The Rearview

The Rearview

By The HinduScienceEducationHistory
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The Rearview episodes

  • The Shy Nobel Laureate: Har Gobind Khorana and 'Total Synthesis'

    What happens when a bureaucratic blunder wrecks a young scientist's career plans, and the wreckage turns out to be the making of him? And why would a man who helped crack the language of life spend decades insisting that his greatest triumph was only a detour?In this episode of The Rearview, we trace the life of Har Gobind Khorana, only one of four Indian origin scientists who were awarded a Nobel Prize. He was born in pre-Partition Punjab, the son of a village tax clerk. A scholarship took him from Lahore to Liverpool, Zürich and Cambridge. Friendships, family and a wife who kept his world running took him on to Vancouver, Madison and MIT.

    What it means to build molecules from scratch, why that mattered to biology and what did Khorana achieve that others in a celebrated scientific race did not? We also ask how he related to the country he left, whether "brain drain" fits his case.
    Hosts: Jacob Koshy & Sobhana K Nair
    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    35 min
  • Where Have The Birds Gone? with Asad Rahmani

    Common birds are no longer common. Rural landscapes now host fewer Black Drongos and Indian Rollers; Nightjars call less frequently from the edges of forests; Black-shouldered Kites perch less often on telegraph wires; Eagles are scarcer in the skies; and Harriers patrol protected grasslands in dwindling numbers as they search for insects.

    What is causing this disappearance?

    Renowned ornithologist and former Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) director Dr Asad Rahmani’s latest book, ‘Where Are the Birds Gone?’, investigates the alarming long-term decline of bird populations across the Indian subcontinent and the reasons behind it.

    Hosts: Sobhana K Nair & Jacob Koshy

    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    54 min
  • Part 2 | The Bomb, the Faith, and the Country That Disowned Abdus Salam

    Can a man work at the very frontier of physics and still hold a deep religious faith — and did Abdus Salam ever feel the two were at war? Did the world's first Muslim science laureate help build Pakistan's atomic bomb?

    Behind the hundred-hour weeks, Salam was someone who recited Ghalib and Rumi mid-calculation, laughed first at his own jokes, and worked best arguing at a blackboard. We look at whether he "flamed out" after the Nobel (he didn't — he was still swinging for the biggest prize in physics), and at a private life more unusual than most of his colleagues realised: two marriages, two families, and a British scientist he met at a disarmament meeting.
    Then his greatest creation, which wasn't a theory, but a place. Denied the resources to build a great institute at home, Salam built one abroad instead, a haven where scientists from poor countries could work alongside the best in the world. We ask what it cost him to succeed everywhere except in the one country he built it for.
    At the centre of the episode sits the question that still starts arguments: Salam's real role in Pakistan's nuclear programme. The official story says he opposed the bomb. A more recent, uncomfortable body of evidence says otherwise. We lay out both cases and the moment in 1974 when a single act of parliament changed everything, and set him against the country he had served.
    Around that turning point cluster the threads we follow to the end: his friendships and rivalries across the Indian border; the famous name he's wrongly linked to; the faith he refused to soften even as his homeland punished him for it.
    Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair
    Producer: Shiksha Jural
    Video: Jude Weston

    24 min
  • Part 1 | Abdus Salam: Nobel Laureate, Physicist and Heretic

    What does a borrowed cow have to do with a Nobel Prize? And how did a committed atheist set a devout Muslim on the path to becoming one of the great physicists of the twentieth century?

    This is the story of Abdus Salam born in 1926 in Jhang, a mud-walled town in the Punjab, the son of a poor schoolteacher who studied by the light of an oil lamp. In 1979 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics, becoming the first Muslim ever to win a Nobel in the sciences, the first physicist from the subcontinent since C.V. Raman in 1930, and — to this day — Pakistan's only science laureate.
    What did he win it for? For showing that two of the fundamental forces running the universe — electricity-and-magnetism, and the "weak" force that powers the Sun and makes atoms radioactive — are secretly one and the same thing wearing two different disguises. And he did that work not in America, where his co-winners sat inside the biggest networks in physics, but as an outsider in Britain: at Cambridge, and then at Imperial College London.
    In this first episode, we trace how a teenage prodigy set exam records across the entire province and casually one-upped the legendary Ramanujan. How his uncle signed over a small plot of land — enough to keep a cow — so his schoolteacher father would count, on paper, as a "farmer," making Salam eligible for a scholarship reserved for farmers' sons. That, plus an English-literature student's last-minute cold feet, is what carried him to Cambridge in 1946.
    We meet the tutor who redirected his life: Fred Hoyle — the famous astronomer, champion of a universe with no beginning, and an avowed atheist — who nudged this deeply religious young man off the safe civil-service track and into physics. Salam called it the most important conversation of his life. For him there was never a contradiction: he saw physics itself as a form of worship, a way of reading God's handwriting in nature.
    Then we follow him to the summit — a turban in Stockholm, the Quran quoted at the Nobel banquet — and end on the shadow already falling over that triumph. Because five years before the prize, his own country had passed a law declaring him a non-Muslim. Which is where Part 2 begins.
    Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair
    Producer: Shiksha Jural

    38 min
  • The Mathematics and Loneliness of DD Kosambi w/Prof. Ram Ramaswamy

    Did Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi solve the Riemann Hypothesis - one of mathematics's greatest puzzles? Was Kosambi, who wrote one of the most influential books on studying Indian history, ignored by both mathematicians and historians? Is he India's Alan Turing?

