Tag: Nambi Narayanan

• Violence shuts science? Err…

  Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is news.

  I’m reminded of this adage of the news industry – and Nambi Narayanan’s comment in August 2022 – when I read reports like ‘Explosion of violence in Ecuador shuts down science’ (Science, January 13, 2024). An “explosion of violence” in a country should reasonably be expected to affect all walks of life, so what’s the value in focusing a news report only on science and those who practice it? It’s not like we have news reports headlined “explosion of violence in Ecuador shuts down fruit shops”.

  There are little tidbits in the article that might be useful to other researchers in Ecuador, but it’s unlikely they’re looking for it in Science, which is a foreign publishing reporting on Ecuador for an audience that’s mostly outside the country.

  The only bit I found really worth dwelling on was this one paragraph:

  The Consortium for the Sustainable Development of the Andean Ecoregion (CONDESAN) … went further. It canceled all fieldwork this week and next, says Manual Peralvo, a geographer and project coordinator. He adds that CONDESAN plans to design a stricter security protocol for future projects that involve fieldwork. “We’re going to have to plan our schedules much more specifically to know who is where and at what time,” and to avoid dangerous areas, he says.

  … yet it’s just one paragraph, before the narrative moves on to how the country’s new security protocols will “deter non-Ecuadorian funding and scientists”. I’d have liked the report to drop everything else and focus on how research centres organise and administer fieldwork when field-workers are at risk of physical violence.

  If anything, there may be no opportunity cost associated with such stories – except for the authors and publishers of such reports (i.e. in its current form) suggesting they believe science is somehow more special than other human endeavours.

  2024.01.19

• Books – 2022

  Even as I whined about losing my reading habit, I managed to read a surprising (to me) number of books through 2022. One reason I think I didn’t notice is because very few of them started out being books I actually wanted to read. Looking back, there’s a clear fiction-nonfiction divide and a marked preference for monographs. The full list follows; each recommender’s name is in square brackets and a thumbs-up denotes how much I personally enjoyed it.

  1. The Dark Side of the Hive (NF), Robin Moritz and Robin Crewe [Raghavendra Gadagkar] 👍🏾
  2. Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants (NF), John Drury Clark 👍🏾
  3. The Technological Society (NF), Jacques Ellul
  4. The Complete Cosmicomics (F), Italo Calvino [Jahnavi Sen] 👍🏾
  5. Reread: Coup de Grace (F), Marguerite Yourcenar 👍🏾
  6. Straw Man Arguments: A Study in Fallacy Theory (NF), Scott Aikin and John Casey 👍🏾👍🏾
  7. Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling (F), Bruce Sterling [Shruti Muralidhar]
  8. The Vortex: A True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation (NF), Scott Carney and Jason Miclian
  9. From Space to Sea: My ISRO Journey and Beyond (NF), Albert Muthunayagam 👍🏾 (largely because the Nambi Narayanan biopic had just come out and the book contradicted many claims in the film)
  10. Real-World Cryptography (NF), David Wong
  11. Spillover (NF), David Quammen 👍🏾👍🏾
  12. Modi’s India (NF), Christophe Jaffrelot
  13. Letters to a Young Poet (NF), Rainer Maria Rilke 👍🏾
  14. Ninefox Gambit (F), Yoon Ha Lee
  15. The Dawn of Analysis (NF), Scott Soames
  16. At the Feet of Living Things (NF), Aparajita Datta, Rohan Arthur and T.R. Shankar Raman 👍🏾
  17. The Collected Stories (F), Arthur C. Clarke
  18. Parallel Lives (NF), Phyllis Rose [Jahnavi Sen] 👍🏾

  Now reading: Viriconium (F), M. John Harrison [Thomas Manuel] so far 👍🏾👍🏾

  Up next: The God Is Not Willing (F), Steven Erikson

  2023.01.26

• Immunity for scientists? Err…

  On the sidelines of a screening of the semi-fictional biopic of beleaguered ISRO scientist Nambi Narayanan, the Madhavan-starrer Rocketry: The Nambi Effect, Narayanan told journalists on August 1 that “scientists should” receive immunity against “arbitrary police action” (source).

  “It is not just ISRO… scientists working in the Department of Science and Technology, the Department of Atomic Energy and others too. As part of their job, they travel a lot. … They have to be protected from random police action, else you can go on booking people and put them behind the bars”.

  This is a strange statement to make, with quite a bit to unpack.

  No one – not just scientists – deserves to be at the receiving end of arbitrary police action. Singling scientists out here transforms a right into a privilege and scientists into an arbitrarily exceptional class of citizens. Narayanan suffered considerably after the Kerala police falsely accused him of espionage and derailed his career and life, and the response to this should include among other things the elimination of all arbitrary action, instead of vouchsafing the cruelty of it for some non-elite group.

  Narayanan’s statement is also vague about what he considers to be “arbitrary” and whom he considers to be “scientists”. If he is using “arbitrary” as a synonym for ‘baseless’, his statement is immediately a statement about the arrests and harassment of journalists, activists and political leaders around the country. The police and state governments also arrested and harassed social scientists. To want scientists alone to be protected in this regard is disingenuous – and in the process raises the question of “protection from what?”.

  Baseless police action against scientists who spoke up is baseless police action against scientists who spoke up against state failure and overreach. These scientists are not simply – to use a cliché – doing their jobs, as Narayanan was, but also exercised their rights as citizens of the country to call out and protest communalism and corruption. Narayanan on the other hand was persecuted for two decades for having done nothing at all. Both actions were wrong but for significantly different reasons. Importantly, cases like his have been rare while those unlike his are the norm today.

  And finally, Narayanan’s statement presumes an implicit distinction between scientists’ work and their political engagement. He seems to invoke, by asking for immunity, that exceptionalism again: that there is nothing worth taking police action over as well as that scientists are above it all. Granting them and only them immunity from police action could consequently render their comments on political matters (even more) irrelevant, coming as they will from a position of incredible privilege, but it is far more likely that senior scientists (an important distinction because younger scientists have on average been better) will interpret the decree to mean they’re obligated to the state to stay in their lane.

  The only part of Narayanan’s statement that makes sense is the one that expects the police to give scientists, and for that matter people of any profession, the benefit of the doubt – to admit, essentially, that a conspiracy isn’t the only explanation for a researcher in a well-funded research facility to travel to or be in touch with their counterparts from other countries.

  2022.08.02