Scientific Temper

A NEAT GRID OF TUBES, burettes, beakers and flasks sits on a low table, clamped to steel supports and connect­ed by snaking pipes, all tinged a lovely turquoise—the kind of blue that puts you in mind of an exotic beach. Some of the flasks hold murky liquids that, upon closer examination, turn out to be kombucha and not, as the appara­tus suggests, some hazardous laboratory chemical. Which im­mediately leads you to wonder: is brewing a science or an art? How does kombucha get its fizz and its vinegary tang? And why should this installation be on display at Science Gallery, a new space in north Bengaluru for public engagement with scientific research? The exhibit is an attempt to awaken curiosity as well as to draw attention to Bengaluru’s long history of brewing, begin­ning with the establishment of Castle Breweries in 1857. On a Saturday evening in September, amidst a steady trickle of visitors to the gallery, a family of three—mom, dad and a preteen girl—is presently sampling some of the kombucha, presented at various stages of fermentation, at the tasting station next to the exhibit and recording their observations in the logbook that documents individual interpretations of the brew. It is likely their first time interacting with science in this dramatic and exciting fashion, and yet, fermentation is the science of their everyday lives.

A provocative new exhibition at Science Gallery, which declares Bengaluru to be the ‘new science city’ of India, not only unpacks the city’s sustained relationship with science and engineering, but also explores the many ways in which science becomes culture. “Bengaluru is India’s most recognised military-industrial-academ­ic complex today. Sci560 is one way to question why that may be so,” reads the introductory note in the main hall. Spread over a number of rooms, the exhibits explore little-known aspects of the city’s scientific history—the manufacture of telephones at Indian Telephone Industries’ first ever plant in 1948, Bharat Electronics Limited’s vacuum tubes, used in a restored short wave radio you can actually tune in to, an altitude and azimuth instrument used in the Great Trigonometric Survey of India that mapped the entire subcontinent using the geometry of triangles, with the first baseline established by William Lambton in Bangalore in 1800—between Agara and Ramamurthy Nagar—and a ‘democracy console’, with an Electronic Voting Machine (EVM) manufactured by city-based PSUs juxtaposed with an old ballot box.

“When you see the Bangalore Torpedo [filmmaker Surekha’s 2016 short film on the explosive charge devised in the city in 1912 is part of the exhibition], you may be able to go back in history and imagine Tipu’s rockets which were the first known use of ballistics in warfare globally. The objects then speak to the past but also to the future—it is not that massive a jump to the Indian space programme, of which this city is a critical part. By associa­tion, I think such exhibits allow us to tell a story of why Benga­luru is interesting and why Bengaluru has been interesting, as far as science is concerned,” says Jahnavi Phalkey, the director of Science Gallery Bengaluru and a historian of science. “Bengaluru is a city where new science and new engineering have met indus­try. The exhibition is not a comprehensive narrative. It is a com­ing together of self-selections by institutions in the city—from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the National Centre for Biological Sciences to Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and Bharat Electronics Limited. Taken together, they give you a sense of the kind of entanglements the city has seen between industry, mili­tary, academia and the economy,” she says. In her office on the second floor, tucked behind an unmarked door, we talk about the ‘openness’ that is palpable in the city. There is remarkably less gatekeeping around anything, including research and funding, Phalkey says. “When we invited the state minister for science for the inaugural of our building early this year, they gave us a corpus without us asking for it, and also increased our operational bud­get. I have worked with three state governments and every one of them has been extremely supportive of what we are trying to do.”

Science Gallery was started in Bengaluru because the city has “the energy, the resources, the people and the goodwill” needed to navigate the creation of a new idea at scale, she says. The idea of using science and technology as a powerful lens to shape our read­ings of the city resounded with Biocon founder Kiran Mazumdar- Shaw, Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan and philanthro­pist Rohini Nilekani, who came together to contribute `51 crore to Science Gallery, building on foundational support by the state government and its three primary academic partners: the Indian Institute of Science, NCBS and the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology. Nilekani had in fact agreed to support three itera­tions of a bi-annual science festival that Phalkey, Mukund Thattai, a biophysicist at NCBS, and Rajesh Gopakumar, director of the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS) were hatch­ing before Covid struck. “It was going to be a five-day festival along the lines of the New York Science Festival, with live experiments, experiential exhibitions, workshops and talks. The dream was to create a JLF for science,” says Phalkey. And it may yet come to pass. “Frankly, if anywhere, it should be here, in Bengaluru.”

There is no better way to bring science back into culture than by breaking barriers between disciplines and showcasing science as being anything but insular. Science Gallery wants to do just this, with help from not just academia and research institutions but also from city-based galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAM) that have formed a tight-knit yet informal network—they even have a WhatsApp group—to mutually share resources and ideas. So, at Science Gallery, you see photographs from the Museum of Art and Photography. You can even hear the beat of a tabla from the Indian Music Experience Museum. “The National Gallery of Modern Art and Government Museum are in talks with us to explore collabora­tions. Such connections seem to form naturally in Bengaluru. You might have the best idea in the world but if you landed like a UFO in the middle of nowhere, it’s not going to function,” says Phalkey.

