ThinkHer

  How long should someone wait for society to change? Perhaps it is easier and certainly faster to push yourself than to wait for the world to change and become more accepting.   History is filled with women who first learn to trust their abilities, persist despite resistance, and continue their work even when recognition is absent. Forcing society to acknowledge what it had overlooked. Darshan Ranganathan's life is a striking example of this reality. She did not wait for academia to become more accommodating. She did not wait for institutions to recognise her potential. She simply continued doing science day after day, year after year, driven by curiosity and conviction. Over the years, she became one of India's most prolific chemists, not because the system made room for her, but because she refused to let the system determine her worth. Darshan Ranganathan  Born on 4 June 1941 in Delhi to Shanti Swarup and Vidyavati Markan, Darshan was, by all accounts, a lively a...

The popular practices in history of science narratives still carry the legacy of Eurocentric approaches shaped by European colonialism. For example, the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the rise of European universities are frequently imagined as a long intellectual dusk, an age of theological dominance, institutional fragility, and scientific slowdown. Yet the same centuries contain a, parallel arc of knowledge-making that unfolded across Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba, and Samarkand. Between roughly the eighth and thirteenth centuries, these cities formed a dense network of translation, observation, and mathematical innovation that modern historians refer to, cautiously and retrospectively, as the Islamic Golden Age. The contrast is not simply one of “stagnation versus progress,” as older narratives suggest, but of uneven institutional geography. While parts of Western Europe were reorganising after the collapse of Roman administrative systems, Abbasid Baghdad deve...