Do you remember calling in sick to work one day because you didn’t have the energy to wake up and go to the lab, or because you were feeling anxious, depressed or restless, and then coming up with a different ‘reason’ for it afterwards? This is not uncommon and almost all of us have done something similar at one point or another.

It’s a common observation that a person suffering from mental health-related issues often prefers to suppress these issues instead of seeking help. A whole community of people looking calm and composed on the surface but paddling furiously beneath to stay afloat is what defines ‘the culture of silence’. Being silent about mental illness in academia (and in general) is one of the leading causes of us not faithfully addressing the issue. Hence, it is important to understand the origins of this culture and why it is so pervasive.

Why does the culture of silence exist?

Multiple concerns, both societal and personal, keep us from acknowledging and speaking about our mental health. The whole idea that mental health disorders are not similar to regular physical ailments and suffering from them is not okay, or that they are a sign of weakness, allows us to brush the conversation under the carpet. Our limited understanding of mental health issues, for e.g. the boundaries between regular sadness and clinical depression, or between day-to-day worrying and generalized anxiety, leads to decisions made in ignorance. If someone luckily does recognize that they are facing difficulties related to their mental health, they are stumped by the questions of where to go and whom to trust. The stigma and embarrassment associated overpower the suffering.

Academia serves as a breeding ground for the culture of silence despite the fact that people here are likely more susceptible to be suffering from mental ailments as compared to society in general. A large part of this non-acceptance comes from the fact that the immediate surroundings, in most cases, do not give equal importance to mental and physical illnesses. Suffering from regular panic attacks, breakdowns, and severe impostor syndrome is often considered normal and a standard part of a research career. Hence, one is asked to “just deal with it” or “get over it”.

Because of the pervasive idea that “everybody goes through it” and “the nature of the work demands it”, people in academia tend not to discuss their mental health struggles with the people around them. Setting extraordinarily high, rigid and narrow expectations from oneself and others lets most people believe that until certain very clear lines are crossed, one should not seek support. The constant struggle to maintain the image of a dedicated, satisfied and happy researcher leads many of us to suffer in silence.

Another factor that promotes silence in academic environments is the possibility of negative repercussions upon opening up. Many fear that their work would not be taken seriously, or that peers would not understand, or that they would be accused of ingratitude, or that others would feel uncomfortable to be around them.

What does this silence lead to?

Being silent about mental health disorders leads to a lack of visibility and false perceptions about one being alone in experiencing mental health problems. A dearth of honest communication heightens feelings of isolation, worsening the illness and amplifying the internal crisis. The illness is further exacerbated due to the patient’s reluctance to seek help.

We also need to understand that the cost of silent suffering extends far beyond the sufferer. The persons’ capacity to contribute positively to their environment deteriorates, relationships with family, friends and colleagues are negatively affected, and the upshot of this is an overall unhealthy atmosphere surrounding the sufferer.

What can be done to combat silence?

In order to break the culture of silence, building an environment that is open to honest dialogue is the first step. The effort has to be made at an individual, peer, institutional, and policy level.

At an individual level, talking about mental health issues can help us figure out the next step forward and take action on improving the situation. Depending upon the severity of the condition, simple breathing techniques, exercise or yoga may help some, while others may need extensive therapy or medication. But one can only figure out which end of the spectrum they are on if they actively open up about what they are feeling.

An important question here is who to speak to? Family members and good friends can often be the first choice. However, many times this may not be possible due to circumstances or a lack of knowledge/understanding on the part of one’s loved ones. It is, therefore, a good idea to identify people at your workplace whom you can talk to freely. Talking to peers at an individual level does two things – (1) makes one feel better and lighter, (2) many times the listener might also end up sharing their own experiences making one realize and accept that they are not alone in this. This has a much more profound effect than simply saying that mental health issues are very common these days. Also, one might also end up learning about some practical solutions to common problems.

Immediate surroundings, especially peers and workplace, play an important role in encouraging one to open up. Listening without judging and treating sufferers normally afterwards breaks down many such barriers. Making it clear that self-disclosure will not lead to persecution but admiration can help in normalizing the discussion. Talks, where faculty members open up about their experiences with mental health, can also help in building a more receptive environment promoting students to look into similar signs and seek help if they are suffering. Such discussions can also raise awareness among people who have never suffered from any mental illnesses. This can help them understand that if someone complains, there might be some underlying issue that needs attention.

Principal Investigators (PIs) should take mental health seriously and be trained to identify academic and personal crises appropriately so that in cases where students are not opening up, they can initiate the discussion. Initiatives like Time to Talk can also help us break the culture of silence.

Another major roadblock in opening up about mental health issues and seeking help is the lack of affordable and approachable therapists. For addressing counselling needs, fast-responding medical systems need to be developed. Academic organizations need to bridge the gap between the mere existence of resources and their proactive usage.

At a wider public level, discussions and debates to put physical and mental first aid on equal footing are necessary. This does not mean that stress or depression can be eradicated completely from academia. It is normal for us as human beings. But we need to learn to address and handle it. By ensuring that the discourse on mental health is free and open, discussions leading to policy changes can be promoted, ultimately leading to acknowledgement and protection for those suffering.

Lastly, this article was born out of the fact that someone had the courage to break the silence and said, “I suffered from it, I know how it feels, and there is help available.”

Previous articles in the Mental Health Series:

• You don’t have to be ​‘crazy’ to be doing a PhD!
  
• Wake up academia, it’s a brand new mental health patient
• Sowing the seeds of a long-term mental health study in an Indian population

Do you agree with the opinions expressed in this article? Please let us know in the comments below

I am currently graduating out of TIFR within my tenure, and I am a high-functioning depression patient.

If the two statements sound contradictory, academia needs to wake up.

I had heard of the terms 'depression', 'bipolar disorder', 'maniac', etc., but never really bothered understanding them until about a year back when a friend confessed to me about the reasons she dropped out of a prestigious graduate school: she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I read up on borderline personality disorder for the first time when my partner was diagnosed with it. Later I went through a phase that was diagnosed as depression. Only then did I really start understanding the dynamics of it all.

In the days following the diagnosis and while slowly getting better, I came out to people about my existing condition. I have received support from people in my department, including my advisor. While it has taken me a lot of time to tell my parents about it, nowadays I can say with a smiling face that I am a depression patient. The reasons are the following:

• I do not want people to feel like this is a taboo subject.
• People need to realise that the brain is just another organ, and it can occasionally malfunction.
• A person who is going through (a) mental health-related problem(s) looks just like any other person.

