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Manish Sisodia, Delhi’s deputy chief minister and education minister, is the visionary instrumental in ushering in evolutionary change in the public school education system. Recounting his experiences and experiments as an education minister, this book offers blow-by-blow account of this amazing success story. Shiksha, a book of hope and possibilities, will inspire everyone who is poised to make a difference in society through education.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

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In Delhi, government schools have brought new hope in the education system by scoring a pass percentage of over 96 per cent this year. This is a great class 12 result. The fact that these are the best results in the last twenty-one years makes this an important landmark. What fills me with pride is that in today’s date, there are many Delhi government schools that are preferred over private schools by parents for their wards. Another feather in our cap is that the admission fee of many big private schools has not increased in the last four years. This is because the government got the accounts of these schools checked and found that they had crores of funds lying in surplus. Education departments from all over the country are now keen to visit Delhi government schools to understand what exactly is happening in this city that has drawn such attention! Not just national but many international delegations are paying Delhi a visit just to understand its education model.

During the days of agitation, in 2010–11, Arvind Kejriwal and I would often wonder why education was not at the centre of politics. Why was it that governments never allotted the requisite amount of money in budgets? Why was education not on anyone’s election agenda? In 2015, when Kejriwal was voted in as the chief minister by Delhi, with AAP getting sixty-seven out of seventy seats, it was our turn to answer these questions. We were now answerable to ourselves and the country’s politics. As soon as he became the chief minister, Kejriwal made it clear to all ministers and officers that education was the topmost agenda of his government. After four and a half years since then, as I write the introduction to this book, I can say with a great deal of happiness that our government has changed the people’s perception.

It is a fact that education has not been in focus in political discourse. The reason for this is that it isn’t easy to focus on education while doing political work.

There are two main reasons for this: One, we lack an organizational system in a big way. Usually, all education related decisions are taken by the education minister or the people in the education ministry or the education directorate. If we go by the prevailing norms, there is no need for them to have an experience in or understanding of education. Any person, whose party is in majority and who has been voted in, can become the education minister; any senior IAS officer can become a director or secretary of education. These three are the principal stewards of education, but neither at the Centre nor at the state level is it important for them to have some experience in or understanding of the sector. In my view, those who understand education do not necessarily have the authority to bring about a positive change, and the ones who take decisions mostly lack the understanding. This is one reason for the current dismal situation in India. The other reason, in my opinion, is that there is no instant gratification when it comes to improving education systems as the hard work yields results later. Today’s politics wants instant results. The public expects quick solutions to issues from its government. In such a situation, it becomes easier to pacify them by constructing roads or flyovers, or to float policies such as pension schemes that make a bit of a difference to the lives of people. There has been a tradition to use popular schemes to woo voters but working on education doesn’t just mean building a school. Improving education also means constantly supervising hundreds and thousands of teachers—to ensure that they spend more time in schools, that they attend training programmes, and to make them more accountable. These are enough to make anyone unpopular among teachers but without these, without their support, without putting them in ‘mission mode’, it is impossible to make any improvements in the education sector. This is probably the reason why previous ministers have not made education the focus of their agenda.

In the last four years, many of my well-wishers have commented that we have been doing great work in the sector of education and the country needs development in this arena the most, but we should also float schemes that will make our politics successful. By this they mean winning elections. The success or failure of politics is in future’s womb but, for now, Delhi is proof that if there is political willingness, the country’s growth vis-à-vis education is possible. The Delhi education model is testament to the fact that with extreme diligence and political willpower government schools can be made like private schools even at a time when their performance across the country is underwhelming. Delhi is also an example of how with political interest and honest governance, the steeply rising fees in private schools can be regulated, which is a major source of concern for a lot of parents.

I am writing this book to document this story of transformation, so that people can appreciate these finer points which have been effective in helping the Delhi government change the face of government schools. It is also to familiarize them with the reason behind these efforts because just getting good results and building great structures do not translate to good education. Education is not merely about creating a society equipped with school and college certificates. Education is more than that, much more.

Shiksha is available now!

