Viswanathan K's Thoughts

It takes time for the law to understand a scientific principle. We may take finger prints and DNA as cast in iron evidence today, but that takes time. Carl Zimmer talks about one such instance involving the famous actor, Charlie Chaplin, in his book on heredity, She has her Mother’s Laugh . A serial womanizer, Chaplin had an affair with Joan Berry, got bored with her, and dumped her for the next girl.   Berry, however, would not go away quietly. In 1943, she filed a paternity suit claiming that her in-the-womb baby was Chaplin’s and demanded he pay for the child’s upbringing. Back then, DNA comparison wasn’t an option, so lawyers tried an inherited trait as a test instead: the blood type.   At that time, scientists knew that the blood variant proteins (A, B and O) had certain characteristics: A and B both dominated over O. This implied certain patterns: if you got A from one parent and O from the other, you’d be an A. To be an O, you needed an O from both parents. Conv...

Shashi Tharoor’s proposal to name whetever new law might (or more likely, might not) come up after the recent rape victim and the reaction from political quarters got me thinking. Forget for a minute whether or not this was just a publicity stunt by Tharoor. Instead focus on the statement itself: isn’t it the sort of comment that many influenced by the West, urban Indians would have voiced? In other words, isn’t it the way “people like us” think? Next, look how our politicians shot his proposal down saying there is no provision to name laws after people. Since when did politicians know or care about any provisions or laws? Apparently it is OK to name every money draining scheme after Queen Sonia’s dead hubby, but hey, naming a law after the person who might be the trigger for that very change? That’s outrageous! Competent or not, sincere or not, this incident shows that people like Tharoor who is much more similar to people like us than the Laloo’s and Mayawati’s of this...