Not everyone needs to go through or experience mental illnesses personally to know about them. We can learn from others and we must have enough awareness and sensitivity to be able to help and support those facing mental health-related challenges, rather than adding to the problem or being apathetic. In general, academicians still hesitate to openly talk about mental health problems. Conversations around the subject often have a hush-hush tone, and there is a tendency to misinterpret facts.

There is still fear amongst many academics about coming out to their peers. Sometimes the reason is that their peers have unintentionally played a part in their situation, and sometimes it is the fear of being shamed behind their backs. I notice not only a lack of awareness, but also a lack of awareness about this lack of awareness. This is a dangerous situation, and academia cannot afford it for its own good.

Why? Because academia runs on the brain, and it cannot take problems with the brain lightly.

So, what can it do?

1. Make it mandatory for everyone in research institutes and universities to attend mental health awareness sessions. Get experienced people to talk about the issues.

When an academic openly admits their condition, they stand a chance to lose their academic position. First of all, that will not help their situation. Secondly, the number of academics who are going through some kind of mental health problem— anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and depression topping the list— is significant. Therefore, instead of looking down on the problem, academia needs to wake up and solve the problem at its root. Here is where awareness comes in.

Mental health-related problems are often not diagnosed simply because the symptoms are ignored. Many of these symptoms (insomnia, lack of motivation to work, emotional responses to academic failures) have become normalised or even expected in academia. When diagnosed, people don’t feel comfortable talking about their condition with people around them, even coming up with excuses to explain their physical absence in official venues. Why cannot people openly admit to it and not feel alienated, when the reality is that a good fraction of academics is facing similar problems? Academia cannot afford to continue like this. Instead of a culture of silence, acceptance, and shame, we should promote a culture of prevention and support.

I have seen a small number of academics being receptive about the issues— when I have explained the details, they have been willing to learn. This is a positive sign, and we need to take this forward. We need to have more open seminars, give people who are willing to talk a platform to open up about their experiences. We need to accept that the brain can malfunction and that help and treatment are available. Most importantly, such malfunctions can be prevented by detecting the symptoms at an early stage, which can be ensured by raising awareness in the community.

2. Set up mental health facilities which are staffed by professionals.

The best help is offered by professional psychiatrists, therapists, or psychotherapists. The more difficult part of the problem is getting the patient to the right professional. Psychopathologies are complex disorders and not generic diseases, so the treatments can be subjective, even the most expert professionals may not be able to treat a case accurately in the very beginning. Counselling requires the therapist to click with the patient, which can sometimes take a few sessions despite the best efforts.

On the other hand, the available professionals are in high demand because of their small number compared to the number of people in need, and hence availing their services tends to be expensive. What academia can do is to arrange a system where on-campus doctors can refer individuals suspected of mental disorders to a reliable expert and reimburse the consultation fees (at least partially). Currently, such a system is missing in many universities and research institutes in India.

3. Set up a small first point-of-contact group of people in each institute or university who can be approached whenever a person feels the need to talk.

Quite often, academics go through problems that can be treated in their nascent stages, with the right kind of reception and guidance. If the symptoms are identified early and a helping hand extended, this can sometimes prevent the need for extensive medication later on. However, it is often difficult to talk about our problems with people we see regularly.

For example, when I first realised something was wrong, I had approached a friend who stays in a different city instead of my advisor. Although my advisor was supportive and told me all the right things on being informed post-diagnosis, I doubt whether he would be able to guide me pre-diagnosis as well as my distant friend. And this is not a statement about him, it is a statement about human interaction. Humans naturally find it easier to open up to people with whom they do not interact with on a daily basis.

This is where a committee of a few people, constituted by aware, responsible students, postdocs, or young faculty members, will be massively useful. Their personal contact details can be made available so that they can be approached in states of emergencies when immediate help from professionals might not be available. These individuals can help salvage the situation when the times are really dark, and lower the risk of a person taking drastic steps to combat their pain.

Lastly, this is a personal appeal to academics— please treat humans with care, including yourself. What you say to others even casually can affect them, how you treat them even in a small interaction can shake them. While pursuing a profession that requires exercising the brain, we cannot afford to be unreceptive to human interaction. Let us all grow together, not pull each other down.

If you are interested in my personal experiences with depression and the lessons learnt from them, I have written about them here: I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends and Relapse.

Do you agree with the views expressed in this article? Please let us know in the comments below.

How many times have you heard “A PhD student has no weekends or holidays”, “PhDs are half-mad”, “I am a PhD student, so stress is my middle name” or something similar? Chances are, more than you can count on your fingers. For too long now, chronic stress, sleeplessness, anxiety, burnout, and depressive tendencies have been conflated with ‘normal’ features of the life of a PhD student. You’ll find it everywhere. From academic circles to popular culture features such as memes, the concept of a distressed PhD student is pervasive.

So deeply entrenched is this notion in our collective psyche that even as students we tend to believe that lack of mental well-being is just an excuse for lack of productivity at work. And what could be a louder warning bell than victims blaming and shaming themselves?

Where do we go wrong?

The transition from a college degree to a PhD is quite a leap. While working on short-term projects during college ensures to some degree that the student is not completely naïve about the nature of research, there is still a stiff learning curve when they actually enter academia.

The beginning often has a dreamlike quality, the desire to become a ‘doctor’ finally taking shape. But what follows can be overwhelming. Late nights in the lab, missed deadlines, negative results, rejection of proposals, ‘publish or perish’ phenomenon etc. can take a toll on one’s mental health.

Should then “but this is how academia is!” be the solution? The answer is a resounding NO.

Expectation management is a concept in business psychology, where working on your expectations leads to better productivity. It can work well when it comes to ensuring a graduate student’s well-being as well. So, you finally have little to no classes or exams and a focused and independent project. Great! But, this also means you are pretty much working out a new path on your own (not undermining the role of peers and collaborators), with a lot of power vested in the single person who supervises you. The way we are taught how to learn during school and college is turned on its head, and knowing what to expect out of this can go a long way in ensuring your mental well-being doesn’t go for a toss.

Do we mean to say that the student’s mindset is all that matters, and absolve others of all responsibility? Again, no. When it comes to managing expectations, a student looks up to his/her seniors and the supervisor. An honest orientation to the paradigm shift in learning and work culture rather than ‘this is how it is’ would do wonders. A supervisor managing his or her own expectations is not any less imperative. Having gone through the same grind, it should be easier for a guide to empathise with the student than vice versa. This empathy, when put to good use, ensures the student doesn’t bow down under the pressure of unrealistic expectations thinking it is normal.

