men’s and women’s teams, Afghan refugee and taekwondo champion Marzieh Hamidi accused the body of tolerating “gender apartheid”, which is also understandable.
These attempts by Afghanistan are reminiscent of a particular passage in my favourite work of fantasy, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. [Spoiler alert] The Crippled God, a vile new deity in the books’ world, petitions vociferously to be included in the world’s pantheon, side by side with all the other gods. The Master of the Deck, the mortal tasked with this decision, initially believes the answer to be easy: to decline admission. But the thought of doing so weighs heavily on him, until one day, on a bloody battlefield, a weary soldier points him to an obvious answer of another variety: to admit the Crippled God in the pantheon only to force it to play by the same rules all the other gods play by. [end alert]
There’s something to be said for doing right by a weakened people ruled by an unelected, oppressive, and insular government. The Taliban idea of human rights is subservient to the group’s hardline religious beliefs, and the country’s people didn’t sign up for it.
No matter how much control the Taliban aspires to exert on the affairs of Afghanistan, it can’t restrict the effects of climate change to beyond its borders. This is why the UN allowed Afghanistan’s representatives to participate as observers at the COP29 climate talks in November 2024 in Azerbaijan, even though the UN doesn’t recognise the Taliban government and had prohibited its participation altogether for three years until then. It was progress of a sort.
Similarly, New Delhi may seek to admit an Afghan diplomat by arguing the merits of having a finger on the button and the ICC may allow the men’s cricket team to play by claiming doing so allows the Afghan people something to cheer for. How meritorious their arguments are in the real world is a separate matter.
But can we apply the same sort of thinking to the US under Donald Trump, Sr.? As soon as he took office in his second term, Trump relaunched the process to free the US of commitments made under the Paris Agreement and to the World Health Organisation, cut funding for research into various diseases, drugs, and vaccines, and nixed support for DEI efforts, trans people, and reproductive rights. He returned to power by winning 312 votes in the electoral college and 49.8% of the popular vote, or 77.3 million votes. Kamala Harris received 75 million votes (48.3%).
As with Afghanistan, does the rest of the world have a responsibility to stand by the people who opposed Trump, as well as the rights of those who supported him but couldn’t have expected the consequences of his actions for themselves? Or is the US beyond concession?
Trump isn’t a terrorist but his protectionist agenda, authoritarian stance, and inflammatory rhetoric also endanger lives and livelihoods and isolate his compatriots in the international area. In fact, the questions arise because Trump’s actions affect the whole world, not the US alone, thanks to ways in which his predecessors have already embedded the country in multilateral collaborations to fight climate change, the spread of communicable diseases, plastic pollution, etc.
ThatVulture piece. If you haven’t already, read it but be warned: it’s just as disturbing as everyone is saying it is.
One paragraph in particular I found more unsettling than the rest — not because it presents one more awful detail but because I just didn’t know, while I was reading the piece, what I was expected to make of it.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”
It paints a fuller picture of Neil Gaiman but the article as a whole says nothing about why that’s necessary. The piece is overall well-composed; the writer and editors have obviously gone to great lengths to produce it. As a result, most parts of the piece justify themselves. But I couldn’t say why they saw fit to include parts like this paragraph, which (re-)humanise Gaiman unto some unclear end. Ultimately, there’s nothing in these narratives to suggest the perpetrators of sexual violence ever lost track of the difference between right and wrong.
Reality is strange and truths pointing at contradicting implications can coexist, but this coexistence defies logic and I find that quite disturbing. This isn’t that abstract, disconnected “cold logic” so much as that it’s not just about the coexistence of truths, that somewhere between the past and the future the fellow had a chance to weigh right and wrong and picked the wrong thing to do. The buck stops there and whatever happened to him in his childhood — as long as it didn’t leave him with schizophrenia, psychosis or any other condition that took away his ability to tell if what he was doing was wrong — ceases to matter.
I realise I might be thinking about this in an incomplete way, but since that big #MeToo wave, I’ve always had in mind those nonsensical statements by some men that they were depressed or anxious and that they’d go to therapy and ‘fix’ themselves. None of these conditions could have interfered with these men’s ability to tell right from wrong (which in some legal systems would have been required to mount an insanity defence), but by blaming them the men stigmatised them in a horrible way. Since then, bad men pointing to bad childhoods, as if the past offers some kind of mitigating background, has only been confusing.
In fact, I wonder if the two truths really do coexist. Maybe they don’t because somewhere in between, these men decided the past doesn’t matter any more.
