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. 5d ago

    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

  2. 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

    38 min

  3. 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

    31 min

  4. May 18

    Forgotten Heroes | Part 3: Yellapragada Subbarow - The forgotten alchemist

    In the annals of modern medicine, few scientists have saved as many lives while remaining as profoundly overlooked as Yellapragada Subbarow. Born in colonial India and later working in the United States, Subbarow’s research laid the foundations for breakthroughs that transformed global healthcare—from treatments for parasitic diseases and cancer to advances in antibiotics and nutritional science. Yet, unlike many scientific luminaries, his name rarely entered the public imagination. This episode—the third instalment in our series on forgotten Indian scientists with Anand Ranganathan and Sheetal Ranganathan—revisits the extraordinary life and legacy of a man whose discoveries quietly reshaped twentieth-century medicine. We trace Subbarow’s journey from hardship and intellectual struggle in India to pioneering biochemical research in America, exploring both his scientific triumphs and the institutional barriers that often obscured his contributions. The conversation delves into the medicines and scientific pathways linked to Subbarow’s work, asking why some innovators become household names while others fade into obscurity. At once a biography, a history of science, and a meditation on recognition, this episode restores to view one of the most consequential Indian minds of the modern era. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana Nair Producer and editor: Jude Francis Weston

    48 min

  5. May 4

    Forgotten Heroes | Part 2: How India gave the world the first blood pressure drug

    What did Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill have in common, besides shaping mid‑20th mid‑20th‑century history? Both suffered from hypertension, a condition Western medicine did not recognise as a disease until well into the 1940s. High blood pressure was seen as an inevitable companion of aging, something to be endured rather than treated. Doctors advised lifestyle changes, less salt, more rest, and, at best, mild sedatives. Long before this shift in medical thinking, Indian practitioners were using the roots of Sarpagandha to treat manic disorders. Drawing on this traditional knowledge, Ram Nath Chopra, the father of Indian pharmacology, demonstrated that the herb could also bring down blood pressure. His work marked a turning point. Building on Chopra’s research and clinical trials by Indian doctors, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Ciba isolated the active alkaloid responsible for Sarpagandha’s hypotensive effect. The result was Reserpine, the world’s first effective drug to control hypertension. In this episode of The Rearview, the second in our “Forgotten Heroes” series, we trace Chopra’s remarkable journey and examine how a British army doctor working in India quietly transformed global medicine and laid the foundations of India’s modern pharmaceutical industry. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Guests: Anand Ranganathan and Sheetal Ranganathan Producer and editor: Jude Francis Weston

    39 min

  6. Apr 20

    Forgotten Heroes | Part 1: How two Indian mathematicians were denied credit for inventing fingerprinting

    Hem Chandra Bose and Aziz Ul-Haque were the experts who played a pivotal role in developing the Henry Classification System for cataloging finger prints. This was during the early 20th century, when both were police inspectors, part of the colonial Bengal Police Service. This was a unique system that enabled the identification of any person, by employing 10 identifying characteristics of their fingerprints such as whorls, ridges and the like. Routine as this sounds today, this was the first time that such a system was conceived to create a criminal database that could then be used to track repeat offenders. Much like Aadhar-based fingerprinting systems strengthen Digital Stack systems like the UPI, this approach was revolutionary and was adopted by Scotland Yard and eventually part of plot points in the Sherlock Holmes- stories. However nearly all credit for developing this was usurped by Edward Henry, Inspector General, Bengal Police under whom Haque and Bose worked. This and a lot more in the three part series of The Rearview Podcast. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Guests: Anand Ranganathan and Sheetal Ranganathan Producer and editor: Jude Francis Weston

    36 min

  7. Apr 6

    India's First Computers | Part 3: How software won

    India’s computing story unfolds in two distinct phases. In the decades after Independence, the country set out to build its own computer hardware. But from the 1970s onwards, that ambition quietly gave way to something else: software. In this concluding episode of the series, we trace how and why that pivot happened. During the 1960s, American universities began partnering with the Indian Institutes of Technology and other academic institutions, drawn by India’s deep pool of technical talent. Instead of manufacturing machines locally, these collaborations imported IBM computers and focused entirely on software and programming. This shift marked the beginning of India’s transformation into the world’s back office for software engineering. We examine how India came to dominate global software labour—and ask the big, unresolved question: why did the country give up on building computer hardware altogether? Hosts: Sobhana K Nair & Jacob Koshy Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    27 min

  8. Mar 30

    India’s First Computers | Part 2: TIFRAC & IBM’s Double Game

    In the mid-1950s, while the world was still reeling from the dawn of the atomic age, a group of visionary scientists in a makeshift barracks in Mumbai were chasing a different kind of power: computational sovereignty. This episode dives into the incredible story of TIFRAC (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator), India’s first indigenous digital computer. Spearheaded by Homi Bhabha and R. Narasimhan, TIFRAC wasn’t just a machine built from vacuum tubes and ferrite cores; it was a bold statement that a newly independent nation could master the most complex technology of the era. But the road to innovation was far from smooth. As India moved toward self-reliance, global tech giants were watching. We explore the shadowy “help” offered by IBM, which dominated the global market at the time. While IBM sought to establish a monopoly by leasing refurbished machines and pushing proprietary systems, the Indian government and TIFR scientists smelled a “technological trap.” Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Guest: Dwaipayan Banerjee, Associate Professor of Science at MIT Producer and editor: Jude Weston

    37 min
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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
    42
  • Copyright
    © The Hindu
  • Show Website
    The Rearview

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