Dr Sachin Mangla, a consultant neuropsychiatrist in Faridabad, believes that a student shouldn't take episodes of persistent stress, depression and anxiety as normal in a PhD or any other academic course. Research supervisors should remember that just like no two PhDs are the same nor the students getting them, the same rulebook cannot be used to guide every student, nor can the same yardstick be used to judge them.

How do we deal with it?

What do we do when a student comes up with a mental health concern? Often our response is to say “But that other person dealt with much worse!” When we do this, we are almost glorifying lack of well-being. Sure, pursuing a PhD is a test of resilience in the face of unpredictable hurdles. But, in the words of scientist and outreach and engagement specialist Kathryn R. Wedemeyer-Strombel, “Graduate school should be challenging — but it shouldn’t be traumatizing.”

If we tell students that their mental health concern might just be a cover for their inability to keep up with demands of academic research, we undermine the courage it takes to voice the concern. Whether we romanticize or stigmatise the concern, the eventual outcome is the hushing up of what might be the warning signs of a legitimate medical condition.

What’s a good solution then? Thankfully, there’s more than just one. While on-campus or referral-based counselling for distressed students is a practical measure, it serves little purpose if the community isn’t sensitised enough about the need. We, the members of academia, need to first learn how to draw a line between “productivity” and burnout, enthusiasm and toxic work culture, and “inefficiency” and a possible mental health issue. Until these false analogies are put to rest, all other measures are bound to fail.

At the Translational Health Science and Technology Institute, Faridabad, we have monthly mental health counselling sessions with Dr Sachin Mangla. He is of the strong opinion that to care for his/her mental health, a PhD student should spend quality time with friends, pursue hobbies, avoid junk foods and excessive sugar, and avoid isolation. To put it simply, don’t forget that you have a life beyond the lab.

Again, is it just the concerned student’s responsibility? Yet again, the answer is no. Sensitising the supervisors and administrators is equally, if not more, important. It is during PhD that the life of a student undergoes many shifts, not just on the professional, but on the personal front as well. They face a number of societal pressures such as gaining financial independence and ‘settling down’. Factoring in these helps the supervisors as well since a strong research ethic without an empathetic work culture can only deliver output for so long. While it is true that faculty members have their own pressures to deal with, this makes it all the more important to find common ground with their students, so that the common passion for research doesn’t get lost. Be approachable and considerate, promote open communication, and offer constructive criticism, advises Dr Mangla.

Fostering a culture where we don’t talk about mental health in hushed tones is the only way forward. You cannot be good to yourself or anyone else till you have a sound mind. Why, then, celebrate anything that comes at the cost of mental well-being? The trope of an overworked, miserable PhD student needs to be done away with, and what better time than now!

Do you agree with the views expressed in this article? Please let us know in the comments below.

If I think about how I became a science communicator, I find that it is a full circle. Popular science got me interested in science, and science pushed me to communicate with others. As a child, I had dreams of serving society as a touring doctor and building a new nation, but that was not to be. When I look back at my journey, sometimes I wonder how I managed to reach here despite the poverty at home and my resource starved hometown of Kollegal.

The answer probably is books. In school, because of my stunted stature, I was often a “play-thing” instead of a “play-mate” for my classmates. Bullied and frustrated, I took shelter in reading. Not that there were many books around – the school library was half an almirah! But one of those books, Nakshatra Loka, kindled my imagination. I still remember the first sentence: “Look at the sky. There are billions of twinkling stars, each billions of kilometres away from another. Now imagine how vast the Universe could be!”

Even though I was barely ten-years-old at the time, these sentences awakened my love for science. It was only as a grown-up, and as a science communicator, that I found that the book was written by Sri R. L. Anantharamaiah, a pioneering science writer in Kannada, and father of the legendary aeronautics engineer-scientist Roddam Narasimha.

My imagination ran riot, even when watching movies. Those were the days of mythological movies in Kannada. Once, when I was in the third standard, I watched Dashavataram, a Telugu movie. That night I couldn’t sleep. What will happen to us, I wondered, if the Earth, as shown in the movie, goes under the ocean? Would we all die? What would happen to the people on the other side of the Earth? I asked my parents, my teachers, even lost several nights of sleep. There was no answer. In fact, I wouldn’t find one until several years had passed.

My next encounter with popular science took place while I was an undergraduate. Enrolled in a small college in a remote town where postings were seen as a punishment, we had no option but to study by ourselves. But whether it was taught in class or imbibed via self-study, taxonomy was equally boring.

It was then that I came across BGL Swamy’s Sahitya Akademi award-winning book, “Hasiru Honnu”. Humour, literature and science were judiciously mixed in the book, actually making taxonomy enjoyable. I think it may be one of the very few popular science books that have received a literary prize in India.

The book made me ask: why can't our teachers teach like Swamy? Why are our textbooks so boring? That was the beginning of my journey into reading popular science. I had a job as a part-time typist and spent all my earnings on buying more books and magazines. Incidentally, Kollegal used to get only one copy of Science Today every month, and that was reserved for me!

As a post-graduate student, I found it very difficult to find reading material in Kannada on evolution, genetics or molecular biology. It was a time when exciting things were happening in the fields of immunology and molecular biology. Monoclonal antibodies were in the news. Oncogenes had just been discovered. Stem-cells were a new concept.

But journals took at least 3 to 4 weeks to arrive at the library and as a result, we were the last to hear about any exciting discovery. That is when I decided to write, and write in Kannada, on every new topic which excited me. My first few articles were published as a student. And then there was no going back.

I kept on writing while I was doing research, and then finally took the plunge into full-time science communication. I wrote a weekly column on science for a Kannada newspaper for 16 long years. The idea was to write about the latest discoveries, for which I relied on peer-reviewed papers.

It has been over four decades since I began my journey in science communication. And it still excites me when I can explain a discovery to someone, one which I had myself found difficult to understand.

Breaking the language barrier

I am very vocal about the need for communicating science in non-English languages. It has been my experience that students from rural areas lack resources to update their knowledge. While things have changed now that the internet is pervasive, the language barrier remains. Even on the internet, Kannada resources are scanty.