The Indian Penal Code (IPC) of 1860 was the first ever codification of offences and penalties in India. Chapter VI of the Indian Penal Code provides for ‘Of Offences against the State’, within which falls Section 124A which lays down the offence of ‘sedition’.

Section 124A was amended for the first time in 1898, and thereafter underwent multiple changes in the years 1937, 1948, 1950, 1951 and 1955. After the amendment of 1955, Section 124A has been left untouched by Parliament, and in its present form reads as under:

Sedition.— Whoever, by words, either spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representation, or otherwise, brings or attempts to bring into hatred or contempt, or excites or attempts to excite disaffection towards, the Government established by law in India, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, to which fine may be added, or with imprisonment which may extend to three years, to which fine may be added, or with fine.

The Great Repression will attempt to tell the story of sedition, and the reasons and desirability of its continued existence. Read to know some facts about the Law of Sedition and its origin in India:

The provision on sedition was based on the Libel Act of 1792 enacted in England, and the law settled after that.

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Sedition was categorized as a class of offences against internal public peace not accompanied by or leading to open violence. In fact, there was no such offence of ‘sedition’ known to English law. Rather than have a single offence called sedition, seditious offences were categorized as seditious words, seditious libels and seditious conspiracies.

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On 25 November 1870, the Legislative Council of the governor general led by Stephen amended the IPC by Act XXVII of 1870 and introduced section 124A, which was a revised version of Clause 113 of the draft penal code.

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The position of the law regarding sedition was consistent until 1942 during the Second World War.

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Even if seditious activity was not directed against the government in explicit language but the inference was necessary by implication, it amounted to sedition under Section 124A.

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Sedition under Section 124A of the IPC continued to be a statutory offence as Article 372 of the Constitution provides that any existing law in force in India as on 26 January 1950 would continue to be in force unless explicitly modified or repealed by the legislature.

The Great Repression by Chitranshul Sinha is a trenchant exposition of the history of the sedition law in India. It makes an exceptionally well-researched and strongly argued case against this antiquated and undemocratic tool of repression.

Did you know that the world’s first eye surgeon, who lived 2500 years ago, came from India?
Or that the standard textbook on medicine-for 600 years!-was written by a self-taught
physician from Persia?
Or that it was a seventeenth-century cloth merchant from Europe who discovered microorganisms?

Discover dozens of ‘No way!’ nuggets like these in this fun, info-packed romp through 2500 years of human health and healing by Roopa Pai. And prepare to be gobsmacked, entertained and inspired by the stories behind some of the most significant medical breakthroughs in history, and the extraordinary men and women behind them.

You don’t need to be a doctor to enjoy this book. Here’s why:

I DON’T WANT TO BE A DOCTOR, WHY SHOULD I READ THIS BOOK?

It isn’t the funnest thing in the world to be ill, of course, but there are always compensations. The biggest, fattest silver lining for us who fall ill in the twenty-first century is, well, exactly that—we’ve fallen ill in the twenty-first century!

No, seriously. If you had lived even as recently as 200 years ago, you might have received some pretty bizarre, and/or very painful, treatments for your condition.

A physician/barber/surgeon (more details given in the box on page xii) may have:

• unleashed a whole army of leeches on you, so that they could suck out your ‘bad blood’ (be warned, this treatment hasn’t fallen entirely out of favour, is reputed to have many benefits and may yet make a big comeback);

• drilled a hole into your skull, via a procedure called trepanning, to ‘let the evil spirits out’ (not even kidding; also, just FYI, to spare you some really scary nightmares, this procedure isn’t life-threatening);

• amputated a limb because it was infected—without using anaesthesia (because an effective mixture for numbing pain that didn’t send the patient into fatal shock hadn’t yet been tested—ouch!) and while using surgical instruments that looked more like medieval torture devices than anything else (maybe that was part of the strategy— patients probably passed out from sheer terror the moment they caught sight of the instrument, thus precluding the need for any other kind of knockout drug);

• wrapped you up like a mummy, plunged you into an ice-cold bath and kept you there for hours at a time to treat your ‘manic episodes’, chained you up and restrained you in a straitjacket for days on end to ‘prevent you from hurting yourself’, or conducted a lobotomy on you (taken out bits of your brain that they believed to be responsible for madness)—all in an effort to cure you of your ‘insanity’, which was believed to be a result of ‘demonic possession’.

