Some books inform. Some provoke. A few ignite. India: Science. S Politics, Geostrategy - A -A Thirty-Year Thought Journey belongs to the last category. This work by Dr. Gautam Desiraju is not merely a collection of essays; it is the chronicle of a restless and fearless mind searching for patterns in the tumult of our times.
I have known Dr. Desiraju not only as one of India's foremost chemists but also as a thinker, who has dared to speak beyond the boundaries of his discipline. His pioneering work in crystal engineering brought him global recognition, yet what I have admired equally is his willingness to step into the public square, to question established narratives.
There are some issues, where both of us have agreed to disagree, because the views from the windows through which we looked at issues were different but that did not come in the way of our remaining a mutual admiration society.
Dr. Desiraju is an original, bold thinker, never content with easy answers, never afraid to challenge orthodoxy. Over three decades, he has written with the curiosity of a scientist, the passion of a patriot, and the courage of a public intellectual who believes that silence in the face of truth is the greatest betrayal.
The essays gathered here began as spontaneous reactions to events, scientific, political, and geopolitical that shaped India and the world around him. Yet when read together, they reveal something greater: a consistent attempt to connect the dots, to see beyond the obvious, and to anticipate futures that were hard to imagine.
What happens when the rigor of a scientist is applied beyond the laboratory? These pages provide the answer. Predictions, projections, sometimes provocations: each piece is an act of intellectual courage. From his early concerns about the inadequacies of Indian science and education, his reflections evolved into broader questions: Can excellence and equity coexist in our universities?
One knows that there is nothing like intellectual democracy but including the excluded is so important for Bharat. I was a member of the Moily committee on implementation of the new reservation policy in higher educational institutions. I remember on the very first day, I suggested that we must think of balancing 'expansion, inclusion and excellence'. In fact that became the main theme and the title of the report. This challenge still remains though.
Why has Indian science struggled to achieve great heights? What must Bharat do to reclaim its rightful place in the emerging geostrategic order? Dr. Desiraju again and again passionately speaks about the importance of quality over quantity, which I share fully. In my article in Current Science titled "What will it take for Indian science, technology and innovation to make global impact?" I had said "They say that only those people are remembered in science, who say the first word or those who say the last word. How many times have we said the first or the last word? We have invariably looked through windows that others have opened up. When are we going to open up new windows ourselves through which others will start looking?"
This on two This is a book that was almost not written. I was working major book manuscripts in 2024 and 2025. The first was a survey of Indian S&T in the extended time period from 1835 to 2025 in the context of heroes, heartbreaks and hopes, representing respectively the past, present and future of Indian science. The second was a scientific autobiography commissioned by the German Chemical Society in their series 'Lives in Chemistry'. While writing these books I was also thinking about various short pieces and articles that I had written about science and education in India, over the past 30 years, and which, in an indirect way, have served as a background for these longer books.
Interestingly, and since science in India has been related to socio-economic factors, my short pieces started acquiring a political slant after 2015 or so and there was a transition in my writing into political and finally geopolitical areas. Unlike pieces written by social scientists and defence analysts, my articles tried to view these matters through the lens of a scientist, in other words they begin with a hypothesis and go on to formulate a rationalisation or explanation for seemingly unconnected events-connect different dots in a way.
These pieces trace my thoughts on various matters of specific and general interest and, in this sense, form a basis for certain sections of the two major books mentioned above. A chance conversation with Disha Anamika of Garuda Prakashan in June 2025 led to a discussion as to whether or not a book that recounted my thought journey from science to politics and further into geostrategy, through a selection of roughly 40 or so of these short pieces (out of the 120 or so that I actually wrote) with suitable annotations, might be of general interest to the lay reader, independent of the two major science-related books referred to above.
The present book is the outcome of these informal discussions and I thank Garuda Prakashan for joining me in this experiment with a 'different' kind of book. I also thank my enthusiastic coauthors, M. Bharadwaj, D. Bhattacharya, R. Mantri, R. R. Mishra, M. K. Mishra, S. Setty, M. K. Surappa and D. Vashisht who contributed to the writing of some of the selected articles.
Hindu (948)
Agriculture (125)
Ancient (1105)
Archaeology (814)
Architecture (568)
Art & Culture (933)
Biography (731)
Buddhist (550)
Cookery (166)
Emperor & Queen (588)
Islam (245)
Jainism (325)
Literary (888)
Mahatma Gandhi (393)
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