I began a science blog in Kannada in the days of the dot-com boom. It was difficult to keep going due to technical issues such as lack of compatibility with fonts and software. Today Unicode has solved many of these issues. Besides, dissemination of information through social media, especially on messenger services like WhatsApp is not only rapid but also has high impact. They also provide an opportunity to interact directly with the audience.

Lately, I have begun distributing an audio magazine titled Janasuddi. It is a digest of science news in Kannada. About 30 minutes in length, each edition is distributed to around 2000 people directly through WhatsApp. These listeners then share it with their friends and family. The podcast is free and hence community radios in Karnataka re-broadcast the digest, thus taking the news to remote corners of the state.

The most challenging aspect of science communication is getting the audience interested. The tag “science” itself puts off many readers who assume that scientific texts are difficult to read. Besides, many such texts sound unnatural due to translation. It is also a fact that a substantial percentage of high school students have poor reading and writing skills.

I ventured into podcasting with these thoughts. And the rewards have been very precious. I chose audio because the tools to produce good quality audio are easily available and distribution is easy. I don’t have a studio, but can still get near studio-quality audio very easily. The low level of technical skill needed also means that the process can be inclusive. For example, listeners as far away as the US have provided audio for my podcasts. Listeners without any scientific background have volunteered to help in the production.

One of my listeners is an 80-year-old lady who sends voice messages (she can’t send text messages) after every episode. She listens to the podcast because that is the only means for her to get information. After listening to a translation of the Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin, she asked me if that was true and if scientists really suffer such hardships to find answers.

Time for a change

For those who wish to start a project on science outreach in Indian languages, it is important to understand that text as a medium of communication is not as relevant any more. It can, at best, be a preparatory step. Blogs, newspapers, magazines etc. are not impactful as a well-made video or audio. My experience is that a science communicator cannot now remain just a writer. He/she has to be a multimedia person, able to use all three modes – text, video and audio in synergy, and if possible, even venture towards non-traditional modes such as performing arts and illustrations.

The nuances of translation of scientific texts also need to be different. The focus must be the reader rather than the source text. Unless we shift our emphasis to effective communication rather than fidelity to the original text, Indian language science texts will not gain popularity.

I chose to be a generalist, as there is a dearth of writers or communicators in Kannada. Almost all popular science communicators in Kannada have been generalists though they usually prefer one subject over others. I choose to write on those topics that excite me, those I feel others should know about, and those which are basic to our understanding of the world. If it is a difficult topic, I take my time to understand it and then explain the same to a new audience.

Over the years, my presentation might have changed, but the conviction that communicating science in Indian languages is a necessity remains the same.

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Communicating science in the spoken language is very important if we want science to reach people and develop scientific temper. It works great with children, even if their medium of education is English. When kids get a chance to read about science in their own language, they can absorb concepts better and develop a deep interest in science as a whole.

Science is not an alien subject to children; they are taught a lot of it in their schools. But, does this learning process get them excited about why the things in this universe exist and behave the way they do? Does it enable them to cherish the beauty of science? The answer is often not very encouraging as most children are not excited by the science they learn at school. However, their lack of interest in pursuing science as a curriculum-based activity does not mean that children cannot be oriented towards science.

A mind for questions

“My friend told me, ‘God created this world in 7 days’. How is it possible that such a huge world was created in just 7 days? Is it true?” A child asks their father. The father lectures the child about the Big Bang, Initial Singularity and makes an earnest attempt to rationalise the child’s thinking. The child impatiently says, “Stop! My friend is far better, at least she said 7 days. You say it all happened in less than a second!”

Here, can we brand this child as irrational or believe that they can’t be guided? For this child, a universe that got created in less than a second, on its own, may seem like an impossibility. So, they dismiss the big bang as irrational. At the same time, their analytical and rational senses find the statement that the world was created in a week’s time slightly more believable. Therefore, to the child, both theories - big bang and divine creation - appear magical or supernatural. The toughest challenge here is conveying scientific information in a form that is acceptable and palatable to children without it appearing like fiction.

My friend's daughter, who is in the fourth grade, came to know that I was writing and editing mathematics content for a newspaper. She asked me, “Who was the first person to say that zero is a number?” I told her that it was Brahmagupta. Her next question was, “At what age did he start speaking about zero?” When I told her that he was an adult at the time, she shot off her next question, “If those ancient Indian mathematicians started to explore zero so late in their lives, why am I being asked to understand it starting from kindergarten?”

Here, we have to understand why children have a problem accepting zero as a number in the first place. A child will usually try to understand a new concept by linking it with previous experience in their immediate environment. “If I had four chocolates and I ate all of them, and if I were then asked how many chocolates remained with me, I would say, ‘I don’t have any’. I would certainly not say, ‘I have zero chocolates’”. This might be their thought process.

So, is introducing zero or concepts that need a deeper reflection to children at such a tender age the real problem here? I would argue not. An understanding of how humans first realised that zero exists as a number in its own right and how they explored its properties could help us find ways and means to convey this to children in a manner that they find interesting and comprehensible. It is only when we fail in these approaches and teach mathematics using crude and forceful methods, do they develop a lifelong phobia towards mathematics.

Making science accessible

A strong aversion for mathematics can also cripple the learning of other science subjects. So, how do we communicate science to this promising bunch of kids who have an inherent ability to evaluate things around them with an unconditioned mind?

The scope is ample in various mediums, be it print or electronic media. Even high school students who may profess that they hate science enjoy reading about the exploratory works of Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. They feel a thrill when they learn that some formulas developed by the late Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan over a hundred years back correlate with recent discoveries about the properties of black holes. In spite of their disaffection for science subjects, children usually regard scientists as their heroes and role models. This is something that can be exploited while teaching science.

No scientific concept is inherently impossible to understand and science can be communicated to any kind of audience. And with school children, the work actually becomes easier because they are more familiar with scientific terms than a more general audience. Of course, an adequate knowledge of the scientific topic we want to communicate is a prerequisite for good science communication. But, even someone with no expertise in any branch of science can do a good job in science communication for children, so long as they possess a readiness to learn and get excited and to pass on this excitement to children.

Any difficult science concept can be mashed into a palatable form and conveyed to children. Even concepts like quantum mechanics or concepts that are still in the exploratory stage in the scientific world can be conveyed to a high school level student. How? Only the approach matters here. It is best to begin with the fundamentals and then walk the child, step by step, to the main concept you want to convey. A smooth flow of narration with the right examples and apt metaphors will also help achieve the goal. If you want to introduce quantum gravity to children, then begin with Newton’s basic explorations. If this may still be too advanced, then start with the motion of objects to arrive at Newton and then proceed from there. Laying the foundation is the most important step.