Say whaaaa . . .?

Barber surgeon? Yes! In Europe, for a big part of the last given that honour.

But spare those poor physicians a thought. None of them did what did because they were particularly mean or sadistic—all their treatments were done in good faith, and came out of long-held (and as we know now, erroneous) beliefs about what made us ill. Hardly anyone back then understood any aspect of mental illness, and although the treatments have become far more humane now, and great progress has been made, we are still quite some way from truly understanding how—or how much!—the brain is related to the ‘mind’. Physical illness, and how the body worked, was better understood, but treatments were often misguided simply because—get this!—until the 1880s, very few people in the world believed, or even suspected, that it was germs that caused disease!

Astounding as it sounds, so many things that we take for granted today about disease and treatment are very, very new developments in the history of humankind. Medicine is arguably the world’s youngest science, and seen from that perspective, the massive strides it has made towards understanding and healing the human body (and mind) are nothing short of, um, mind-blowing. We are better-nourished, die far less often from infectious diseases and live way longer as a species today, almost entirely because of advances in modern medicine.

Featuring groundbreaking ideas, trivia, factoids, and more, From Leeches to Slug Glue will make you question your notions of what makes a person ‘whole’. And it will fill you with wonder at the innovations, inventions and discoveries that have made-and are continuing to make-the young science of modern medicine.

In a tour-de-force that is both an homage to an immortal work of literature and a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam Du Champ, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, an ageing travelling salesman who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his imaginary son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Woven into Rushdie’s expansive landscape are intriguing characters that inhabit his dizzyingly multidimensional world. Yet, their delusions, desires and aspirations strike a chord as they transcend into the reader’s psyche.

Find out how the characters from Quichotte reflect our own struggles-

Sam DuChamp

Straddling a narrow bridge built over the chasm of race and nationality, Sam Du Champs’ name is as splintered as his identity. His sepia toned memories of Warden Road, Mumbai, where he lived surrounded by the eclectic intelligentsia of the time, filter through the tattered fabric of his existence as a writer within this tale. Will his fortune change?

‘He wasn’t widely known, a situation that was unlikely to be altered by the Quichotte book, if he ever managed to get it written and published. Sam DuChamp, Author of the Five Eyes series, unacclaimed, un- famous, un- rich: when people did ask for a title of his in a store, they pronounced the pen name wrongly, calling him Sam the Sham…’

Quichotte

Driving dangerously on the road in search of the elusive joys of love, Quichotte maps the journey of an immigrant and a yearning father. Perched precariously on the edge of surrealism, will he fall into the abyss?

‘Welcome, my future son!’ he enthused. ‘Welcome to the present. We will woo your mother together. How can she resist being wooed not only by the future father of her children, but by one of those children too?’

Sancho

Born as the shadow of the long lost son of Quichotte’s creator, Sancho miraculously materialises into his physical form. Will his tenuous bond with his father survive the journey they embark on?

‘I’m a teenager imagined by a seventy- year- old man. I guess I have to call him Dad. But here’s the thing. How am I supposed to feel properly what’s the word. Filial. When we just met.’

Miss Salma R

Far from the reach of her admiring salesman, Salma shimmers in the glitz and glamour of her life as a TV star. Will the dark shadows of her early years stall her attempts to fly higher?

‘Maybe her spirit was more adventurous than she knew. Maybe there was something in her that wanted to test itself against the challenges of a wider world. Maybe she doubted her own worth and would not be able to think of herself as valuable if she did not pick up this gauntlet. Maybe she really was a gambler at heart and this was her spinning wheel.’

Sister

Left behind in the forgotten corners of her parental home while her only sibling charts his course in the world, Sister is a storm gathering force. Will she find her way back to ‘Brother’ or is his inherited name an ironical reminder of their broken relationship?

‘Feeling (quite rightly) like the less- loved child, she saw Brother (quite rightly) as the unjustly favoured son, and her rage at her parents expanded like an exploding star to engulf her sibling as well. The rift deepened and by now had lasted a lifetime.’

