ThinkHer

  As a child, space didn’t feel like science — it felt like magic. Thousands of stars, distant galaxies, mysterious black holes, supernovas, planets, and moons — everything seemed like an imaginative fantasy world. And it wasn’t just space itself. The precisely manoeuvred satellites orbiting Earth, astronauts floating inside space stations, the bulky space suits — all of it was endlessly fascinating. But now, what fascinates me even more is the kind of person it takes to survive there. Individuals whose journeys are built on discipline, resilience, and a deep curiosity about the universe. One such extraordinary figure is Sunita Williams, a record-breaking astronaut, naval officer, engineer, and an inspiration to millions. Sunita Williams  ©NASA Sunita Lyn Williams was born on September 19, 1965, in Euclid, Ohio, USA. Her father, Dr. Deepak Pandya, was originally from Gujarat, India, and her mother, Bonnie Pandya, is of Slovenian descent. Growing up in a multicultural household...

The modern world celebrates innovation as a universal triumph, yet it is often designed with an unspoken assumption: that its users are able-bodied, sighted, mobile, and neurologically typical. People with disabilities frequently encounter environments, technologies, and institutions that do not account for their needs. As a result, they are not only forced to adapt to systems never built for them, but are often compelled to invent solutions to survive, study, work, and live independently. When Louis Braille lost his sight as a child in 19th-century France, existing reading systems for blind people were slow, impractical, and designed without true user insight. Rather than accept intellectual dependence, Braille developed a tactile writing system that allowed blind readers to access language quickly, independently, and efficiently. His invention did more than improve literacy—it reshaped education, autonomy, and cultural participation for blind communities worldwide. Many breakthroughs...

In the decades following independence, science was a necessity for nation-building. It was seen as a strategic tool—science for defence, to secure sovereignty in a fragile geopolitical landscape; science for progress, to modernise agriculture, industry, and infrastructure; science for social well-being, to combat disease, hunger, and poverty; and science for economic growth, to reduce dependence on imports and build indigenous capability. But, at the same time, science was still nascent. The Department of Science and Technology under the Government was yet to come, and the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) was in the formative stage. Laboratories were few, resources were scarce, and institutional support for scientific inquiry was limited.  Science also occupied a complicated moral and political space. It was expected to be modern yet rooted, universal yet national, progressive yet attentive to indigenous traditions. Scientists stood at the intersection of...

Scientific recognition does not always follow discovery. In many cases, credit moves toward senior scientists or institutions rather than toward those who first made the observation or produced the decisive evidence. This pattern is especially visible in the histories of women in science. Lise Meitner, whose work was central to the discovery of nuclear fission, was excluded from the Nobel Prize awarded to her collaborator. Rosalind Franklin’s data played a crucial role in uncovering the structure of DNA, yet her contribution remained largely unacknowledged during her lifetime. These are not isolated oversights but part of a long-standing pattern of omission in the telling of scientific history. Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s story unfolds within this same structure. Born on 15 July 1943 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, she grew up in a home where curiosity about the natural world was quietly encouraged. Her father, an architect and enthusiastic reader, introduced her to astronomy through books, w...

My first encounter with the concept of ecofeminism was during my bachelor’s degree, in an English literature elective. Until then, my ideas of feminism, environmental questions, and scientific debates sat in separate compartments—each treated as though it belonged to a different intellectual world. But the day we read Vandana Shiva’s work as part of the English coursework, ecofeminism offered a language that pulled these strands together. It argued that the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women were not distinct injustices but expressions of the same systems of power—structures built on extraction, hierarchy, and the devaluation of labour and knowledge. As I read and wrote more about gender, politics, and science over the years, the depth of those connections became clearer. Ecofeminism did not merely place women and the environment side by side; it revealed how deeply intertwined our social, political, ecological, and scientific worlds are. What happens to land is insepar...

  Science or mathematics, at its core, is inclusive. It is a space where logic matters the most, where curiosity and brilliance outrank prejudices. An equation doesn't care who solves it, a wind test tunnel doesn't ask for your skin colour. And yet, for so long, the laboratories and research centres of the world have been reserved for the privileged few. In this context, it is interesting to examine how women entered scientific institutions like NASA in the first place. “Computing” — the painstaking process of doing mathematical calculations by hand during that time — was seen as dull, mechanical work. Male engineers found it exhausting, and as an experiment, labs began hiring women instead. They were reliable, precise, and, in the eyes of the institution, inexpensive. It also freed male engineers to do what they considered “real science.” The experiment became a quiet revolution. Women excelled. Many had university degrees in mathematics but had been denied opportunities else...