To aid my argument, I cite an article (written in Tamil) by R. Sivaraman of the Pie Mathematics Association, which was published in Pattam (Dinamalar student’s edition and Pattam Monday Supplement) on 20.08.2018. The article is about a research paper, ‘Numerical ordering of numbers in honey bees’.

The original study explores whether honey bees understand the concept of zero. In his article, Sivaraman begins by describing four levels of understanding zero. Level one is understanding that zero can represent non-existence (e.g. an empty chocolate box). Level two is understanding that when an ongoing action comes to halt, the value of the action becomes zero. Level three is being able to compare zero with other numbers (it is this understanding that allows us to insert zero before one in the whole number line). Level four is understanding that zero can be used in mathematical operations, e.g. when zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, we get the same number.

Research supports that anyone with a basic understanding of numbers can interpret the first three levels of understanding zero quite comfortably. In fact, studies show that certain vertebrates understand up to level 3, which is the same level of understanding that Howard et al’s study found in honey bees.

Here, laying an initial foundation helps hook the readers to the subject, while the step by step approach conveys the importance of the finding. We received an excellent response for this article from the readers, that included a 6^th class student who said that he was happy to know that even honey bees understand zero in the same way that he understands it.

My journey at Pattam

My formal science learning ended once I graduated from high school. Yet, I write about science and mathematics for children in the Tamil student’s daily edition – ‘Pattam’, a product of Dinamalar groups. Pattam is published five days a week (Monday to Friday) and targets adolescents in the age group of 11 to 18 (6^th to 12^th grade). The children subscribe and receive the newspaper through their schools. The Monday edition also goes out to the general public as a supplement with the Dinamalar main daily edition. One-third of the content of Pattam deals with scientific topics and I want to stress here that we write in Tamil - the language that most of the children in Tamil Nadu think and express themselves in.

There is a general notion that science can only be communicated effectively in English. However, this is a myth. It is possible to communicate science not only in classical languages like Tamil but in any language spoken in any part of the world. Finding apt translations for new scientific terms is not really a problem for the journalist/educator; one can leave that to linguistic and scientific experts. Instead, we can work on popularising concepts and explaining scientific processes. Terms can be boldly transliterated.

In the process of editing some of the finest articles that subject matter experts send us for Pattam, I started learning scientific concepts. Before I began working with Pattam, I was not a science educator, but a social worker and development communication professional with some experience in working with children. I had always believed that the media should serve as a tool in enhancing the understanding of children about the society they live in. I had always been concerned about the (brutal) way children are taught concepts in schools. I had always felt that scientific and social concepts should be introduced to children in a more empathetic manner.

Before I started working with maths-related content for children, my mathematical knowledge was limited to believing that natural numbers can be used to count objects and knowing a few basic arithmetic operations. I could not accept negative integers or irrational numbers when I was taught about them in school. Complex numbers were nightmares.

But, at a later stage of my life, when I started working for Pattam, I discovered that I can easily learn mathematics and science given good resources. When I edited an article written by Dr Sivaraman about the discovery of complex numbers, I found it a phenomenal learning experience.

Being told that the square root of -1 is ‘i’ in school frustrated me to no end because I never received a good explanation of why a letter was being treated as a number. Learning where that notorious ‘i’ came from, the fact that the search for the square root of minus 1 (‘i’) led to the discovery of complex numbers, and that numbers can also be two dimensional or in fact multi-dimensional, made me feel like an excited photon. And I think my job as a science educator is just to get more and more excited about such topics and pass on that excitement to children. And I enjoy doing it.

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As the number of science researchers grows in India, existing science academics need to consider how they can contribute meaningfully to support this growth of younger colleagues working in a range of academic environments. The introduction of formal mentorship mechanisms for academics at all steps of their career is currently insufficiently appreciated and could be transformative in a broad sense.

Formal mentoring structures that permeate widely across all natures of academic and research organizations are infrequent, patchy and more often than not, missing altogether. These would be beneficial for several reasons. In science especially, mentoring at appropriate stages can help the mentee take good decisions on a range of issues that affect their own careers and importantly, also of younger colleagues working with them.

In addition to providing support mechanisms related to career progression, mentoring can help emphasize the importance of following correct ethical practices in the organization and in interactions with students and other laboratory personnel. If done thoroughly at the individual level and at sufficient scale across institutions, the existence of a good mentoring culture will increase scientifically meaningful success stories. Over time this will also help improve the general perception of why public money needs to be spent on teaching and research.

A question that might come up is at what stage of a scientist’s career should formal mentoring start and when is it no longer required? To have a lasting impact on our scientific culture, it is best for formal mentoring to start early – even as early as at the level of a PhD programme. It is true that a PhD student works with a supervisor who is considered responsible for the student’s progress. However, if there are issues with the research project, a PhD student may be hesitant to communicate this easily to his/her supervisor.

A formally constituted thesis advisory committee, with members that include 2–3 scientists chosen jointly by the student and his/her supervisor, is a great source of potential mentors. They provide the student with a set of experienced people (other than the supervisor) who are familiar with ongoing work.

Unlike the supervisor, however, thesis committee members can advise the student impartially on how to deal with problems – both professional and personal – that inevitably come up in a fair number of thesis projects. They can also help with making key decisions related to publications and future prospects. For example, when applying for postdoctoral positions, students can have unrealistic expectations of their own ability to do well in a postdoctoral research group and can benefit from inputs about the nature of research groups to which they should be applying.

Even in a PhD programme that is progressing smoothly, members of the thesis committee can mentor the student regarding the steps to be taken on completion of his/her PhD. Not all science PhDs necessarily need to progress towards a postdoc and, based on the student’s inclination and ability, a good mentor can help steer the student in the right direction at this stage.

The postdoctoral culture is in its infancy in India, and a good mentoring system at this level is essential for its growth. The general perception among scientists is that a successful postdoc, generally considered seriously for research and teaching positions, is one with a series of good publications in reliable journals. This idea needs to be challenged when universities and institutions are hiring new faculty. While strong publications are certainly an asset, a postdoctoral tenure that includes realistic training for functioning as an independent scientist with accompanying responsibilities should be considered as an equal asset.