To me the line that Gaiman hadn’t ever been to therapy was a red flag. When there’s emotional trauma, therapy is useful — as many of us know — to reprogramme emotional pathways that have become hijacked and distorted to respond in harmful ways to even benign stimuli. But there was still an opportunity in front of these men to do the right thing. Self-discipline was still possible and they possessed the agency for it.
Humans are both logical and emotional beings. At times like this, however, in a rush to remind ourselves of how a life of emotion can lead to discomfiting truths — like how a childhood of suffering trauma needn’t preclude an adulthood of inflicting trauma or that antithetical narratives of reality can be equally and simultaneously legitimate — we seem to forget humans are still capable of logic, and thus of restraint and forethought. And well-exercised restraint and forethought often lead to compassionate actions towards others. This logic only comes to the fore when we choose to do the right thing.
Gaiman had this choice, the doorway in the library. Now, he doesn’t get to pretend he didn’t do to his past what he did to his work and what he did to all those women, turning them into his fantasy.
Saying “choosing to do the right thing is easier than done” risks trivialising the difficulty, but again, the right thing here is to look for help before rather than succumb, more so because a man of Gaiman’s tremendous wealth and privileges is also bound to find it.
Self-discipline in this context often reminds me of a piece from a decade ago about how tough the road can be for people with illegal sexual preferences, so to speak, without also being a cul-de-sac. The piece is a long-form deep-dive (trigger warnings: child sexual abuse and discussions of suicide) into the inner lives of people who identify as paedophiles but who also recognise their urges are wrong and refuse to act on them. The narrative is careful enough to be fair to all the dramatis personae (fair of course doesn’t mean nice). Where you draw parallels with the Gaiman story, if it all, is up to you; I found the following passages particularly enlightening:
Dr. Klaus Beier doesn’t believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone’s makeup, that it’s “fate and not choice.” His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. “In my view, it’s not the inclination that’s a problem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t condemn the inclination, I’d condemn the behavior.”
Later:
When [Mike] started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn’t so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn’t become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. “He’s like, ‘People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you’re a guy. Don’t do anything stupid,’” he said. “And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out.”
…
Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. “If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it,” he said. “I don’t want to take pills because I could come back from that.” Ultimately, he felt he couldn’t kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. “But at the same time, I was still… It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick,” he said.
More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center’s cleaning staff began arriving for their night’s work.
Later:
Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., [Virtuous Paedophiles’] 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.
While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It’s also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. “If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he’s never given up on them,” he said. “He didn’t give up on me, he didn’t give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us.”
ThatVulture piece. If you haven’t already, read it but be warned: it’s just as disturbing as everyone is saying it is.
One paragraph in particular I found more unsettling than the rest — not because it presents one more awful detail but because I just didn’t know, while I was reading the piece, what I was expected to make of it.
In various interviews over the years, Gaiman has called The Ocean at the End of the Lane his most personal book. While much of it is fantastical, Gaiman has said “that kid is me.” The book is set in Sussex, where Gaiman grew up. In the story, the narrator survives otherworldly evil with the help of a family of magical women. As a child, Gaiman had no such friends to call on. “I was going back to the 7-year-old me and giving myself a peculiar kind of love that I didn’t have,” he told an interviewer in 2017. “I never feel the past is dead or young Neil isn’t around anymore. He’s still there, hiding in a library somewhere, looking for a doorway that will lead him to somewhere safe where everything works.”
It paints a fuller picture of Neil Gaiman but the article as a whole says nothing about why that’s necessary. The piece is overall well-composed; the writer and editors have obviously gone to great lengths to produce it. As a result, most parts of the piece justify themselves. But I couldn’t say why they saw fit to include parts like this paragraph, which (re-)humanise Gaiman unto some unclear end. Ultimately, there’s nothing in these narratives to suggest the perpetrators of sexual violence ever lost track of the difference between right and wrong.
Reality is strange and truths pointing at contradicting implications can coexist, but this coexistence defies logic and I find that quite disturbing. This isn’t that abstract, disconnected “cold logic” so much as that it’s not just about the coexistence of truths, that somewhere between the past and the future the fellow had a chance to weigh right and wrong and picked the wrong thing to do. The buck stops there and whatever happened to him in his childhood — as long as it didn’t leave him with schizophrenia, psychosis or any other condition that took away his ability to tell if what he was doing was wrong — ceases to matter.
