Geek Nation is an impressionistic look at Indias changing scientific landscape through the buttery lens of an outsider. Taking her cue from Indias increased R&D spend,Angela Saini,a British journalist and self-professed geek,embarks on a pushpin-marked pilgrimage through the birthplace of the geek,seeking a Pavlovian affirmation of the greatness of the birthplace of her father,a chemical engineer. India never managed to live up to his dreams until now. The success of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre is among the first signs that India may have what it takes to become a scientific superpower in the same league as the United States,Europe and Japan. It seems like India is being pulled out of poverty and transformed into a technological giant, she writes,in a voice rendered cottony by a visit to Thumba,the opening act to a cross-country chronicle of scientific renaissance. At first,all seems to be going well for Saini,as she sets about investigating,if tentatively,the legacy of scientific temper that Jawaharlal Nehru,Indias other important geek after Vikram Sarabhai,bequeathed to his country. For Saini,Nehru is the dreamboat that has docked India at the hall of scientific fame for the first time since Aryabhatta and Bhaskara,and thus the key to why we became a country of swots,nerds,dweebs,boffins and dorks. One of the first people she interviews,Udupi Ramachandra Rao,former chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation,is a geek from Nehrus time who hasnt heard of geek,the word Saini uses to qualify the India of scientific possibility. . to me,at least,geekiness is all about passion. Its about choosing science and technology or another intellectual pursuit. and devoting your life to it, she tells Rao. Saini wilfully looks for this brand of geekiness all over: at chess tournaments and physics Olympiads,in the scuzzy lecture halls of the Indian Institutes of Technology,between the pages of extant manuscripts in esoteric Vedic research libraries,behind the glass and glamour of Bangalores tech parks,even in the murky annals of forensic science. Does she suffer an epiphany? No. Instead,Sainis effusive optimism snags like a stocking at every step,and she begins to entertain the terrible possibility that India may not,after all,be a rediscovered nation of geeks. The IITs turn out to be a technological dystopia where students overwork themselves,sometimes to death,to pass and snag a job,not the hothouses of intellectual curiosity and innovation she had hoped to find. Dubious lie detectors devised by a nutty geek spit out judgment on dozens accused of murder,prompting a perturbed Saini on one of several navel-gazing tangents. Worse,an Enlightenment has escaped India,and religiosity coexists with and tries to justify through obscure Hindu texts modern science. Craving chicken nuggets and armed with insect spray,Saini hurtles through Indias socio-cultural milieu trying to make sense of its paradoxes. She drives to Lavasa,the hi-tech,work-in-progress township in the Western Ghats,a perilous two hours away from Pune,and finds it a geeks paradise and a paradise lost to the poor. After a stopover at a farm widows home in Vidarbha,she waxes incredulous about the nationwide opposition to GM crops,and takes heart in the transgenic wonders under development at the National Botanical Research Institute in Lucknow. All along,adding to her consternation is the Indian IT industry,which,after a decade of growth,is still a black hole for dronelike programmers. She meets Infosys founder N.R. Narayana Murthy; his humility and values win her approval,but his companys research spend does not. E-governance kiosks in Rajasthan enthrall her,while the Unique Identification Project,Aadhaar,perhaps the geekiest exercise of its scale anywhere in the world,only gets an honourable mention. And IBMs Spoken Web is spread across 10 pages or so,before being brusquely brushed under the carpet of first-world reductionism. If the Spoken Web is meant to bring the Internet to the illiterate masses then,in effect,this is a technology that is bypassing the need to read at all Wouldnt it be better to just educate everyone? Saini asks,in all earnestness. For all her deliberation,however,Saini is often easily impressed,ready to wolf down cheery factoids on robotics competitions and Techfests and pound out a Theory of Everything Geeky About India. the country does seem to be on the verge of a transformation, she enthuses,upon encountering the first creative spark,rare as a vein of gold if you were to believe her a few dozen pages earlier,at the IITs and among start-ups. This tiring see-saw of high excitement and disenchantment goes on like some infinite balancing act,broken in places by a few lucid accounts of high-quality research. In a noteworthy report,Saini neatly pieces together the tuberculosis puzzle,and meets the drivers of the Open Source Drug Discovery,a project under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research that brings together thousands of scientists from across the world in an effort to invent a new drug for the disease. In the end,the trouble with Geek Nation is not that it is uncertain about Indias emergence as a scientific superpower; it is that Saini cannot decide what she is: an Indian-origin engineer proud of her countrys geeky muscle,or a foreigner looking disparagingly at a wannabe space power.