Postdoctoral mentoring programmes for scientists who plan to take up independent faculty positions need to formally include a range of skills such as grant writing, supervising research projects of trainees and graduate students, learning how to write research papers and communicating with journal editors. Communicating scientific progress through effective seminars is another essential skill that needs to be developed with constructive feedback from good mentors. Institutions and universities that put in place programmes for mentoring along these lines are likely to attract more postdoctoral candidates, whose subsequent independent research careers should progress more smoothly.

As scientists move up the career ladder, the choices as well as responsibilities they face grow more complex. Mentorship at these levels is therefore even more essential, but at the same time requires mentors with the ability to discuss and analyse a range of issues. Introducing a mentoring process from early on in a scientist’s career is likely to have the biggest impact.

Younger colleagues at the initial stages of their independent scientific careers can benefit from mentorship at multiple levels. To begin with, good mentors can interact with them formally and help them understand better the goals of the institution they have joined. Research publications maybe one such goal, but different institutions may value different goals to different extents. For example, in certain institutions, the teaching and training of undergraduates may be given equal importance, and it may not be always clear to newly joined lecturers/assistant professors regarding how to achieve an optimal balance between their own research projects and their expected teaching and training duties in the early years of their career.

The challenges for a fresh independent investigator in a research-only environment are no less. As the pressure on publicly funded research grants grows in the country, younger investigators need to plan carefully when and how many new grants to write. This is in turn frequently related to the number of research students that they may consider supervising at a given time. In our education system, graduate students join laboratories with relatively little research experience. While there is no hard and fast rule as to how many students an investigator should optimally have in his/her laboratory at any given stage in his/her career, early investigators can benefit by discussing this number with mentors.

Other questions that arise are related to publications; for example, the level of completion that a project should reach before sending it out for publication, and to which kind of journals should the first publications go. Even seemingly trivial decisions like how many scientific meetings must one attend annually need to be thought through so that the benefit of attending a specific meeting versus spending more time in the laboratory or teaching is clearly understood. The value of attending national versus international meetings is also not obvious to early career academics often freshly returned from abroad. Good mentors with experience can help negotiate all of these issues smoothly.

For scientists at the mid-level, mentorship committees can formally advise on when and how to apply for awards and fellowships, or for selection on national committees. The nature and extent of science mentorship do change as one moves from one level to the next – but its impact in helping scientists make good career decisions is likely to be felt at all levels.

For formal mentorship mechanisms to impact overall scientific output, it must happen in a uniform and efficient way across all academic organizations. This, in turn, requires that more mid-level and senior scientists appreciate and are willing to act as mentors to their younger colleagues. Informal mentoring has always existed, but an important issue with such mentoring is that it does not reach everyone and often does not reach the people who need it most.

One way of incentivizing this among existing institutions is to constitute awards for good mentors, just as we do for teaching and research. The criteria for such awards already exist in the international domain (Nature, 2017, 552, 5). It is up to our scientific community to institute these broadly across the ecosphere of Indian science.

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In recent years, there has been some concern among Indian scientists and in the public media about the spread of pseudoscientific ideas in our society. Every time a comment is made in public by a politician or administrator, there is outburst in the media and an even bigger outburst on social media. Sometimes the scientific community is so outraged that statements are put out against the anti-scientific or pseudoscientific statement. A few days later, only the scientists remember the incident as fresh news takes over public attention.

Let me take the example of the statement made by a Union Minister, that Darwin was wrong about human evolution; the sages in the Vedic age did not write about apes turning into humans, so this can’t be true. There was considerable media outburst, which lasted longer than expected as the scientific community reacted strongly to this statement. Especially when it was suggested that school curricula be appropriately changed in the light of such an opinion, the community recognized the responsibility to criticize this.

Moreover, in spite of a rap on the knuckles by higher authorities, the Minister defended his statement on a later date, creating further controversy. In fact, the clamour reached a level to make international news, with a report published in Nature News. The Minister, I feel, actually did a service to the community in this case, because there was some positive fallout of the controversy.

Perhaps it was serendipitous that this statement was made by the Minister towards the end of January. 12^th February is Darwin day and typically, this is not celebrated on a large scale in our country. However, following the controversy last year, there was a flurry of activities around Darwin day, organized by the academies, NGOs, schools, colleges and other institutions. I personally delivered three lectures on Darwin and Darwinism in Darwin week. This sudden interest in Charles Darwin had its roots in that one controversy over an anti-science statement.

One year later, this frenzy has died, the activity level on Darwin day has returned to its normal state of absence. Personally, I have interacted with several people over the last year, following this controversy. Unfortunately, most lay people agree with the Minister, in spite of all the statements in the media by the scientific community!

Many consider research that can be communicated to the uninitiated, shared in the public media, discussed by non-scientists to be of an inferior quality.

I feel it is time we scientists held a mirror to ourselves and asked, “Where have we gone wrong?” We agree that in India, there is not enough funding for research and education and we need to work towards improving this situation. We need to raise our voices against funding cut for science and to engage with the policy makers to enable higher investment in basic research and education.

However, we need to remember that we have a greater responsibility towards the people whose hard-earned money helps us to pursue our research – the taxpayers of the country. As a community, we have failed the people who fund our research by not communicating to them our findings and the excitement of science.

A large number of scientists take pride in the fact that their research is beyond the understanding of the “aam aadmi” and in fact, cannot be communicated beyond the peer group. Many consider research that can be communicated to the uninitiated, shared in the public media, discussed by non-scientists to be of an inferior quality. In fact, some go to the extent of saying that such research cannot qualify as science and at best can be called social science. In making such sweeping statements, one does not denigrate the social sciences but one’s own standing as a scientist, by the sheer display of lack of objectivity.

If we cannot take our research findings to every classroom and drawing room, every coffee shop and bus stop, we should be shy of demanding more public funding for our research.

As scientists, we need to recognize that communicating our research findings to the non-specialist, taking our science to the next-door neighbour or a vendor on the street or a politician, spreading the excitement of science among young people are our responsibilities as much as carrying out our research with sincerity and honesty is. We should take pride in the ability to communicate science to the layperson and not shy away from it. When a piece of research gets highlighted by the public media, we should rejoice and congratulate the researchers instead of mocking them for not doing science that is of “high quality”.

If we cannot take our research findings to every classroom and drawing room, every coffee shop and bus stop, we should be shy of demanding more public funding for our research. Why should the shopkeeper in my neighbourhood care about funding science if he cannot understand what it is all about? He/she would rather fund the building of roads, laying of railway lines, the establishment of hospitals and even buying of more ammunition – all tangible ways of spending his/her hard-earned money, as opposed to funding some vague scientific project with a meaningless acronym.

