What does science in India feel like?

As a science journalist whose medium of choice is text (“text is king”), the very first sense of what I am going to write about in a science article is often an emotion in my head. A feeling. Sure, science’s identity is most pronounced in its own mathematics — research budgets, publishing indices, the many, many measurements, the calculations, and so on. It bears a certain finitude, a measure of certainty: even when the answer is beyond its grasp, it has a method, its thresholds, their attendant confidence limits and error rates. However, that is not where the stories really are. (I also would not go so far as to say the stories are always only in its people.) Science, from the point of view of a journalist, is also a mood, so to speak, that society carries about what it believes science is for. And this is not some nebulous, evasive thing. The Welsh thinker Raymond Williams called it “a structure of feeling”. Unlike ideologies, which are written into party programmes and defended if…