Teeming with life and energy, these vividly etched characters ride waves that take them out into the unknown. Find out what turn their lives take. Shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2019, Quichotte is a must read! 

One, an abrasive, fire-breathing demagogue, was seen as his uncle’s political heir whose behavioural traits he cultivated. The other, an introvert, is at his best when plotting strategies on the drawing board rather than the rough-and-tumble of street-corner politics that his party is known for in India’s financial capital.

Dhaval Kulkarni’s The Cousins Thackeray evaluates the political careers of Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray.

Read an excerpt from the book:

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They may be first cousins twice over, but their personalities are poles apart.

One is abrasive, a fire-breathing demagogue, who is blunt to the point of being arrogant but remains one of the most popular crowd-puller in Maharashtra despite a string of electoral reverses. The other is introvert, soft-spoken, an enigma for many associates, and with his penchant for boardroom strategies, seems to be out of character with his rough-and-tumble party, which dominates the streets of India’s financial capital, thanks to its muscle.

This, in a nutshell, is a description of the personalities of the two warring Thackerays, Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray and MNS chief Raj Thackeray.

A Shiv Sena loyalist attributes these differing styles to their starting points in politics. For instance, Raj cut his teeth in student politics, which was violent and rough in those days, while Uddhav’s springboard was the party newspaper Saamna. Hence, Raj gradually imbibed Balasaheb’s behavioural style realizing it would be his USP, thus fitting the stereotype of an archetypal Shiv Sainik, whereas Uddhav is more comfortable as a back-room manipulator, diplomat and strategist.

‘Raj is streetwise compared to Uddhav, who is a late bloomer in politics,’ explained the Sena source, who has worked with both brothers. ‘Uddhav was coming of age when the Shiv Sena was launched. Hence, he was seen as the party chief’s son and led a protected life,’ he said.

While Raj connected to his cadre via his aura and charisma, Uddhav had a strong party organization to back him. However, both lacked the ability Bal Thackeray possessed—going beyond one’s immediate circle and connecting with the workers at the grass roots. Being based out of Mumbai, where society is more cosmopolitan, they do not understand the finer points about caste politics that holds the key for any political mobilization in rural areas. This restricts their ability to launch any social engineering projects.

The Sena source said the cousins were also unable to hold on to influential leaders, choosing to rely instead on their close advisers with no real mass base. Uddhav is said to have a healthy distrust for mass leaders within his party. This may be because many of them like Chhagan Bhujbal, Ganesh Naik and Narayan Rane had grown beyond a point and then split from the Shiv Sena. Instead, he relies on people who are more comfortable with office-level politics.

A close associate of Raj Thackeray, who has since fallen out with him explained that the ‘interference’ of some of his advisers and personal friends in the party’s internal affairs, had led to influential party leaders deserting it in cities like Nashik, where the MNS had a strong presence.

‘These people would paratroop from Mumbai and dictate terms to local leaders with a mass following. The inevitable happened with them finally quitting the party,’ he said, adding that a sore point for many in the MNS was that many of Raj’s personal friends, who were not ‘professional politicians’ were calling the shots.Ironically, Raj had blamed the Shiv Sena’s coterie politics for his decision to quit the party.

The Cousins Thackeray examines questions about identity politics, and the social, cultural and economic matrix that catalysed the formation of the Shiv Sena and the MNS from it.

The book is available now.

Kuldip Singh Dhingra, the man credited with building Berger Paints, has remained a mystery. He is low-profile, eschews media and continues to operate from a small office in Delhi. Unstoppable is a candid and captivating biography in which Kuldip reveals his story for the first time.

Let these tips from Unstoppable inspire you to reach new heights just like Kuldip:

Focus on what you want and don’t let anything come in your way

Business is his[Kuldip’s] life, he lives for his business and will not let anyone or anything come in the way.

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Don’t think short term

The thought of getting his father’s business back on track actually excited him. He realized that he had let the present circumstances colour his long-term thinking.   

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Let each individual handle different aspects of business

Kesar Singh’s business was doing well and he wanted his sons to expand beyond Amritsar. However, he did not want all his sons to work in the same business…‘He told his sons to go out individually and expand the business in different cities.