“Science is part of Bengaluru’s identity,” says Kiran Mazumdar- Shaw. “The city chose to focus on and invest in science early on. Starting with IISc, we have had a growing ecosystem of institutions that the city has nurtured—NCBS, the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, and others. When the vision group on biotechnology wanted to set up a Centre for Human Genetics, the government readily embraced the idea and created it,” she says. Government and industry are two big reasons why science and engineering flourish in the city, she says. “We have an ethos of successfully taking research ideas to the market. Take the example of Vijay Chandru, the first academician in biotechnology to set up a company, Strand Lifesciences. Take the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms (C-CAMP)—it is the first case in the country of an academic institution creating a successful incubator. And now a lot of startups in the city are doing crucial research.”

Indeed, Bengaluru ranks seventh in a list of top 10 AI hubs in 2024 published by Linkee AI. AI hubs are cities that have heavily invested in AI, generating a large number of jobs. When it came to AI research facilties, Bengaluru, along with Berlin, topped the list with the highest number of institutions. In the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2024 released by the Government of India earlier this year, IISc Bengaluru was ranked the best research institute, followed by IIT Madras and IIT Delhi. And yet, despite such reminders, we tend to forget what makes Bengaluru, with its century-old tradition of science, its PSUs and its tech revolution, unique, not just in India but potentially any­where in the world, says Mukund Thattai. “That science is part of our history and our present has not seeped into the city’s cultural consciousness. The idea behind the science festival was to make this visceral—to give people a chance to touch and feel and walk through experiments in astronomy, health, biology.”

While the intellectual ferment in Bengaluru ensures that the city attracts the best scientific talent, outreach usually in the ser­vice of institutions, cannot guarantee true public engagement, says Thattai. “But asking people what they think and incorpo­rating that in our practice is not easy to do. At NCBS, we have had many art-science engagements where we gave artists, play­wrights, etc, access to our campus and our work and let them form an opinion. Their works were then displayed and the public got to see science through the artists, who themselves are representa­tives of the public. This is an uncomfortable space for institutions to be in.” In 2007-08, Thattai collaborated with Yashas Shetty, a conceptual artist, to generate a bacterium that mimicked the smell of wet earth during rain and the work was displayed at Sci­ence Gallery Dublin. The following year, he modified a common laboratory organism, C. elegans, to make it change tracks. “The idea was to provoke people into asking—what is the justification for genetic modification?” he says. Efforts to popularise science generally address children because the last time most people encountered science was at school, Thattai says. Spaces like Sci­ence Gallery and the Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium, which have lectures and programming for adults and effective science com­munication led by institutions, are attempting to change this.

To be sure, there is a lot of prodigious science talent in Benga­luru and efforts are on to provide direction to such children. “Just like Chennai has become a hub for chess, we want to create a hub for science and maths talent in Bengaluru by giving them a place to gather and to be mentored,” says Rajesh Gopakumar, director of ICTS. Outreach is one of the mandates of the institution and it organises monthly lectures—on everything from black holes to the vagaries of the monsoon—that are streamed on its YouTube channel, which has over 63,000 followers. One of the failings of our science community, he says, is its inability to leverage impor­tant pop culture moments that were made possible by science— be it Chandrayaan’s soft landing on the southern polar region of the moon or the production of Covid vaccines in the country.

A study by the Raman Research Institute (RRI) predicts that India, which spends too little on R&D, will surpass the US in the number of annual scientific publications by 2029. Analysing sci­entific publications from 50 countries between 1996 and 2020, the study uses statistical tools to forecast future trends. Much of this research output is likely to come from Bengaluru, with IISc, per­haps India’s most prolific research institution, continuing to lead the way. How the larger public gets to engage with this work—not all of which is meant to be productised—will determine popular attitudes towards science news and education in the years to come. “Science is alive and thriving in Bengaluru. I see this when we con­duct programmes for children and when 60-70 adults come in the evenings, post-monsoon, to spend the whole night at the planetari­um,” says BR Guruprasad, director, Jawaharlal Nehru Planetarium. Guruprasad is a passionate science communicator, having written and broadcast for 42 years, including at the Indian Space Research Organisation. One of the brightest moments of his career, he says, was to commentate live, in Kannada and in English, from ISRO when India’s moon mission touched down on the lunar south pole.

Around the world, people are increasingly connecting with the science in their lives, whether it is taking a scientific approach to cooking, taking up indoor gardening or understanding their own bodies. There is a lot of information on the internet but facts, as Phalkey points out, do not change our minds—experiences do. And Bengaluru has never offered as many science-filled experi­ences as it does today—from galleries that showcase art inspired by science and open days at research institutes to public lectures, film screenings and workshops on everything from hydrology to sustainable architecture. The city is also home to one of the best archives chronicling the history of science in contemporary India. The archives at NCBS, which came into being in 2019, have grown into a large and rambling collection of about 2.5 lakh archival ob­jects from over 30 collections in different languages, represent­ing 120 years of the history of science. “We have some invaluable material—for instance, the papers of KS Krishnan, the physicist who did not get to share the Nobel with CV Raman despite having contributed to the work. Luckily, the family brought them over to us,” says LS Shashidhara, director, NCBS. Shashidhara is also working on building a digital museum of science in contemporary India—a project that, for him, inevitably begins with Bengaluru.

Last week, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah launched an ambitious 5,800-acre Knowledge, Wellbeing and Innovation City (KWIN) City on the outskirts of Bengaluru “to serve as an engine for growth, fostering cutting-edge research, nurturing talent, and creating opportunities across sectors like healthcare, biotechnology, AI, and advanced manufacturing” and to cement “Bengaluru’s reputation as a global leader in critical sectors.” In­vesting in science does pay off—especially, if it is in Bengaluru.

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