At least launching of rockets can bring pride to the nation and its people, but why should the people care if someone is peeping into the depths of live cells or growing populations of mutant flies or solving partial differential equations? Why should they care if PhD scholars get a fellowship hike or not? Why should they be bothered if an Indian scientist publishes a paper in the world’s best journal? After all, how many Nobel prizes have we brought to the country as a community, the people ask, and why shouldn’t they?

Neither do we give them something to be proud of, nor do we care to share our knowledge with them. We keep them away from our labs and we treat them as intellectual inferiors who have no right to demand answers from us. Why should the people be interested in supporting an endeavour which doesn’t give them anything tangible in return? When we, as scientists, do not make the effort to reach out to the people, how can we condemn them for believing in pseudoscience? At least the people who spread pseudoscientific and anti-scientific ideas make an effort to reach out to society. How can we expect to counter this from a pedestal of our own creation?

When we, as scientists, do not make the effort to reach out to the people, how can we condemn them for believing in pseudoscience?

As a community, we have failed to engage with the society and thus, we should hold ourselves responsible for the flourishing of pseudoscience, not the politicians who use this for propaganda.

When someone claims that an ape never changed into a man, we don’t make a concerted effort to explain the fallacy in the statement. We don’t bother to explain to the layperson the true essence of evolution.

We do not protest when our children are taught to accept anything that is written in the textbook as truth, not through experimentation and reasoning, but through command and faith.

We do not bother to “waste” time in reaching out to school children and showing them how they can test the facts written in their books.

We do not object to a system of education that is dictated by the vicious loop of examinations based on memory, marks and tutorial businesses.

We do not talk to the media and we do not encourage our students to take up science communication as a profession.

We do not bother to write popular articles as it is a waste of time and does not get counted in various metrics for promotions and awards.

We do not bother to deliver talks and write in the regional languages as this is below our dignity.

We are thereby largely ignored by the public media, unless there is some scandal and the science that we do gets filed away in computers and lab notebooks, never reaching beyond the peer group. Yet, we demand that the public should support our research and we expect that young people would be motivated to take up science as a career.

It is time that we owned up to ourselves that we need to cleanse our community of the false pride of knowledge. It is time we came down from our pedestals and engaged with the public, taking our science to schools and colleges, cafes and shopping malls, drawing rooms and playgrounds. Only then, can we hope to begin cleansing the society of pseudoscience and anti-science and begin creating a society rooted in the philosophy of science as a way of life.

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In this opinion article, Shambhavi Naik, Research Fellow, Technology and Policy Programme, Takshashila Institution, and Megha, India Alliance Early Career Fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) discuss the implications and possible repercussions of such a policy.

The Department of Science and Technology (DST) recently announced an inter-ministerial committee to improve the quality of doctoral research. This was accompanied by a list of recommendations, one of which is to reward PhD students for publications and patents.

Despite being the target of several policy decisions, students are seldom directly consulted on such matters. We therefore surveyed PhD students about this; of 131 respondents, ~ 56% affirmed that monetising publications and patents would improve the quality of their PhD. In contrast, the very same incentive has been vehemently opposed by faculty and the media. We use our survey to advocate a middle path: acknowledge that students may perform better with incentives, but recognise that papers and patents are not the best way to measure the quality of a PhD.

Publications and patents often take years and are collaborative efforts, not individual student led outcomes. Increase in computational and technological power has pushed up both the number of authors and the amount of data required to publish in well-regarded journals, a fact poignantly quantified by Ron Vale from the University of California, San Francisco.

Our survey echoes this sentiment: for students with a publication (any level of authorship), >55% say it took more than 2 years for the data they generated to be part of an accepted manuscript. Besides, in most scientific research articles, the author list follows a hierarchy, with the student who performed the majority of the work getting first authorship. This point is not addressed in the current recommendations. Will students be rewarded no matter where their name appears in the author-list? Even if it is limited to first authors only, what happens when there are multiple co-authors that equally share first authorship?

Further, the recommendations do not clarify what a “reputable” international or national journal is. There are multiple issues with the routine metric for a “reputable” journal - impact factor (IF). Many scientists agree that IF is a convenient but imprecise benchmark of scientific quality. Also, this favours students from laboratories that are already well-funded and regularly publish in high IF journals; the incentive thus rewards research environment rather than the individual student. It is possible that this would further feed the feeling of injustice that PhD students from resource-poor universities or laboratories already experience.

Furthermore, many factors determine where a manuscript is finally accepted. In the survey, students weighed novel research, technology, writing, supervisor’s reputation and luck more or less equally in determining if a publication is accepted in a reputable journal. It may be argued that none of these parameters is entirely in a students’ control. Therefore, the notion that incentives to publish will improve quality is not easily justified.

A secondary, but important point is also the variability in reward: Rs 50,000 for an international publication vs Rs 20,000 for a national publication. This disparity signals that policymakers themselves believe indigenously peer-reviewed science is not of high quality or competitive to publish in. Which begs the question – why are we funding two tiers of science in the country?

Another way to examine the effectiveness of these recommendations would be to study China’s “cash for publication” policy. While China has significantly increased publication output, this policy has also encouraged scientific malpractice and plagiarism. Notably, such schemes form part of a larger investment by the government into R & D, that reach levels of up to 6% of GDP. In contrast, our spending is just 0.7%. Thus, borrowing policies from China piecemeal may not work for us.

Finally, in linking publications and rewards, we must reflect on the type of signal this sends to our scientific community, not just students. By rewarding publications and patents, we will be assessing scientific research merely by the output of the discovery and not its impact. Because much of science in India is tax-payer funded, should public money be utilised to reward research articles that achieve little in terms of direct public benefit?

Rather than unequivocally disparage the government’s effort to improve the quality of students we argue that we must appreciate this initiative, but tweak how it is executed. Perhaps publications should not be the sole criteria by which the quality of a good PhD student should be assessed. We generated a word cloud based on student comments on what they think are the qualities of a good PhD scholar. As the figure suggests, publications are one facet. Other skills include but are not limited to communication, designing experiments, ability to apply oneself to a problem.

Rewarding students for such skills at the institutional level as well as in national competitions is not a new thought. The government is already active in this area - for e.g., the science-writing competition recently concluded by Vigyan Prasar (AWSAR).