~

Don’t hesitate to expand

Unable to expand their own families, the three eldest sons focused on expanding the geographical reach of their businesses.

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Take the help of professionals

Each son had trusted professionals by his side to help him with the business. This arrangement worked well for them as it allowed them to achieve a work–life balance.

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Sometimes you need to be ruthless to succeed

He[Kuldip] had a good understanding of business. He also had a ruthless streak when it came to business…

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All kinds of experiences are important 

…Kuldip was a man who looked at the facts and took a decision fast. He processed all his thoughts, and came to the conclusion that three months in the life of the business would not mean much and that seeing the world would only widen his perspective.

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See what the market demands 

He had been travelling to Delhi to book orders already… ‘Delhi was a bigger market than Amritsar. I thought, let me go and expand the business there,’ said Kuldip.

Unstoppable narrates what a man can achieve if he pursues his dreams relentlessly. The book is available now.

India’s start-up revolution began in 1998, when the first venture capitalists (VCs) arrived from the US and backed early businesses in IT services for global corporates. The second wave came in 2006 when home-grown VCs raised large amounts of capital and funded products and services companies for Indian consumers.
This is a gripping behind-the-scenes story of a VC’s journey, right from the beginning of the second start-up revolution in India in 2006 until the end of the funding frenzy in 2016. A story about how global conditions, local consumers, founder ambition and good old greed shaped the start-up story in India.
Rahul Chandra is the co-founder of Helion Ventures, and in this candid memoir he tells us about his journey building one of India’s oldest VC firms. In a remarkably gripping account, he recounts his adventures in India’s hyper-funded start-up ecosystem.

The Moonshot Game gives readers an insight into the secret world of a VC, with unguarded stories involving large bets and big mistakes, and tales of how one juggles several investments at the same time.
Rahul shows why being a VC is a constant journey of ups and downs, why building value is a long-term business, and why no amount of failure can be an excuse to lose optimism in the power of entrepreneurship.

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from the book!

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A country with a growing middle class, millions of engineers and thousands of back offices building products for global customers. A new venture capitalist (VC) fund that would work collaboratively with entrepreneurs. Past success in building start-ups. This was our sales pitch to whoever cared to listen in the summer of 2005.

The four co-founders of Helion—Sanjeev Agarwal, Ashish Gupta, Kanwaljit Singh and I—were traversing North America, meeting investors who were intrigued by the unproven but promising land of India. China was also catching the fancy of US investors, and many a delegation had travelled to the large semiconductor plant in Pudong district in Shanghai to experience the country’s potential first-hand. Meanwhile, India had software product teams beginning to build new products out of Bangalore, instead of just following specifications from their US colleagues.
India and its billion people represented a virgin opportunity. Our pitches had borne fruit. Investors with long time horizons had chosen to back us with their capital. Capital that we would deploy in promising start-ups. Capital that would accelerate growth and help build industry leaders. The fundraise culminated rather quickly once our first few investors came in. These investors, known as LPs or ‘limited partners’, were taking a call based on our thesis, team strength and credibility. Overarching all this was their openness to India.

Our maiden fund was ready for deployment in May 2006. We had raised a cool $140 million and were ready to start. In June 2006, we formally opened for business. Ashish Gupta and I moved from Silicon Valley to India.

Ashish moved to Bangalore. He and Kanwaljit Singh would work out of our Bangalore office. Sanjeev Agarwal and I would work out of our Gurgaon office. It had been a month since I moved back to India after spending seven years in Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, and I was just getting re-adjusted to a new way of life. Delhi wasn’t home and
the peculiarities of Delhi life were just revealing themselves to me. It was frustrating to see how people said they were going to do something ‘now’, but that didn’t mean the present. It just meant sometime in the near future, and they called it ‘now’. We would earnestly wait for delivery people, electricians and plumbers to show up and then actually get frustrated over the shoddiness and work ethic. Living in the US had conditioned us to expect predictable outcomes. After returning to Delhi, it took us a few years to change our habit of linking work to a timeline. It would happen, at some time in the future. Letting go of the ‘when?’ question was the path to nirvana.