I realise I might be thinking about this in an incomplete way, but since that big #MeToo wave, I’ve always had in mind those nonsensical statements by some men that they were depressed or anxious and that they’d go to therapy and ‘fix’ themselves. None of these conditions could have interfered with these men’s ability to tell right from wrong (which in some legal systems would have been required to mount an insanity defence), but by blaming them the men stigmatised them in a horrible way. Since then, bad men pointing to bad childhoods, as if the past offers some kind of mitigating background, has only been confusing.
In fact, I wonder if the two truths really do coexist. Maybe they don’t because somewhere in between, these men decided the past doesn’t matter any more.
To me the line that Gaiman hadn’t ever been to therapy was a red flag. When there’s emotional trauma, therapy is useful — as many of us know — to reprogramme emotional pathways that have become hijacked and distorted to respond in harmful ways to even benign stimuli. But there was still an opportunity in front of these men to do the right thing. Self-discipline was still possible and they possessed the agency for it.
Humans are both logical and emotional beings. At times like this, however, in a rush to remind ourselves of how a life of emotion can lead to discomfiting truths — like how a childhood of suffering trauma needn’t preclude an adulthood of inflicting trauma or that antithetical narratives of reality can be equally and simultaneously legitimate — we seem to forget humans are still capable of logic, and thus of restraint and forethought. And well-exercised restraint and forethought often lead to compassionate actions towards others. This logic only comes to the fore when we choose to do the right thing.
Gaiman had this choice, the doorway in the library. Now, he doesn’t get to pretend he didn’t do to his past what he did to his work and what he did to all those women, turning them into his fantasy.
Saying “choosing to do the right thing is easier than done” risks trivialising the difficulty, but again, the right thing here is to look for help before rather than succumb, more so because a man of Gaiman’s tremendous wealth and privileges is also bound to find it.
Self-discipline in this context often reminds me of a piece from a decade ago about how tough the road can be for people with illegal sexual preferences, so to speak, without also being a cul-de-sac. The piece is a long-form deep-dive (trigger warnings: child sexual abuse and discussions of suicide) into the inner lives of people who identify as paedophiles but who also recognise their urges are wrong and refuse to act on them. The narrative is careful enough to be fair to all the dramatis personae (fair of course doesn’t mean nice). Where you draw parallels with the Gaiman story, if it all, is up to you; I found the following passages particularly enlightening:
Dr. Klaus Beier doesn’t believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone’s makeup, that it’s “fate and not choice.” His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. “In my view, it’s not the inclination that’s a problem,” he said. “And I wouldn’t condemn the inclination, I’d condemn the behavior.”
Later:
When [Mike] started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn’t so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn’t become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. “He’s like, ‘People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you’re a guy. Don’t do anything stupid,’” he said. “And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out.”
…
Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. “If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it,” he said. “I don’t want to take pills because I could come back from that.” Ultimately, he felt he couldn’t kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. “But at the same time, I was still… It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick,” he said.
More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center’s cleaning staff began arriving for their night’s work.
Later:
Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., [Virtuous Paedophiles’] 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.
While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It’s also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. “If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he’s never given up on them,” he said. “He didn’t give up on me, he didn’t give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us.”
I recently came across an initiative called “Industrial47”. Someone had shared a link to it on a group I’m part of, and when its card loaded, the image was of a nuclear weapon going off.
I found on LinkedIn that “Industrial47” is a fund with the aim of “backing the forerunners of India’s Industrial Revolution”. I must say it’s quite dubious to read about a country-specific “industrial revolution” more than two centuries into a global post-industrial era. But maybe historical accuracy isn’t the point here so much as the josh elicited by those words. By this time, another member of the group had pointed out that all of India’s nuclear tests had been underground and that the one in the image depicts an American test.
Source: WhatsApp
Where technology meets people
According to its official website, Industrial47 currently funds companies developing technologies of the future. Why then did it have the image of a nuclear weapon going off? And why is there to be an Indian “industrial revolution”? *scrolls down the website* Here’s an answer — what looks like a mission statement. Let me annotate it.
We believe India’s moment is now.
Okay.
Our engineers aren’t just coding software anymore – they’re designing satellites, building robots, revolutionising agriculture, reimagining defence and rethinking energy.
There are five items listed here. The first two are factually accurate, the last two are unfalsifiable, and the third one is misleading. There’s no agricultural revolution. Let’s talk when it happens.
They’re tackling challenges that will define the next century of human progress.
Okay.
The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives.
The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.
