Susan Sontag On Photography.

Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon - one that is as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy and invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all knowing and responds to the slightest pressure of the will. it's as simple as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger.

Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravangances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. The camera does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems all bluff - like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife or tool between his legs. Still there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they neever see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is the sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is the sublimated murder.

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situation where people are switching from bulllets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in east Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture. Guns have metamorphed into cameras in the earnst comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Penguin Classics, 1977

Girly Science.

Does Science have a gender? Does Gender have a science?

Is this an uncool question to ask in today's political climate? In the days when when we have ample of evidence that girls do just as well in math exams as the boys? Why does the choice of a scientific career come and stall at something as mundane as a math test? what does that have to say about career choices anyways?

Gulab Devi (45) of Harmara village in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district comes across as the quintessential rural woman from Rajasthan. Dressed in the traditional ghagra-choli (long skirt and blouse), Gulab is the sole bread-earner for her four children and her ailing husband who hasn’t had a job in the 24 years of their marriage. Gulab is completely illiterate. Ask her what she does for a living, and she’ll tell you she makes electronic circuits and charges for solar lighting panels. And before you start wondering whether you heard her wrong, she’ll tell you that she also installs and maintains hand pumps, water tanks and pipelines. Not only is she running her household comfortably with her salary from this work, she is also one of the most respected members of her community.
Gulab is one of the many Barefoot Solar Engineers (BSEs) working across eight Indian states (Rajasthan, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Uttaranchal, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Sikkim) to establish solar energy systems in areas where electricity supply is either non-existent or highly erratic. A majority of these engineers, mostly women, are illiterate like Gulab or semi-literate at best. But they talk of transformers, coils and condensers like other women would talk of cooking and sewing. Their dexterity with spanners and screwdrivers is impressive, to say the least.

Probably scientific enterprise is exactly what we in the 'comfortable' world forget to instill in our school children... the fun in exploration, the excitement in figuring out a problem, but most importantly everyday issues that get solved by ingenious scientific enquiry. Instead we keep on bickering about 'gender' representations in one field of science or the other...