    This week we interview Prof Ram Ramaswamy, whose biography of the remarkably eclectic DD Kosambi: DD Kosambi, One Life, Many Worlds, gives a dispassionate, scholarly and insightful look into this mathematician and historian who was also a Sanskrit scholar and avowed Marxist. Ramaswamy, who's taught at JNU, IIT Delhi and is a former Vice Chancellor at University of Hyderabad, has unearthed rich archival material to investigate the motivations, frustrations and sources of inspiration that shaped one of India's greatest polymaths.
    Host: Jacob Koshy

    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    1 hr 1 min
  • Part 3: How El Nino Choked Civilisations and Stirred Revolution

    Could a warm patch of water in the Pacific have influenced both the French Revolution and some of India's deadliest famines? In this concluding episode of the series, Jacob and Sobhana trace the extraordinary historical reach of El Niño, revealing how a climate phenomenon thousands of kilometres away has left its imprint on societies, economies and even moments that changed the course of history.

    The episode revisits the devastating El Niño of 1877–78, when simultaneous droughts across India, China and Brazil unfolded as the world was becoming the first truly globalised economy. It explores intriguing links between climate extremes and events such as the 1789 Skull Famine in India and the years leading up to the French Revolution, while weighing the evidence with appropriate historical caution.
    The conversation also asks why modern India no longer experiences famine despite repeated El Niño-driven monsoon failures. Instead, the impacts are now felt in subtler but still powerful ways: food prices, rural incomes, reservoirs, electricity generation and the wider economy.
    Finally, the hosts explain why forecasting the Indian monsoon remains one of science's greatest challenges. El Niño is only one player in a complex system, joined by the Indian Ocean Dipole and the Madden–Julian Oscillation. As this year's monsoon unfolds, the episode shows why meteorologists are watching every signal—and why a distant Pacific Ocean still shapes life at the Indian dinner table.
    Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair
    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    15 min
  • Part 2 : El Niño: From Titanic to Monsoons—The Climate Story That Changed Everything

    What do the Titanic and a pair of ship's cooks have to do with one of Earth's greatest climate mysteries? In this episode, two remarkable stories become the gateway to understanding El Niño—one suggesting how the climate phenomenon may have quietly influenced history, the other showing how cooks aboard a research vessel spotted the signs of a major El Niño before the scientists themselves.

    In the second part of our series, we narrate the scientific detective story that finally united two seemingly unrelated discoveries: the warming of the Pacific Ocean known as El Niño and Gilbert Walker's mysterious Southern Oscillation. Listeners follow the breakthrough that revealed these were not separate phenomena but two parts of the same global climate engine, transforming our understanding of weather across the world.
    Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair
    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    17 min
  • Part 1: El Niño: How a Warm Patch of Pacific Water Came to Rule India’s Monsoon

    How can a patch of warm water thousands of kilometres from India determine whether its farms flourish or fail? And how did a mathematician help uncover one of the greatest hidden connections in the planet’s weather?

    In the first episode of this three-part story, we trace the strange history of El Niño and the centuries-long struggle to predict the Indian monsoon. The journey begins off the coast of Peru, where fishermen gave a deceptively tender name—the Christ Child—to warm waters that devastated their rich fisheries.

    From there, we travel to nineteenth-century India, where catastrophic famines made forecasting the monsoon a matter of life and death. Early meteorologists chased sunspots and elusive cycles, while an Australian astronomer glimpsed something extraordinary: droughts thousands of kilometres apart seemed to occur in step.

    The breakthrough came with Gilbert Walker, an eccentric Cambridge mathematician fascinated by birds, flutes, ice-skating and boomerangs. With the painstaking calculations of Indian clerks—including the remarkable Hem Raj—Walker uncovered a vast atmospheric seesaw across the Pacific: the Southern Oscillation.

    Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair

    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    21 min
  • India's Dinosaurs | Part 3: The day it all ended

    What if we told you that one of the most extraordinary dinosaur fossils ever found was in India — a snake caught mid-strike, coiled around dinosaur eggs, frozen in time for 67 million years?

    In this series, The Rearview, we have travelled from the earliest dinosaurs to the giants that walked the Indian subcontinent when it was still adrift and to the discoveries that continue to reshape what we think we know. From India’s own titanic long-necks and the fearsome Rajasaurus, to the astonishing fossil boom in China that is rewriting the global dinosaur story.
    In this final episode, we ask the biggest questions of all: how did it end? The rock from space, or the fire from below? Tune in for answers and more.
    Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair
    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    32 min
  • India's Dinosaurs | Part 2: The Coal That Found a Lost Continent

    What does coal have to do with a lost supercontinent? And how did one tiny Punjabi town give India both its dinosaur hunters and one of the greatest actors in its cinema?

    In 1840s Bengal, the East India Company wasn't hunting prehistory — it was hunting fuel for its steamships. But the men sent crawling through Indian coal seams kept stumbling onto something stranger: fossil plants that matched Australia's, tusked reptiles that matched South Africa's, and polished boulders that meant central India had once lain buried under glacial ice. Piece by piece, a cadre of young Irish geologists and Central European specialists drew the map of Gondwana — the vanished half of the planet, named for a forest region of the Narmada — and never quite got the credit.
    Then the story turns personal. Follow the thread from India's first weatherman to the remarkable Sahni dynasty of Bhera: a patriarch who built himself from nothing, a palaeobotanist felled days after Nehru laid his institute's foundation stone, and a grandson who bent to tie his shoelace and found a nest of dinosaur eggs.
    Coal, ice, eggs, and a family that produced scientists and film stars alike. The map that explains India's dinosaurs — drawn by men looking for fuel.
    Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair
    Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    31 min

About The Rearview

From the publisher's feed

Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair guide you on a scenic route through the history of science. Filled with fascinating anecdotes, deep archival dives, and a closer look at the quirky minds behind…