It’s not clear where “here” is, but okay. Also there’s a grammatical problem: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons” seems to say the problems will ripple across eons, not the solutions.
This is more than a story of one nation’s rise. This is about humanity’s next giant leap.
…
When software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms – therein the future is forged.
And Industrial India will build out the next century.
See, now there’s a problem.
Since listening to a talk by Gita Chadha in 2020, I’ve been wary of the idea of “genius”. Among other things, I’ve noticed that there aren’t nearly as many “geniuses” in the social sciences and humanities as there are in the natural sciences. All these enterprises are littered with very difficult problems waiting to be solved but the idea of “genius” — as and when it is invoked — seems to apply only to those in the natural sciences. Even in the popular imagination, a “child prodigy” is expected to become a gifted mathematician or scientist, not a gifted poet or anthropologist. Great intellectual ability is preordained to be devoted to problems in science. Sometimes I amuse myself with the idea that problems in the social sciences and humanities simply overwhelm this “genius”.*
If the “future” of a country is to be “forged” at the moment “when software meets steel, when code meets craft, when bits meet atoms”, and without room for where technologies meet people — which technologies, which people, when, how — it sounds like a project that expects the socio-economic and the political pieces of the “future” to fall in place in accordance with the engineering goals alone.
You’re reading it wrong, you say. The fund only claims the future will also be forged in the solutions to engineering problems. We shouldn’t overlook these problems. I reply: Are you sure? Because I don’t see a fund to solve problems like increasing people’s trust in EVMs, improving MSPs for farmers or ensuring machines, not people, clean sewers (and I mean everywhere and in practice, not just in isolated pilot projects). How about putting the best minds together to work on the problem of developing a socio-political ideology to ultimately restore a politics of dignity and common welfare? It’s nasty, arduous, wicked work but it’s also the ultimate challenge — one that, if it succeeds, would obviate the need for most of these other interventions. But if you’d rather begin with a specific one: did you know there still isn’t a smokeless stove for rural India’s millions, leaving the country the world’s largest consumer of fuelwood for household use? Here’s a summary of Shankar Nair’s pertinent comment in The Hindu in February 2023 by ChatGPT; I hope it encourages you to read the whole thing:
The launch of Indian Oil Corporation’s solar cook-stove at India Energy Week 2023 casts a harsh light on India’s ongoing efforts to transform household energy consumption. While promoted as a low-carbon innovation poised to reach three crore households and save costs, its steep price of ₹15,000 raises concerns about accessibility. This initiative echoes past efforts like the National Physical Laboratory’s solar cooker in the 1950s and the 1980s’ “improved chulhas” program, both of which failed due to poor design, high costs, and ineffective implementation despite government subsidies. The historical parallels underscore a recurring gap between state-led energy innovations and practical adoption, as well as the lack of focus on improving rural incomes, which strongly influence energy choices.
This post benefited from feedback from Srividya Tadepalli.
Social ignorance is social harm
Projects that offer new technological solutions these days to old problems almost never account for their social dimensions. They are instead left to the state. Isn’t this cynical? Last year’s controversy about using satellite data to track farm fires offers another good example — as does the overarching endeavour to stamp these fires out. When a new project starts up, it may advance the technology, have some companies make money, and they all move on. The socio-political and socio-economic needles almost never move. The problem of scale matters as well because of the financial implications inherent to the economic relationships between people and their technologies. At this stage of development, it is hard to give every new scheme and fund the benefit of the doubt when it ignores the question of minimising social harm and maximising social welfare. In fact, it seems like an expedient exclusion.**
Air-purifiers come to mind. Researchers have found links between air pollution on one hand and biological and psychological development on the other. (Update, 9.10 am on January 15, 2024: Nature has just published a news feature entitled ‘Air pollution and brain damage: what the science says’.) In New Delhi (or any city with foul air for that matter), clean air is becoming increasingly vouchsafed for those with air-purifiers, which cost a good deal of money, require constant power supply, and of course owners that can pay these bills. The better and the more numerous the air-purifiers around you, the cleaner the air around you is, and the lower your risk of impaired biological and/or psychological development. Over time, people that can afford these living conditions — typically the “upper class” and, almost inevitably, “upper caste” lot — accumulate the benefits of clean air whereas those that can’t accumulate the ill-effects, and thus the gap between their fortunes slowly but inexorably widens. Every time the AQI crosses some headline-worthy threshold, New Delhi breaks out the “smog towers” and the “mist cannons” and home-appliance companies advertise newfangled air-conditioners and air-purifiers whereas state-led attempts to move towards a future in which no one needs air-purifiers flop. If I’m cynical to doubt initiatives like Industrial47, what would you call this?
