Science owes a great debt to imagination. Many great inventions
and discoveries would never have come about if some day dreamer
hadn’t imagined it first. Sitting in a classroom, or a
laboratory or under an apple tree, wondering… ‘What if’? Back in
the late eighties when I was still in the single digits, my
father bought me an junior science encyclopaedia and a book
called 101 Science Experiments. Considering that it was the pre-
internet era, I read and re-read those books many times over the
years, eventually learning more from them than I ever did inside
a classroom. Few in our country are lucky enough to have access
to good books and great teachers. Fewer still if you assess the
availability of good books about science in Hindi and other
regional languages, and the state of our schools’ science labs
and computer facilities. When Arvind Gupta, an IIT Kanpur
electric engineering alumnus, quit his job at Telco, his mother
came to his defence stating ‘good, now he will do something
noble with his life’. A proph