Why are there no celebrity scientists called Indian names…

Times of India today has published an article online “God! Why did world forget Boson’s father?” and lamented the fact that the hurrah around Peter Higgs has left Mr. S. N. Bose in oblivion. Of course the article goes on to complain about and even quotes someone who is somebody somewhere saying “I believe it is a deliberate omission” and that “this is not the only such case”. Mr. Pardesi Desi (the guy who lives in my mind commenting on a random variety of oddities) say aloud, very aloud, “so typical!” And I tend to agree on this rare occassion.

We have become so centered around washing West’s laundry (outsourcing, cheap exports, etc.) for foreign exchange to cover our current account deficit that we have lost touch with the fact that India was where zero was invented – that which I believe is the fundamental ground for everything that came afterwards from the study of stars to the concept of time travel and Higg’s Boson somewhere in between. Is seems that about the time of our Independence from colonial rule, we began losing our incredible intellectual drive and have over the past 65 years completely lost all our chops as a nation in terms of intellectual capacity. Every one wants to become a software engineer and run to the US, earn dollars, build a house, buy a car and die rich (or somewhat richer, as the case may be in reality!). I do too! And I am terribly ashamed of it (not that I would have made a brilliant scientist but I did not even try). Such is the addiction of mediocrity!

What is to blame for this terrible paucity of genius in a country that produced many great scientists and literary agents of change. Today we only seem to produce a homogenous crowd of vegetables being processed through an education system that is geared more to filter than educate, a social and cultural value system that is built on a foundation of cliché and an environment that severely punishes curiosity and creativity. Oh, and one other thing we produce amply today are politicians – the new term for the unemployed and hopeless. We have been talking for the last 20 odd years about brain drain and for even longer about the rustiness of our education system. And yet we persist!

We have not produced, in the last 50 years, one scientist or poet with the caliber of S. N. Bose or Tagore! All we have done is lament over why they are not celebrated! Apparently we are a booming economy with immense potential, but if the number of celebrity scientists and literary figures we have produced in any indication, I doubt that what we should read our economic potential as is a nation where talent is cheap and abundant; and there is more where the last ten thousand came from.