Technologisation isn’t implicitly virtuous: to succeed in the fullest sense of improving the quality of life of all Indians, it needs specific social and political conditions as well. “1947 marked our political independence, 2047 will mark our technological sovereignty,” Rahul Seth, the person behind the Industrial47 fund and “an Infantry Officer with the Indian Army Reserves” with the rank of major, wrote in a LinkedIn post (whose card displayed the nuke test). His comment and its rapturous reception assume a clean break between political and technological achievement when in fact there’s no such thing.
Indeed, the comment is reminiscent of China’s rise as a “scientific superpower”. Part of this supposed achievement is founded on the slew of sophisticated and expensive scientific experiments it has executed, often in collaboration with other countries; its accelerating space programme; and its rapid industrialisation of the energy sector. The country is now planning to build the world’s largest hydroelectric-power dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river, which becomes the Brahmaputra when it subsequently enters India. Until this new dam takes shape, China’s Three Gorges dam will continue to hold the torch of physical magnitude. I hope by now the dangers of building dams in the Himalaya should be clear enough to discourage unbridled enthusiasm for projects of this nature. This said, many have marvelled at the Three Gorges dam and what they claim it says about China’s ability to plan and execute such projects: as if flawlessly.
But the country’s surveillance and censorship apparatus hampers us from knowing how people on the ground suffered as they were forced to make way for the monstrous facility. Attesting to such concerns are anecdotes that have managed to escape plus informed scholarship (see here and here, for example). Frankly, I prefer the amount of friction local movements in India have brought to bear on new “development” projects in the country. Friction is good: it ensures project proponents think twice about what they’re doing if they already haven’t. And increasingly often, they haven’t, and why should they when the current national government seems to be doing its damnedest to dilute the friction? The LinkedIn post goes: “You can be the right person, in the right place, at the right time – and yet have a few key pieces missing. Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici. Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore. Chandragupta Maurya had Chanakya.”* To this I’d add: India once had friction, then squandered it.
Source: Google search
When do we become scared?
The quip about “technological sovereignty” rankles in this regard. On any day ‘sovereignty’ is a powerful word, not one to be invoked in vain. Here, the term fantasises a future in which technology reigns supreme, but its framing also leaves open the question of India’s place in the comity of nations, which the country has worked hard to attain, continues to build on even today, and will for the foreseeable future. Recall that obnoxious piece on NASA Watch where a former JPL science-worker called NASA’s decision to downsize JPL’s workforce — due in part to budget overruns by the Mars Sample Return mission — the “fall of a civilisation”. It was reckless fear-mongering: among other things, NASA, and the US by extension, are currently more beneficiaries of an international collaboration than patrons of the spacefaring world. “In this milieu, harping on sole leadership because it’s the ‘American way’,” as the science-worker insisted it was, “is distasteful” (source). In the same vein, consider the example of ISRO’s forthcoming space station and Indian-on-the-moon plans. Its scientists and engineers are working hard but what are they working towards? Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued orders from on high to ISRO to build the ‘Bharatiya Antariksh Station’ by year X and land an Indian on the moon by year Y. And then what? We wait for the next diktat?
Imagine a future 50 years from now when it’s possible there are a few space stations in orbit around Earth and maybe even the moon, and when it’s plausibly (and relatively) more affordable, and not just in economic terms, to send people to stay and work there than to build a station of one’s own. Imagine if India owned and operated one of these stations instead of Indians having to lease time on another, you say. I reply: Sounds good, but where’s the cost-benefit analysis to this plan? Because unless you can demonstrate the benefit, we’re riding the coattails of speculation here and, importantly, you’re motivated by little more than the idea of Indian leadership rather than a proof of leadership de facto.
It’s reminiscent in turn of the International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955: it was chaired by Homi Bhabha, a representative from India, then a country that didn’t have nuclear power of its own. Conferences are not countries, you say. And leadership doesn’t demand “steel”, “craft” or “atoms”, I reply. This is in fact what the comity of nations allows us: leadership in various forms, and freedom from the tunnel vision that condemns the country to just one. The aspiration to “technological sovereignty” rankles specifically because, taken together, it offers one pointless pinnacle at the expense of others, and without the requisite justification of its presumed supremacy.
