Month: October 2018

Despite the arrest of one more person last week in connection with the August 20, 2013 killing of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, questions remain about the manner in which the case

The Bombay high court criticised the central and state agencies probing the killings of rationalists Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, chiding the slow progress despite the country being in a

Aurangabad/Mumbai:Former Shiv Sena corporator Shrikant Pangarkar was arrested by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) on Sunday in connection with the seizure of crude bombs and weapons from different parts of

As similarities between the murders of rationalist Narendra Dabholkar, Communist leader Govind Pansare in Maharashtra, progressive thinker M.M. Kalburgi in Karnataka, and Tuesdays murder of journalist Gauri Lankesh are being

Exactly five years ago, on August 20, 2013, Narendra Dabholkar, Maharashtras best known and most vocal anti-superstition activist and rationalist, was shot dead in Pune. In February 2015, Govind Pansare,

Two apparently unrelated yet deeply interconnected events of July invite serious reflection. One belongs to an unending story of crime, the other a not-so-interesting bureaucratic muddle. One will continue to

A studypublished in the journalNeuropsychologiahas shown that religious fundamentalism is, in part, the result of a functional impairment in a brain region known as the prefrontal cortex. The findings suggest

The All Pervading Superstition Our country is steeped in superstition. We imbibe too many dos and donts since our childhood, almost all of them irrational and we are not even

On Friday, after unusually intense rainfall caused Kerala to be inundated by worst floods it had experienced in a century, a tweet by newly appointed Reserve Bank of India board

A ping on my phone told me that I had been added to the NSTD Mumbai Whatsapp group. NSTD? National Scientific Temper Day, 20 August, as I soon figured out.

Thousands of scientists, academics and students staged a March for Science in August 2017 and April 2018 all over India. Inspired by a global movement, these marches were also a

Should the Indian media pay as much attention as it does to our politicians pseudoscientific claims?The Printhad posed this question to me recently making an apparent reference to the debate

Today, there is a crisis of trust in science. Many people including politicians and, yes, even presidents publicly express doubts about the validity of scientific findings. Meanwhile, scientific institutions andjournalsexpress

Imagine an intelligent bat contemplating the mind-body problem, name of Tim Nigel. TimNigel has noticed that humans have an auditory sense not possessed by bats (of his species): they can