MS Sparsha Venkatesh Bapuji Ketkar: The forgotten genius who looked beyond Neptune, challenged convention and lived largely outside the spotlight What if an Indian schoolteacher, struggling to make ends meet, calculated the possible existence of a planet beyond Neptune nearly two decades before Pluto was discovered? What if he named it Brahma, only for the…
MS Sparsha In 1987, a young engineering graduate approached an artificial intelligence (AI) laboratory in Texas with his résumé. The laboratory turned him down. He offered to work at night. The laboratory said it had no office space. He said he would work wherever he could find a place. This time, they hired him. Three…
MS Sparsha History often celebrates famous scientists, groundbreaking inventions and spectacular discoveries. Yet, some of the most consequential agricultural revolutions begin with an ordinary act of courage — the refusal to discard something whose potential others cannot see. In Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, a Tamil Brahmin scientist named Tiruvadi Sambasiva Venkatraman once refused to let his…
MS Sparsha Long before modern medicine began to celebrate its advances against leprosy, an ancient Indian remedy had already attracted the attention of Western medical science. Its journey from Ayurveda to hospitals across the world is a remarkable story of indigenous knowledge, scientific perseverance and an injustice that left one young chemist’s contribution unrecognised for…
MS Sparsha Dr Rustom Jal Vakil helped bring an ancient Indian remedy for high blood pressure to the attention of modern medicine, exposing a remarkable gap between scientific evidence and its acceptance. In 1949, the medical world was still struggling to find effective ways to control high blood pressure. Yet, in India, doctors had already…
MS Sparsha How Itty Achudan’s botanical wisdom survived three centuries to reclaim its place in history In April 1675, inside a Dutch fort in Cochin, a traditional Indian physician signed a certificate in an old Malayalam script that few people today can read. The document authenticated the botanical knowledge he had shared with a Dutch…
MS Sparsha In 1850, a schoolteacher in Delhi spent his own money to publish a mathematics book. A leading review in Calcutta dismissed it as “cumbersome,” “clumsy,” and almost “schoolboy-like.” Thousands of miles away, however, one of the greatest logicians of the age saw something very different—a work possessing “merit of a peculiar kind.” That…
MS Sparsha When one hears of the Kolar Gold Fields (KGF), the first thought that comes to mind is gold. But buried deep beneath those famous gold mines lies a remarkable chapter in India’s scientific history—a story in which Indian scientists went underground not in search of precious metal, but in pursuit of one of…
MS Sparsha Long before the word “bioenhancer” entered the vocabulary of modern pharmacology, Ayurvedic physicians had been using a simple combination of black pepper, long pepper and ginger to make medicines work more effectively. The combination was known as Trikatu. Its three ingredients—black pepper (Piper nigrum), long pepper (Piper longum) and ginger—were themselves regarded as…
MS Sparsha Some scientists make discoveries. Others build the scientific capability that makes discoveries possible. Professor Erode Subramanian Raja Gopal belonged to the second category—and, in doing so, became one of the important pioneers of experimental condensed-matter physics in Bharat. Known to colleagues simply as ESR, Raja Gopal spent much of his professional life at…