The image of the nuclear weapon slips back into view. It’s from a promotional video in Seth’s LinkedIn post. It opens with a staccato montage of the Indian flag atop a temple tower, atop a mountain (Kargil?), atop the Red Fort, atop a glacier (Siachen?), and atop the moon.*** Perhaps the fund’s ultimate priority is national security, yet “technological sovereignty” implies even greater ambitions — as do other visuals in the video**** and the enterprises Industrial47 has already invested in. National security also exists today in a baleful avatar. Rather than inculcate something the armed forces deem worth fighting for, the government’s narratives have often attempted to cast soldiers’ “spirit and courage” themselves to be the objects of desire, the thing citizens at large must prove they deserve. The government has also invoked national security as a spectre, bolstered by periodic allegations of threats to Hindus, disinformation about the intentions of Muslims, and in general the communalisation of public life, to deny requests under the RTI Act about information as benign as the designs of scientific spacecraft. Unspecific appeals to national security have also become the basis for jailing students and academics for indefinite periods of time, expel foreign journalists, rebuke foreign governments’ comments on the country’s “internal affairs”, and deny the findings of international democracy and welfare research organisations. If this is national security, I sincerely dread a deeply technologised form.
It’s just a video, you say, and you’re seeing meaning that isn’t there. Most of you must’ve watched Oppenheimer by now but let me call your attention to something Leona Woods asked Enrico Fermi after the world’s first nuclear reactor went critical: “When do we become scared?” Call it the naïvety of eggheads or political premeditation, Oppenheimer et al. had control of the Bomb until suddenly they didn’t. Its very existence reshaped the world order. Whether or not it actually went off was secondary. This is scope creep: when the parameters of a project are changing so slowly as to not be threatening, until one day you realise they’ve crossed some threshold, an unforeseen tipping point, and significantly altered the scope of the project. You thought you had a hand on the wheel, and maybe you did, but the car’s almost imperceptible drift to the right now has you endangering oncoming traffic, and yourself, on the other lane. Call it pithy, call it a cliché, but science and the technologies that follow need a hand on the wheel to adjust the course of their fantasies every now and then instead of going with the flow. Politics needs your other hand on another wheel to do the same thing, considering science is already a reason of state in India. Otherwise, we’re left staring at “technological sovereignty”.
Or maybe these are all just words trading in josh on an investment fund’s webpage — although it does alert us to one particular plausibility and renders the words more potent: “The problems we solve here will ripple across eons. The companies we build here will transform billions of lives. The technologies we pioneer here will reshape what’s possible.” When do we become scared? I don’t know, but when you do, don’t ignore it. That’s all I’m asking.
* “Leonardo da Vinci had Lorenzo de’ Medici” and “Walchand Hirachand had the Kingdom of Mysore” — and of course a wider socio-political environment that they navigated as well, but this aside: notice the distinctive singularity of “genius”, its manifestation with problems amenable to being solved by individuals, often working alone, as was once the case in some of the sciences but hasn’t been so for more than a century — and as has more rarely been the case in the social sphere, virtually by definition.
** I can seem like a habitual naysayer but I assure you I’m not. I can’t get onboard with new technology + business ideas if they’re ill-conceived or if their social and political implications haven’t been thought through. If I keep saying ‘no’, it’s because I’m being met with a continuous stream of half-baked ideas. I have no obligation to put up with one every now and then.
*** The video includes footage from Associated Press. I hope it was licensed properly.
**** The video’s theme seems to be masculine middle-class fever dream. The scenes of its montage go space, space, sport, space, cricket, space, EV, sport, sport, a CEO, software code, sport, a CEO, a CEO, automation, an award, music, the stock market, Rajpath, military, Taj Mahal, IT, IT, a CEO, a CEO, space, space, mountains, tigers, IISc, IISc, metallurgy, military, Mahabharat on DD, space, some nuke test, polio vaccine, Shah Rukh Khan, Modi performing aarthi like a priest, AR Rahman, cricket, military, military, a CEO, automation, the “shayari jugalbandi” in Parliament, CV Raman, an Amul ad, military, that nuke test, military, military, Parle G biscuit dipped in tea, military, metallurgy, military, space, and finally Nehru hoisting the flag in front of a crowd of thousands.
In many respects Krishna Ella and Elon Musk are poles apart but on some they share a few similarities. Both of them have played along with nationalist elements in their respective national governments in order to further their agendas, if not profits. Both men are also at the helm of successful companies that build valuable products that a lot of people need, that the world needs. But while Elon Musk continues to be a despotic techbro, Krishna Ella is just a fellow who’s made some detrimental decisions.
