By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan A judge wants law schools to teach the Vedas alongside the constitution. That is a bigger ask than it sounds INDIA'S SUPREME COURT likes anniversaries. For its 75th, in April 2025, it unveiled a new statue of Lady Justice: sari instead of toga, a book instead of a sword, eyes uncovered rather than blindfolded. At the same event, at a legal conclave hosted by the National Law Institute University in Bhopal, Justice Pankaj Mithal, a sitting judge of the court, went further. Law schools, he argued, should formally teach the Vedas, the Smritis, the Arthashastra, the Manusmriti, the Buddhist Dhammas and the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata as sources of legal reasoning, under a course titled something like "Dharma and Indian Legal Thought." The constitution, he suggested, should not be the only book Lady Justice holds. The Gita, the Vedas and the Puranas ought to join it. Judges opining on curriculum design is unusual enough. What makes the ...
By Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan The Vanishing Translator-Why We Need Science Writing for the Common Person Now More Than Ever Somewhere between the laboratory and the living room, something essential keeps getting lost. A study gets published. Its findings are hedged, qualified, and buried in statistical caveats that took the researchers years to earn the right to make. By the time it reaches the public, it has often been stripped of every nuance that made it honest — reduced to a headline, a meme, or a WhatsApp forward that says either "Scientists Prove X Cures Everything" or "Scientists Admit They Were Wrong All Along." Neither is true. Both spread faster than the truth ever could. This is not a new problem. But it has never been more urgent than it is right now. The Widening Gap Science today moves at a pace no previous generation has witnessed. A single year now produces more peer-reviewed research than entire decades once did. Fields like genomics, climate ...