THE government last week released, after cabinet approval, its much awaited Indian Space Policy after having earlier put out a draft inviting comments. This is the latest in a long series of similar attempts which predictably failed due to faulty assumptions about national priorities in the space sector, about interests and capabilities of the private sector in India, about interests and motivations of foreign entities to invest in the Indian space sector. The current ISP 2023 suffers from a repetition of all these weaknesses and a failure to learn from past mistakes.

MAY 3rd is World Press Freedom Day, a reminder that the role of news organisations is to speak truth to power. Not to manufacture consent – to use Chomsky’s famous words – for the government and the ruling classes. While doing that, I want to remember two men who exemplify the need to speak the truth: Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame and Julian Assange of WikiLeaks. And also of Chelsea Manning, without whom we would not have the proof of what the US was doing, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but all across the globe.

IN 2018, during the previous tenure of the BJP-led government, minister of state for the ministry of human resources development (now renamed education ministry) Satya Pal Singh told parliament, no less, that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was “scientifically wrong,” since humans have always existed on earth as humans, and since “nobody saw an ape turn into a man.” He also said school and college curricula should be suitably changed. The minister was lambasted by scientists and in the press, but remained unfazed and repeated similar statements over time.

THE British saw the Mysore Kingdom of Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali as a significant obstacle to the British Empire in India. The British lost the first three Anglo-Mysore wars before defeating Tipu in the fourth war. The British allies were the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Peshwas. Cutting to the present, the BJP's battle against Tipu is limited: it is about the Karnataka elections. The attack on Tipu is a not-so-thinly veiled attack on the Muslims.

THE unprecedented popularity of ChatGPT has turbocharged the AI hype machine. We are being bombarded daily by news articles announcing humankind’s greatest invention –  Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is “qualitatively different”, “transformational”, “revolutionary”, “will change everything” – they say. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced a major upgrade of the technology behind ChatGPT called GPT4. Already, Microsoft researchers are claiming that GPT4 shows “sparks of Artificial General Intelligence” or human-like intelligence – the Holy grail of AI research.