Read The Moonshot Game to know more!

In the sumptuously imaginative Quichotte, Salman Rushdie’s uniquely textured characters wade through a tumultuous period in America even as they deal with their own dilemmas. Staggering underneath the weight of a ruptured sense of self, struggling writer Sam DuChamp transfers the burden onto his alter ego, Quichotte. Marvelling at the changing world order, Quichotte, wonders, ‘There were no rules any more. And in the Age of Anything- Can- Happen, well, anything could happen’.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work, the fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

Lending a sparkle to the absurdly porous world they inhabit, Rushdie’s characters helplessly collide with the real and imaginary to create bewilderingly humorous moments. Here are 4 such instances:

1. In a hyperbolic leap, Quichotte, feeling the full effects of fatherly love, lays it on a bit thick only to have the unimpressed Sancho prick his flamboyant bubble.

‘Sancho,’ Quichotte cried, full of a happiness he didn’t know how to express. ‘My silly little Sancho, my big tall Sancho, my son, my sidekick, my squire! Hutch to my Starsky, Spock to my Kirk, Scully to my Mulder, BJ to my Hawkeye, Robin to my Batman! Peele to my Key, Stimpy to my Ren, Niles to my Frasier, Arya to my Hound! Peggy to my Don, Jesse to my Walter, Tubbs to my Crockett, I love you! O my warrior Sancho sent by Perseus to help me slay my Medusas and win my Salma’s heart, here you are at last.’

‘Cut it out, “Dad”,’ the imaginary young man rejoined. ‘What’s in all this for me?’

2. Sancho struggles to make sense of his baffling encounter with an insect that not only speaks English but also flaunts its Italian accent.

‘Grillo Parlante at your service,’ said the cricket. ‘It’s true, I’m Italian originally. But  you can call me Jiminy if you want.’

‘This isn’t really happening,’ (Sancho) said.

‘That is correct,’ said the cricket. ‘È proprio vero. I’m a projection of your brain, just in the way that you started out as a projection of his. It seems you may be getting an insula.’

‘A what?’

3. Transitioning from a phantasmagorical desire into an assertive teenager, Sancho alerts his father to his recently acquired physicality  –

‘You’ll have to get me everything. I can’t wear the same thing every day, can I. So, shirts, pants, underpants, socks, sneakers, boots, hoodie, coat, hat. Plus, I’ll need to eat regularly from now on, so we’ll need to get extra food. Also, when we get away from here I’ll need a room of my own, to get away from that steam hammer in your nose.’

4. At the Lake Capote Campsite, a bemused Sancho watches Quichotte huddled over a map trying to chart out their journey to reach his beloved. An Osprey flying overhead delivers its load onto the map and to this, Quichotte joyously exclaims –

‘This is it!’ he cried.

‘This is what?’ (Sancho asked.)

‘The sign. The hunter has guided us, and the hunt is on! We must go immediately where we have been told to go.’

‘This is the sign?’ Sancho demanded with some indignation. ‘My transformation from a figment into a flesh- and- blood person, that’s not the sign? Birdshit is the sign?’

Quichotte is a rollercoaster that’s bound to leave buoyant with delight. Read the book for more of Salman Rushdie’s magic!

We don’t see them on TV, in textbooks or in newspapers, and most of us can’t name a single one. But there are thousands of women scientists in India, who perform experiments in laboratories, peer through powerful telescopes and camp out in harsh and extreme conditions.

31 Fantastic Adventures in Science presents the stories of thirty-one trailblazing women who work in a diverse array of fields, from environmental biotechnology to particle physics, palaeobiology to astrophysics.

Read on for a peek into 6 such stories-

Bushra Ateeq- Cancer biologist

‘She started her scientific journey by studying the damage that occurs in fish DNA on account of the fish being exposed to chemicals used in agricultural fields. The results of her study horrified Bushra. If these chemicals can cause so much damage at the chromosome level, surely they might also be affecting the human body when we consume food and water from toxic environments? she pondered. This was the moment Bushra’s scientific interest shifted from simply studying mutations to studying human diseases like cancer.’