Recently, both men were also in the news for honours they’d received.
The Royal Society in the UK continues to remain under pressure to rescind its fellowship of Musk, which it granted in 2018, owing to his attacks on free speech (ironically in the guise of protecting an absolute right to free speech), support for pseudoscientific ideas (including his antivaccine sentiments and support for climate denialism), and generally being unable to tell profundity from horseshit.
At least one other fellow has resigned to protest the Royal Society’s unwillingness to suspend Musk’s membership: retired University of Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop. She wrote in November 2024 on her blog:
There was no formal consultation of the Fellowship but via informal email contacts, a group of 74 Fellows formulated a letter of concern that was sent in early August [2024] to the President of the Royal Society, raising doubts as to whether he was “a fit and proper person to hold the considerable honour of being a Fellow of the Royal Society”. The letter specifically mentioned the way Musk had used his platform on X to make unjustified and divisive statements that served to inflame right-wing thuggery and racist violence in the UK.
Somebody (not me!) leaked the letter to the Guardian, who ran a story about it on 23rd August.
I gather that at this point the Royal Society Council opted to consult a top lawyer to determine whether Musk’s behaviour breached their Code of Conduct. The problem with this course of action is that if you are uncertain about doing something that seems morally right but may have consequences, then it is easy to find a lawyer who will advise against doing it. … And, sure enough, the lawyer determined that Musk hadn’t breached the Code of Conduct.
According to Bishop, Musk is in breach of sections 2.6, 2.10, and 2.11 of the ‘Code of Conduct’:
2.6: Fellows and Foreign Members shall carry out their scientific research with regard to the Society’s statement on research integrity and to the highest standards.
2.10: Fellows and Foreign Members shall treat all individuals in the scientific enterprise collegially and with courtesy, including supervisors, colleagues, other Society Fellows and Foreign Members, Society staff, students and other early‐career colleagues, technical and clerical staff, and interested members of the public.
2.11: Fellows and Foreign Members shall not engage in any form of discrimination, harassment, or bullying.
Seems fair. I reckon that together with the possibility of the unspecified “consequences” for the Royal Society Bishop has speculated, the body will also be mindful of being obligated to reassess the fellowship of many other individuals on its roster should it remove Musk on these grounds. (To be clear, this isn’t a defence of its position.)
I’ve always held that awards are distinguished by their laureates and not the other way around. Fellowship of the Royal Society isn’t technically an award but for the most part it operates with the same incentives. Its code is thoughtful enough to not be limited to one’s conduct as a scientist. Just as the Millennium Plaque of Honour wouldn’t make a dent on the reputation of any scientist who wins it because it was awarded to Appa Rao Podile in 2017 — after he let police personnel lathi-charge the students in his care at the University of Hyderabad — it must be difficult to count Musk among one’s peers as fellows of the Royal Society.
Consider Krishna Ella now. As part of its annual routine, the Indian National National Science Academy (INSA) handed out 61 fellowships last week, Ella among them. It’s the first time INSA has included industry leaders for this recognition. According to a statement on the INSA website:
Dr. Krishna Ella, a prominent Indian scientist and entrepreneur, leads Bharat Biotech in ground-breaking vaccine development. His achievements include India’s Covaxin, the world’s first clinically proven conjugated Typhoid Vaccine, ROTAVAC, and the first preservative-free vaccine, Revac-B mcf Hepatitis B Vaccine. Bharat Biotech also introduced India’s first cell-cultured Swine Flu vaccine and manufactures the world’s most affordable Hepatitis vaccines. Additionally, they were the first globally to develop a vaccine for the Zika virus.
Impressive achievements, right? But to me, Ella will equally be the man who saw fit to file defamation cases against me and many of my fellow journalists for publishing evidence-based articles critical of the manner in which the Indian government approved Covaxin for COVID-19 (with emphasis on the Indian government, not Bharat Biotech).
I’m not at liberty to quote from these articles as Bharat Biotech was able to obtain an ex-parte injunction to take them offline until the proceedings concluded. But as with Bishop vis-à-vis Musk, here’s an instructive passage from the INSA ‘Code of Conduct’:
All people associated with INSA are expected to adhere to certain minimal standards of ethical behaviour which include but are not limited to, honesty, integrity, and professional (sic). Integrity in the context of scientific research means trustworthiness of the data collected/presented, their interpretation, and the soundness of methodology/protocol followed in carrying out the research.
