Book description
Take the way we go about buying a new car. We identify an auspicious
date and time, then proceed to break a coconut, plonk a plastic deity of
Ganesha on the dashboard, and zoom off at great speed, refusing to wear
our seatbelts. Supposedly educated, smart and tech-savvy, Indians can be
surprisingly unscientific in their daily lives. Think of the crores
spent every year remodelling homes according to vaastu, in the hope of
changing luck; and the continued horrors of female infanticide, because
it is only the son who can help the father's journey to heaven… This
unsparingly critical, scathingly analytical book points out the shocking
lack of scientific temper among the vast majority of Indians, and how
this holds us up as a nation in the twenty-first century.