*

Jahnavi Punekar- Palaeontologist

‘The end of the Cretaceous period is especially interesting to her as it marks the demise of the big dinosaurs. What killed so many dinosaurs? Was it the impact of a big meteorite crashing into earth as is popularly believed or was it a ginormous volcanic event that occurred around the same time? Jahnavi is trying to find out.’

*

Uma Ramakrishnan – Molecular ecologist

‘Finding out the whys in nature felt like detective work,’ Uma says. Why do elephants have trunks and why are goats great at climbing mountains? These were fascinating mysteries to the young Uma. Today a molecular ecologist working in Bengaluru, Uma leads the scientific minded bandwagon to save the Indian tiger from extinction. She is a special kind of conservation ecologist. Instead of spotting the animals with hidden cameras, she analyses the genetics of the animals from their poop and hair.’

*

Vidita Vaidya- Neuroscientist

Honoured with the biggest science award, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize,Vidita is ‘trying to figure out which connections in the brain are responsible for the way we feel. Which brain connections are activated when you’re happy or jealous or stressed? Why do identical twins sometimes react differently to the same situations? Why do medicines for depression work for some people and not work for some others?’

*

Hansika Kapoor – Psychologist

‘One of her recent big projects researched negative creativity. ‘Negative creativity is when one uses creativity for a goal that is not considered “good”,’ Hansika explains. One example is finding a new way to cheat in an exam. Hansika set out to find if there was a difference between brain activity when creativity was used for good versus when creativity was used for bad.’

*

Vanita Prasad- Environmental biotechnologist

On a routine visit to a vegetable market, Vanita wondered, ‘What happens to all the vegetables, fruits and flowers that no one buys? Where does all the waste go? Can we make the waste useful?’ Today, Vanita works with an upgraded version of an old technique of breaking down waste to create useful energy which can supplement the needs of a big country like India.

Find out what drew them to science, read about how they deal with the difficulties and pressures of their work, and learn how they push the boundaries of human knowledge further and further every day.

Get your copy of 31 Fantastic Adventures in Science today!

The seemingly random number, 31, is meant to convey a sense of continuity—a tribute to the fact that the scientists featured in this book are only 31 of the thousands of inspirational stories out there.

The men who hunted terrorists in a magical Kashmir forest…a pair of young Navy men who gave their all to save their entire submarine crew…the Air Force commando who wouldn’t sleep until he had avenged his buddies…and many more. In this sequel to India’s Most Fearless, authors Shiv Aroor and Rahul Singh offer the reader a poignant insight into a few such instances.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

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Just after 3.30 a.m. on 26 February 2019, climbing abruptly to 27,000 feet in dark airspace over Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), an Indian Air Force (IAF) pilot flying in a single-seat Mirage 2000 fighter jet pushed a button on his flight-stick. A few feet below him, from the rumbling belly of his aircraft, an Israeli-made bomb silently detached itself and dropped away to begin a journey—first gliding and then careening— towards a target over 70 km away. The bomb, fed with satellite coordinates and an on-board guidance chip, had all the information it needed to hurtle to its destination.

The Mirage 2000 was far from home. It had taken off from the Gwalior air force base over 1000 km away earlier that night along with at least six more Mirage jets from the three squadrons based there. Over the hour the jets flew over central India and into the northern sector. Following in their wake, five more Mirage 2000 jets took off in the darkness from an air base in Punjab.

The dozen Mirages, flying in three separate and unequal formations, weren’t alone in the air. Two airborne early warning jets, an Embraer Netra from the Bathinda air base and a higher performance Phalcon jet from Agra were already in the air, their powerful radars and sensors on full alert to the mission ahead. Communications between aircraft were kept to a minimum. This was a mission with almost no room for deviation unless absolutely necessary. And it needed to last for as little time as possible.

As the three Mirage formations flew in a circuit at low altitude, very much in the manner of night flying training sorties conducted by squadrons, ten jets more roared off the tarmac from two more air bases, including Sukhoi Su-30 MKI fighters from the forward air base at Halwara. It was this pack of Su-30s that would play a crucial role in what came next.

