The Rearview

What happens when a bureaucratic blunder wrecks a young scientist's career plans, and the wreckage turns out to be the making of him? And why would a man who helped crack the language of life spend decades insisting that his greatest triumph was only a detour? In this episode of The Rearview, we trace the life of Har Gobind Khorana, only one of four Indian origin scientists who were awarded a Nobe...

Common birds are no longer common. Rural landscapes now host fewer Black Drongos and Indian Rollers; Nightjars call less frequently from the edges of forests; Black-shouldered Kites perch less often on telegraph wires; Eagles are scarcer in the skies; and Harriers patrol protected grasslands in dwindling numbers as they search for insects. What is causing this disappearance? Renowned ornithologist...

Can a man work at the very frontier of physics and still hold a deep religious faith — and did Abdus Salam ever feel the two were at war? Did the world's first Muslim science laureate help build Pakistan's atomic bomb? Behind the hundred-hour weeks, Salam was someone who recited Ghalib and Rumi mid-calculation, laughed first at his own jokes, and worked best arguing at a blackboard. We look at whe...

What does a borrowed cow have to do with a Nobel Prize? And how did a committed atheist set a devout Muslim on the path to becoming one of the great physicists of the twentieth century? This is the story of Abdus Salam born in 1926 in Jhang, a mud-walled town in the Punjab, the son of a poor schoolteacher who studied by the light of an oil lamp. In 1979 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming...

Did Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi solve the Riemann Hypothesis - one of mathematics's greatest puzzles? Was Kosambi, who wrote one of the most influential books on studying Indian history, ignored by both mathematicians and historians? Is he India's Alan Turing? This week we interview Prof Ram Ramaswamy, whose biography of the remarkably eclectic DD Kosambi: DD Kosambi, One Life, Many Worlds, gives...

Could a warm patch of water in the Pacific have influenced both the French Revolution and some of India's deadliest famines? In this concluding episode of the series, Jacob and Sobhana trace the extraordinary historical reach of El Niño, revealing how a climate phenomenon thousands of kilometres away has left its imprint on societies, economies and even moments that changed the course of history....

What do the Titanic and a pair of ship's cooks have to do with one of Earth's greatest climate mysteries? In this episode, two remarkable stories become the gateway to understanding El Niño—one suggesting how the climate phenomenon may have quietly influenced history, the other showing how cooks aboard a research vessel spotted the signs of a major El Niño before the scientists themselves. In the...

How can a patch of warm water thousands of kilometres from India determine whether its farms flourish or fail? And how did a mathematician help uncover one of the greatest hidden connections in the planet’s weather? In the first episode of this three-part story, we trace the strange history of El Niño and the centuries-long struggle to predict the Indian monsoon. The journey begins off the coast o...

What if we told you that one of the most extraordinary dinosaur fossils ever found was in India — a snake caught mid-strike, coiled around dinosaur eggs, frozen in time for 67 million years? In this series, The Rearview, we have travelled from the earliest dinosaurs to the giants that walked the Indian subcontinent when it was still adrift and to the discoveries that continue to reshape what we th...

What does coal have to do with a lost supercontinent? And how did one tiny Punjabi town give India both its dinosaur hunters and one of the greatest actors in its cinema? In 1840s Bengal, the East India Company wasn't hunting prehistory — it was hunting fuel for its steamships. But the men sent crawling through Indian coal seams kept stumbling onto something stranger: fossil plants that matched Au...

What did the world's greatest anatomist mistake a dinosaur bone for? And how did the man who hunted India's most feared serial killers end up discovering Asia's first dinosaur fossils? The first episode of Rearview opens in a cold Oxford study in 1677, where a scholar turns over a colossal bone and confidently declares it the thigh of a Roman war-elephant. That sets the tone for two centuries of o...

When people speak of Sir M. Visvesvaraya, they usually remember him as one of India’s greatest engineers. As Diwan of Mysore in the early twentieth century, he championed ambitious infrastructure projects that he believed would modernise the princely state and drive economic growth. Among his most significant achievements was the Krishna Raja Sagara, or KRS, dam across the Cauvery River. Visvesvar...

