Admiral Mehta's parting cannon ball on India's security appropriately eclipsed the episode on a Chinese scholar talking of dismembering India. That story was of interest not because it had any worries for India, unlike the Admiral's wise words, but as an insight into Chinese scholarship in what I would describe as an increasingly liberalised regime of ideas. At least Chinese scholars have complete freedom in critically commenting on countries like India, the US and Russia. Freedom to comment on China is also expanding.

The fear of internal revolt is real in China. I was the minister accompanying the Chinese President when he visited India and the Clash of Civilisations really bothered him. An electrical engineer by training, he jokingly told the press at the end of his visit that "your minister" is an econometrician and I discussed fuzzy logic with him. Also we both agreed that the clash of civilisations is not relevant to large countries like China and India. The problem is more acute for them.

An interesting experiment biotechnologists carry out is to examine if, genetically, populations are different. These are expensive and so sample sizes are limited. The Indian experiment done by our ranking National Institute at Pune had a sample of over 2,000 which is large for such studies, but I suspect had a small Adivasi cohort. It turns out that the Indian population does not show any genetic differences in a statistically significant sense. As the then Minister of Science and Technology I read the report carefully since in my days, the Science Minister also looked after BT. Life was never the same for me again. Earlier, when I would take a plane and go south in the subconscious mind, there was the myth of the so-called Aryan North and the Dravidian South. Now when I go I see, hey, he looks like my cousin Pramod or she is like Pushpa Chachi.

... contd.