Any proposed attempt to define rigid racial distinctions among India’s 1.4 billion people, even if honestly undertaken, would quickly run counter to well-established scientific research that has demonstrated the immense diversity of India’s population, as well as the world’s population as a whole, with respect to genetics, language, and culture.
Top Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday decried reported attempts to conduct a study on racial purity, saying that what the country needed was job security and economic prosperity and not 'racial purity'. Rahul was responding to a news report that claimed that the Ministry of Culture was in the "process of acquiring an array of DNA profiling kits and associated
Three remarkable people
Celebrating the lives of Roddam, Faruqi and Sudarshan
Three remarkable men, all in their late eighties, passed away within days of each other in December 2020, two of them in Bengaluru and a third in Allahabad.
Enough has appeared in this paper and elsewhere about Professor Roddam Narasimha who died on December 14, as a scientist and a teacher in the Indian Institute of Science. India’s aerospace programme owes a lot to him.
A scientist strategist
Roddam was a tremendously curious individual who wore his achievements lightly. He was a member of India’s highest-level strategic and security bodies.
Roddam Narasimha (1933-2020): A scientist-engineer with an endless thirst for knowledge
RN, as he was known, guided several generations of scientists. Roddam Narasimha. | Science Gallery Bengaluru @SciGalleryBlr via Twitter.
Roddam Narasimha was in rarefied company as a scientist-engineer. But, if you consider his exceptional research output along with his track record in public service, he is perhaps second to none. RN, as he was lovingly referred to, passed away in Bangalore on December 14. The scientific community has lost a transcendent member, and India, a model citizen. Narasimha left behind a towering legacy.
At the start of his research career, Narasimha worked on problems concerning turbulence, a feature of fluid flows that has vexed scientists for more than a century. Flow in a pipe at low enough speeds is well-behaved, regular, and predictable – a laminar state. But if you ramp up the speed, the flow transitions to an irregular mess – a turbul