In the annals of modern medicine, few scientists have saved as many lives while remaining as profoundly overlooked as Yellapragada Subbarow. Born in colonial India and later working in the United States, Subbarow’s research laid the foundations for breakthroughs that transformed global healthcare—from treatments for parasitic diseases and cancer to advances in antibiotics and nutritional science....

What did Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill have in common, besides shaping mid‑20th mid‑20th‑century history? Both suffered from hypertension, a condition Western medicine did not recognise as a disease until well into the 1940s. High blood pressure was seen as an inevitable companion of aging, something to be endured rather than treated. Doctors advised lifestyle changes, less salt, mor...

Hem Chandra Bose and Aziz Ul-Haque were the experts who played a pivotal role in developing the Henry Classification System for cataloging finger prints. This was during the early 20th century, when both were police inspectors, part of the colonial Bengal Police Service. This was a unique system that enabled the identification of any person, by employing 10 identifying characteristics of their fin...

India’s computing story unfolds in two distinct phases. In the decades after Independence, the country set out to build its own computer hardware. But from the 1970s onwards, that ambition quietly gave way to something else: software. In this concluding episode of the series, we trace how and why that pivot happened. During the 1960s, American universities began partnering with the Indian Institut...

In the mid-1950s, while the world was still reeling from the dawn of the atomic age, a group of visionary scientists in a makeshift barracks in Mumbai were chasing a different kind of power: computational sovereignty. This episode dives into the incredible story of TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator), India’s first indigenous digital computer. Spearheaded by Homi B...

In the first of a 3-part series, we discuss the origins of India’s quest, first to procure and then to build a homegrown computer in India. Coming very close to the Indian independence, this is the period that is more closely associated with the birth of India’s nuclear programme. Dr Banerjee’s book: Computing in the Age of Decolonisation narrates this history and begins with the story of DD Kosam...

Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis (1893–1972) was a Bengali statistician and institution-builder who became one of the most consequential figures in twentieth-century Indian science. Trained as a physicist in Calcutta and Cambridge, he discovered statistics almost by accident through an encounter with Biometrika, and went on to found the Indian Statistical Institute in 1931 out of a small laboratory at...

This podcast explores the lives of India’s first female doctors, framing their struggle not as a technological quest, but as a profound social rebellion. Beyond merely practicing medicine, women like Drs. Kadambini Ganguly, Anandibai Joshi, Rukmabai Raut and Jamini Sen, navigated a "structural trap" of colonial prejudice and domestic conservatism. The narrative highlights the contradictions of the...

Waldemar Mordechai Wolff Haffkine (1860–1930), born in Odessa (then part of the Russian Empire, now Ukraine), was a pioneering Jewish bacteriologist who spent more than two decades working in India. Barred from academic positions in Russia due to antisemitic restrictions, he fled first to Switzerland and then to Paris, where he worked at the Pasteur Institute. In 1892, Haffkine developed the world...

In Part 2 of the the history of India’s nuclear programme, we discuss the impact of the 1974 nuclear test on India’s civilian nuclear programme. Whether the consequent technological embargo dealt a body blow to Homi Bhabha’s three phase programme that was premised on sufficient uranium to tide India over until it could extract its vast reserves of thorium? Why electricity from nuclear reactors hav...

India’s nuclear programme has been shaped by idealism, secrecy, ambition, sanctions, and strategic anxiety. In this two-part series, we trace its evolution from the pre-independence period to the passage of new legislation—the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill, 2025, also known as the SHANTI Act. Along the way, we explore India’s first Prime Minis...

Spread out over a sprawling 109 hectares (270 acres), the Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Indian Botanic Garden, previously known as the Calcutta Botanic Garden, was among the first experiments commissioned by the East India Company to create a ‘ nursery’ for exotic plants that could be studied for commercial use. Situated in Shibpur, Howrah, just across the Hooghly River from Kolkata, the Garden bo...

The Indian Science Congress (ISC)—the first-ever conclave of India’s scientific community—was inaugurated in 1914. It was conceived by two British chemists, Professor J. L. Simonsen and Professor P. S. MacMahon. The inaugural session was held from January 15 to 17, 1914, under the presidency of Ashutosh Mukherjee, then Vice Chancellor of the University of Calcutta. The event brought together 105 s...