Dismal science

Dismal science

It took Stephen Hawking. It took a surprise visit by one of the greatest scientific minds of our times to spotlight the depressing state of science in India. As the Cambridge professor of mathematics navigated his wheelchair around Mumbai and New Delhi, a wondrous phenomenon was evident: never before in living memory has India sustained popular interest in science, that too in the rigorous theories of modern physics, for such a long stretch. This at once elicits two observations. One, the dismal public space devoted to pure science cannot be attributed to a lack of wider interest. The thousands who tumbled out of crowded auditoriums, most of them a little glass-eyed after Hawking's conducted tours of superstring theory, of p-branes and of not-so-black black holes, attest that. Two, as the scientific community in India rushed forth to heap praise on the bespectacled physicist, a gulf was apparent: none among them -- in fact, none among the much fabled third largest pool of scientific manpower we in India sooften boast of -- is a force to reckon with in the global galaxy of leading scientists, let along vis-a-vis Hawking.

What ails science in India? Why does this country not boast of scientists of stature today? Why among the admittedly limited number of contemporary leaders in fields like economics, literature and technology is it so impossible to spy a pure scientist? Sure, the foundations of modern physics rest on the seminal contributions of Indians like S. Chandrashekhar and C.V. Raman. Sure, the holy grail of physicists today, the Theory of Everything that has to be deemed the most intellectual of modern quests, would entail reconciling the four known forces of nature, gravitons, gluons, photons and weak gauge bosons, the last of these named after Satyendra Bose. Sure, all those centuries ago we came up with the most fundamental of mathematical tools, the zero. But if the first impulse is to cite these contributions to assert the robustness of Indian science, the next constructive step would be to assess the absence of that vibrancy and intellectual assertion in turn-of-the-millennium India. Longago achievements cannotcompensate for current bankruptcy.

It is a failing that must be addressed if India is to achieve the great power status it so fervently desires. The perennial suspect, the education system, certainly calls for a rethink. A rigidly set curriculum that rewards rote, for one, cannot inculcate innovativeness in thinking -- neither can the current insistence on compartmentalising students into either the arts or the sciences at a young age. Politics-ridden and unnecessarily bureaucratised centres of higher learning too are unlikely breeding grounds for leaps of the imagination -- just as they by their very nature cannot house mavericks, which is what perpetrators of scientific revolutions usually are.