The Rearview

The Hindu
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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 groundbreaking ideas.

  1. 3d ago

    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

  2. Jul 27

    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

  3. Jul 20

    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

  4. Jul 13

    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

  5. Jun 29

    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

  6. Jun 22

    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

  7. Jun 15

    The Story of India's dinosaurs | Part 1

    What did the world's greatest anatomist mistake a dinosaur bone for? And how did the man who hunted India's most feared serial killers end up discovering Asia's first dinosaur fossils? The first episode of Rearview opens in a cold Oxford study in 1677, where a scholar turns over a colossal bone and confidently declares it the thigh of a Roman war-elephant. That sets the tone for two centuries of outrageous confident error: bones mistaken for whales, fish, rhinoceroses, and — in one glorious near-miss — awarded the scientific name S*****m humanum. The reason everyone got it so spectacularly wrong turns out to have nothing to do with stupidity, and everything to do with a the, yet unknown concept of 'deep time.' The episode then traces the two rival Englishmen who finally cracked it — a chaotic, bear-keeping Oxford clergyman and a Sussex country doctor whose wife may, or may not, have found the decisive tooth by a roadside — before crossing four thousand miles to the Narmada valley, where a thug-hunting East India Company captain accidentally dug up the earliest dinosaur bones ever found in Asia, and left behind, almost incidentally, a thread that leads to Mowgli. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Producer and editor: Jude Francis Weston

  8. Jun 1

    Visvesvaraya, Cauvery and Karnataka’s Water Legacy

    When people speak of Sir M. Visvesvaraya, they usually remember him as one of India’s greatest engineers. As Diwan of Mysore in the early twentieth century, he championed ambitious infrastructure projects that he believed would modernise the princely state and drive economic growth. Among his most significant achievements was the Krishna Raja Sagara, or KRS, dam across the Cauvery River. Visvesvaraya strongly supported the project because Mysore needed reliable water storage and electricity. One important motivation was to provide power for the Kolar Gold Fields, then among the most important mining centres in India. The dam helped transform Mysore’s economy by supporting industry and expanding access to electricity. But the KRS dam’s impact went far beyond mining. The vast reservoir enabled large-scale irrigation across parts of present-day Karnataka. Farmers increasingly cultivated water-intensive crops such as sugarcane and paddy, bringing prosperity to many regions but also creating a growing dependence on Cauvery waters. That agricultural transformation had long-term consequences. As irrigation expanded upstream in Karnataka, concerns grew downstream in what is now Tamil Nadu, where farmers also depended on the river. Competing demands eventually evolved into one of India’s most enduring inter-state water disputes. More than a century later, debates over sharing the Cauvery continue, linking today’s politics and agriculture to Visvesvaraya’s vision of development through engineering. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Recorded and produced by Jude Francis Weston Edited by Shiksha Jural and Jude Francis Weston

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About

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 groundbreaking ideas.

Information

  • Creator
    The Hindu
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    47
  • Copyright
    © The Hindu
  • Show Website
    The Rearview

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