We envision three broad categories: communication, innovation and entrepreneurship, which would reward skills such as tenacity, problem-solving, ability to self-learn (a biology student who becomes a coder; a mathematician who does bench science), initiating collaborations, extent of literature knowledge etc. Ultimately, we must recognise these skills of doctoral students, as applied to their PhD, have as much to do with quality as patents and publications.

The philosophy of these recommendations resonates with the way such policies are framed - by committees composed of experts at the peak of their career and with vast experience, but in the absence of the target stakeholders. Surely they also need to include the voices of the students and faculty that are directly going to be affected by the recommendations? Inclusion of all stakeholders in these issues will foster a feeling of a community which in the long-term would enable us to elevate the quality of our research.

This article summarises our results from the student survey. We are now undertaking a survey of faculty for their opinion and suggestions for improvement on these recommendations. Hopefully, this would help our policymakers with formulating the recommendations, not just in content but also implementation.

Survey details: We polled PhD students by circulating a link to students via email and social media. Responses between 6/2 – 11/2 were collated for this article. The survey contained 5 questions which can be read here. We are happy to share the raw data upon request.

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Recently, the #savescience movement began trending on several social media platforms with a number of students, teachers and researchers participating in the debate. This is mainly because of the unscientific statements which are constantly being put forth in multiple scientific forums. The epithet pseudoscience is being used more and more in national debates.

Even though it is difficult to exactly define pseudoscience, any claim which is not fully supported by strong scientific evidence will qualify as pseudoscience. While the demarcating line between science and pseudoscience may appear blurred sometimes, it still exists. By this, I am in no way justifying the unscientific claims made by few Indian academicians in the recent past, which have stirred controversy. At the same time, what was considered a myth and impossible a few decades back is now rapidly becoming reality due to the power of science and technology.

Let me give an example from our own Indian mythology. In the popular story of Durga slaying the demon Mahisasura, a demon by name Rakthabeeja (Raktha – blood; Beeja – seed) plays a prominent role. The unique feature of this demon is that every drop of blood which falls from his body gives rise to a new demon. So, when I gave a popular science talk for undergraduate students in a college, I used this analogy to explain cloning, which was appreciated by the audience who were familiar with the story. Again, I used it only as an analogy. An analogy is an example to explain a complex concept in familiar terms – it is never meant to be taken literally. An analogy can be an excellent tool to explain a scientific fact to a lay person, but it can never be treated as a scientific fact per se.

Using analogies to explain science is not new and has always been an integral part of pedagogy. I still feel that the story of Rakthabeeja was a novel concept which somebody from India came up with many centuries back. Even though the technicality of cloning is way different from the process of a new demon springing out from a blood drop, the concept which I wanted to highlight was identical genetic constitution, which the students understood with the help of the analogy. I feel it is well within the premises of science to use such an analogy while teaching. But had I said that “Indians were the first to experiment with human cloning,” then it would be absolutely unscientific and would qualify as pseudoscience.

The utility of analogies in explaining scientific concepts depends upon the audience and forum. In popular science talks which are conducted to reach out to the wider society, analogies can be very useful for describing unfamiliar scientific phenomenon to the common man. In a classroom scenario where a teacher has to explain complex scientific concepts, analogies become powerful pedagogy tools. But these analogies are of less utility in scientific conferences, workshops, symposiums and seminars where both the speaker and the audience are from the scientific fraternity.

Another popular analogy which created a stir in the recent past is the pushpakaviman. Certain stories from Indian mythology mention a spaceship (pushpakaviman) which celestial nymphs use for their air travel. It is yet another fascinating concept, which also finds mentions in other mythologies (outside India), though of course with variations. So here, even the concept cannot be claimed to be of purely Indian origin. That being said, claiming that Indians were the first to invent aeroplanes is plain pseudoscience.

There is a difference between an idea and a claim. An idea is a concept which can lead to a hypothesis. But the hypothesis must be tested rigorously to become a theory or a claim. Anybody can come up with an idea or a concept, but rigorous scientific testing is required to prove the validity of the said idea and that is where the ‘lakshmanrekha’ of science lies. Falsifiability of an idea (i.e. we should be able to come up with an experiment which can potentially prove that the idea is false) is one of these tests and most pseudoscientific claims lack this criterion of falsifiability.

Coming back to this idea of analogies and claims, using analogies has its own advantages and disadvantages. First, it is the easiest way to reach out to a wide audience. Since we are in an era where the importance of dissemination of scientific knowledge to the common man is beginning to be appreciated, analogies serve as powerful tools for scientific dissemination. It is an easy method to induce enthusiasm in school children, which is the need of the hour.

However, when analogies become claims, then they simply nurture our false ego and pseudo-patriotism. This also puts us in a poor light in the international scientific arena. There is a sizeable number of Indian scientists working abroad, and incidents like these where pseudoscientific claims enter the national conversation, percolate to these academic circles as well. In a recent interview, Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan calls this a manifestation of colonial inferiority complex, which we need to come out from. For Indian scientists working in India, the situation can be worse. It can demotivate a good scientist and can even motivate a bad scientist to do pseudo-research, which lacks scientific validity.

Allowing scientific platforms to promote and propagate pseudoscience can have debilitating consequences for Indian science in the long run. Scientists and educators who fall prey to this kind of pseudoscience can even propagate it by training their students who become the torch-bearers of pseudoscience in generations to come. Further, these pseudoscientific claims also belittle and camouflage the true contributions of both ancient and modern Indian scientists, the latter of which include the likes of C.V.Raman, S.Chandrasekhar, J.C.Bose, S.N.Bose, G.N.Ramachandran, Hargobind Khorana, Venkatraman Ramakrishnan etc.

Having identified the problem, the next and most important step is learning to stop it. First, in any scientific meetings, strict regulations should be followed while determining the speakers. Only scientists with a good track record should be invited. For screening, the applicants should submit a small write-up about the topic of their talk which can be used to select the speakers. Most importantly, a chairperson should be appointed for every session and the person should be capable of sharply interjecting if the discussion heads in a non-scientific direction.

Finally, the media plays a very important role in controlling pseudoscience. In my opinion, the media should follow a name and shame policy without pity in identifying the torch-bearers of pseudoscience. In certain cases, all stakeholders can make a symbolic protest to show their solidarity towards science. The recent #savescience protests organised in several major cities in India illustrated this idea. As members of the scientific community, let us work together to denounce pseudoscientific claims, and promote rigorously-tested and valid science.

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