Why India “may not” win a Nobel in Science ever!

We Indians anyway have EGO in many things, from buying a TV to Car to going for specific schools to calling oneself IITian. Now when we add being a scientist who has contributed n terms of papers under Govt funding, he/she quite often thinks (leaving few exceptions) that he/she is so important that his fellow professionals are lesser souls. So petty thinking on such issues is natural, though you might call irrational; in fact it's being UNREASONABLE.

To win a Nobel there has to be lot of other things than Science. I see westerners work in Collaboration from inter-department within a University/Research Institute to across borders. Indian scientists on the other hand might not do it with their neighboring scientist of the same department on the same floor. The only time they come together is during the 4 p.m. tea time, where in the name of scientific reckoning a show off is made of their skills with no absolute base on the discussion; these discussions are more of criticism and demeaning to others' work than brainstorming.

Secondly, science and technology are not cousins of each other as portrayed in India. In India we separate individuals right after XII Std. You will hardly find Science and Engineering in same campuses of a College or Univ, and even though IITs have them, there is stark difference in the intermingling of the students. 1 in 1000 might opt for Science with a top JEE rank. Most low rankers are Science laborers and mostly opt because it's "IIT". So the ranking makes the look-down-upon attitude over there. When the same is progressed professionally, it is reversed in R & D. In Indian R & D orgs, scientists think Engineers are either someone who can fix their turbo-machine for the evacuated systems of their experiments or someone who does not understand science (my personal experience), more precisely who cannot decode equations(physics) or balance reactions (chemistry) or know nothing about making a slide(biology) or has no aesthetic sense of equations(maths). It is this attitude that ruins the possibility of collaborative and creative work.

The world's largest exprimental facility, Large Hadron Collider, cannot exist without science or cannot be built without engineering. GMRT would not exist if there was no science or engineering. Science and Engineering are two sides of the same coin. It is such attitude brings about great science and thus NOBEL Prize, at least in today's times. Do we really think like that? Do we really teach our kids that way? Everyday I feel the assualt of not being from IIT or not unravelling a Perturbation Theory. If I build a data-acquisition system for a large chemical process, I am being looked nothing more than an electrician who fixes the table fan. Apparently engineering is also nothing more than a "trade-school". Our brahminic culture (irrespective of you being brahman or not), makes Engineers as well as other think that working with tools is "blue-collar job". Hence the world's toughest engineering entrance exam, IIT JEE tests you on theoretical foundation and thus the coaching classes guide you in solving problems. No one has any idea about a Simple Pendulum or Double Pendulum and his behavior in reality if it were damped, though they might have solved theoretical problems of those. This is also the reason, IITians & other engineers pursue anything but engineering in their job prospects and closest engineering is where it requires theoretical involvement. We Indians are the only advanced society than the West, where we knew about Universe - multiverses etc(long before the era of String Theory) without inventing Telescope. We realize science only in equations. We are proud of it. We hate entering science labs, working late nights, toiling oneself to make a machine work. I have worked in handful of top organizations in IT as well as Govt orgs and I am annoyed by the fact that not a single Indian company manufactures Raman Spectroscopy Machine, though CV Raman discovered it in India. Who is to be blamed? System? People? All I know is we can but we don’t and hence we aren’t able to.

I always say one simple thing to my students, "On should not take theory literally, which is what our system makes us do. To give an illustration, if two negatives make one positive, does it mean, if we connect two negatives of batteries, it will give positive voltage?"

When they smirk, they realize the importance of my message!