On December 4th 2009 I recorded an interview with Ewen Chardronnet. I’d heard that he’d been to space places in Russia.
I want to interview people, artists who I think have pioneered, have gone into space agencies as sort of the first artists. I want to find out what their impressions are because I have […]
On Monday there was a lecture at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore by William D. Phillips, Nobel Laureate called “Time, Einstein and the Coolest Stuff in the Universe”. It was the Vainu Bappu Memorial Lecture, with a huge crowd, a packed auditorium. Why I’m writing about it is that it was like a good […]
Am looking back through books. One page is about the symposium at NIAS ages ago. I had been trying to find the presentation that Shiv Visvanathan gave and I think I’ve found it. It was wonderful, about the imagination of science and the imagination of democracy. Here in England, its truly difficult to get anyone […]
[Shiv Vishwanathan-yesterday at NIAS]
Can we think through a new imagination? What is the imagination of India, what is the imagination of science. What does science stand for in the face of nomadic and marginalised imaginations? Is imagination about conjuring an aura and where do these exist, where are they allowed to exist? What are knowledge […]
This phrase came up this morning.
This evening this poem:
Which Apu reads out in the middle of the film Aparajito by Satyajit Ray .
About a month ago I talked to Sundar Sarukkai at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, to ask his perspective on India’s satellite programme, the “impact of satellites on India is tremendous”. He told me about the first phase of satellite technology, Edusat was an experiment in sending lessons to tv sets in schools, via […]
Trying to remember some things about satellites on the terrace at CEMA with Mouli and Shakti.
Mouli telling me things about India’s satellites.
Shakti telling ,me about what he learned at school about satellites and India’s space programme. Me saying why I do this and Shakti talking about the village where he’s from, where there are no […]
An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire by Arundhati Roy, only available in the Indian Subcontinent, it says. This I like, its hugely angry, I read it in the afternoons, it tells me about the violence of States like America, India and Great Britain towards their own people and other nations.
“The only way to make democracy […]
Mr Sharma was the first Indian person in space. He went up in a Soyuz T-11 on 2 April 1984 with two Russian cosmonauts to board the Salyut 7 Space Station. He stayed there for eight days conducting experiments, significantly, imaging the Indian continent and providing the base data for India’s current advanced remote sensing […]
There has been much hyperbole recently about the direction NASA is taking under the current administration. The media has presented the decimation of science projects in favour of a new age of exploration - more flags and footprints! Space is viewed myopically as a fighting ground between Science and Exploration. Nothing could be further from […]
You are currently browsing the archives for the rhetoric category.