At the time the Drugs Controller General of India (DGCI) signed off on the use of Covaxin and Covishield in “clinical trial mode” on the cusp of India’s drive to vaccinate against COVID-19, in January 2021, the country’s medico-legal doctrine didn’t recognise the term “trial mode” and phase III trials of both vaccines hadn’t been completed.
To make matters worse, the DGCI said the vaccines were “110% safe” when the safety data hadn’t even been collected. AstraZeneca came through later with the complete safety and efficacy data for Covishield. In July 2021, Bharat Biotech researchers uploaded a preprint paper reporting safety data for only 56 days following vaccination with Covaxin. To this day, Bharat Biotech and the Union health ministry have yet to release the long-term safety data collected during Covaxin’s phase-III trial. Instead, both the company and the national government have simply expected people at large to trust them. Irrespective of whether the vaccine is safe, these actions are inimical to trustworthiness.
I’m not opposed to Ella becoming an INSA fellow because I don’t care. Instead, my concerns are about INSA: I know it focuses on a prospective fellow’s scientific work at the time of granting the fellowship (see link below) and I suspect the Royal Society does too, but the latter also has a code of conduct that extends to fellows’ conduct beyond the scientific enterprise and other fellows who find value in all their peers adhering to it.
The Royal Society fellows’ protests against sharing the honour with Musk is of a piece with his increasingly rightward turn in recent years being met with scientists speaking up against him in various fora. While there isn’t a correspondingly objectionable scientist in India, I also don’t recall members of the Indian scientific community speaking up in defence of science journalists who are speaking for science when they’re harassed by other members of the research enterprise, at least beyond the constant few I remain grateful for.
I sense the public panic over the HMPV outbreak in China is finally dying down. I don’t know which TV news channel picked up on it first and blew it out of proportion but it created the sort of time in which basic public health literacy would have made a big difference. Clearly such literacy is still quite low in the country.
I also don’t know why it became such a panic at all. As an editorial in The Hindu noted, the outbreak was a problem only insofar as the Indian media made it out to be: it didn’t hit the headlines anywhere else (except perhaps some Sinophobic outlets in the US). It made me wonder what exactly we learnt from COVID-19: wear masks, wash hands, maintain social distancing, and consult your physician, yes, but seemingly not that the COVID-19 pandemic was troublesome because SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus. This novelty made a world of difference.
The whole thing was constantly reminiscent of a 2014 Tamil film called Vaayai Moodi Paesavum (‘Speak With Your Mouth Shut’). In the film, there’s an outbreak of a previously unknown virus and medical researchers are slowly elucidating the full range of its symptoms. But even before they’ve learnt anything about whether it’s deadly or requires drastic action to protect against, the state health minister (played by the well-cast Pandiarajan) — desperate to quell the media outcry and to pacify a worried local populace — declares the state government will manufacture masks en masse and hand them out for free. Good call, right?
The fellow’s unscrupulous: he means to have a relative receive the government contract and take a slice. But his statement feeds the real panic: while until then neither the people nor the journalists knew whether the infection was communicable, his implication that masks are necessary suggests it does, and they’re all in a tizzy.
It was the same way with covering HMPV stories as journalists: all the experts to whom journalists spoke, irrespective of their location in the public or private sectors or their ideological tendencies, said HMPV wasn’t cause for concern. At the same time, local and hyperlocal media outlets were reporting “First HMPV case reported from X city” or “X number of people dead due to HMPV”. Those publications that did have a functional science/health journalism department would’ve been caught in between: they couldn’t deny HMPV’s existence nor leave it out of the front pages, so they had to acknowledge its existence in a way that didn’t also inflate the hype balloon.
Another problem we came across showed up the piecemeal nature of India’s pathogen surveillance programme. Many headlines simply said “X agency detects Y HMPV cases”. Since HMPV has been around for a long time, and hasn’t exactly been hiding, it was a truism that if we went looking for it, we’d find it. And the ICMR did, repeatedly, but when it put out press releases to that effect together with statements asking for the people at large to not worry, just the fact that the agency had picked up on those cases further fuelled concerns.
Public outcry is a dangerous animal. It forced the government’s hand and, in a bid to be seen to be acting, the government instituted the same sort of response measures it would have if there had been an outbreak with real cause for concern. Whatever blew the HMPV outbreak out of proportion, a cascading lack of tact — if not courage — was part of it.
