Renowned radio astrophysicist Govind Swarup was a driving force behind India’s efforts in the field of radio astronomy.
(Getty)
There’s a lot of history on Indian science and the people who contributed to it. What challenges did you face in finding all these anecdotes?
It took a long time. I didn’t finish (the research). Covid-19 finished it for me. I would have loved to take another three months. As you can see, the final chapters are a bit shorter. And that is by design—it is not necessarily because of covid—because biology started very late. A major challenge was uneven documentation. This is a problem about any history that you write of India. It may be rich in some areas and not in others. But you cannot write an uneven book, so you have to work that much harder to get more information. If you can’t, you have to bring down