With a total of twenty-two IAF fighters in the air, the jets slowly mixed their formations to create three separate packs— two mixed packs of Mirage 2000 and Su-30 fighters. And a third pack comprised only of Su-30s. While it’s tempting to think of these three packs as neat little jet formations in the sky, it was nothing quite like that. The jets in each pack flew tens of kilometres from each other, and were only bound by a loose common flightpath and mission profile.

Shortly after 3 a.m., the mission began with a pre-planned deception.

The third fighter pack, consisting of big, heavy Su-30 jets, turned south, heading out of Punjab and into the Rajasthan sector, all the while ensuring it remained prominent and visible to Pakistani radars on the other side of the international border. Turning around over Jodhpur, the fighters began provocatively flying in the direction of the international border north of the Chandan firing ranges, their noses pointed towards a Pakistani city that couldn’t possibly have been on a higher alert at the time—Bahawalpur, 250 km to the north, the city that was home to the Jaish-e-Mohammad’s (JEM’s) headquarters and largest terror training facilities. The IAF planners had counted on Pakistan’s ‘hair-trigger’ state of alert to provoke a reaction. It happened within minutes.

The Pakistan Air Force scrambled a group of F-16 jets from the Mushaf air base in Sargodha about 320 km to the north of Bahawalpur. Just as the jets were getting airborne and moving south to fend off any possible attack by the Indian Su-30s, the second IAF pack, comprising Mirage 2000s and Su-30s, broke away from its circuit and turned south over Jammu along a radial pointed towards Sialkot and Lahore in

Pakistan, both large and commercially important cities. This second pack split further, with one part flying along a radial that would pass through Pakistan’s Okara and lead once again to Bahawalpur.

The twin air manoeuvres from two directions doubled the air threat to the ‘capital city’ of the JeM. More F-16s departed Sargodha to engage with this second Indian threat. Pakistan’s instantaneous scrambling of fighters wasn’t surprising to Indian radar controllers and sensor operators on the two airborne early warning jets. The country’s air defences would have been on their highest state of readiness since the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, an act of carnage terrible enough that it got India to seriously consider retaliatory air strikes for the first time.

And now, for twelve days without pause, Pakistan’s military had cranked its alertness levels to maximum.

Eleven days earlier, at 9.30 a.m. on 15 February 2019, the chiefs of the Indian armed forces and intelligence agencies, top ministers and the National Security Advisor arrived at Delhi’s leafy 7, Lok Kalyan Marg compound where the Prime Minister of India lives and sometimes operates from. It was far from a routine weekly meeting for the Prime Minister to take stock of national security.

Eighteen hours earlier, 800 kilometres north, in the Lethapora area of Jammu and Kashmir’s Pulwama district, a vehicle packed with explosives and driven by a young man named Adil Ahmad Dar, had managed to snake between vehicles of a large convoy of Srinagar-bound trucks carrying 2500 troops from the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), and rammed it. The explosion killed forty troops, spattering the highway with their blood and body parts. Minutes after the blast, a stream of pictures of the mangled vehicles and sickening carnage taken from mobile phones of locals and first responders flooded social media.

With the Pakistan-administered JeM terror group claiming responsibility for the attack, the Prime Minister had convened this meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) solely to assess how India could respond. Forty minutes later, the meeting was finished. Asked if air strikes on a terror target were a viable option, IAF Chief Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa responded in the affirmative, also briefing the Cabinet Committee that the country’s jets would be ready to strike with confirmed targets in a matter of days. He was given two weeks.

From 16–20 February, the IAF worked with intelligence agencies at the operations room in Delhi’s Vayu Bhawan. With National Security Advisor Ajit Doval receiving a daily update on proceedings, the deliberations were honed by satellite imagery, human intelligence from the ground in Pakistan and PoK, and photographs from a pair of Heron drones flying daily missions along the Line of Control (LoC).

On 21 February, the IAF presented a classified set of ‘target tables’ to the government via the National Security Advisor. The first in the list of seven separate target options was a JeM terror training compound that sat on a hill called Jabba Top outside the city of Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber- Pakhtunkhwa province. The IAF recommended Balakot, just 100 km from Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, since it was a secluded target with the lowest probability of non-terrorist casualties.

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