When Silence Becomes Evidence

 

There is an incident from many years ago that I have never forgotten.

An undergraduate student from Electrical Engineering wanted to do his final-year project with me. During one summer, he went to Japan for an internship at a prestigious neuroscience institute. He worked there with a well-known researcher in the field of the hippocampus and spatial navigation.

When he returned, he was full of enthusiasm about what he had learnt.

During one of our discussions, I told him that spatial navigation should not be thought of as something driven solely by the hippocampus. The hippocampus is of course central to spatial cognition, but navigation involves cooperation between multiple systems. The basal ganglia, particularly the striatal system, also play an important role. Different systems support different kinds of navigation strategies, and they interact.

He disagreed.

There was nothing unusual about that. A student should disagree with his teacher when he has reason to. That is how science should work.

So I asked him what his counterargument was.

His answer stunned me.

He said, almost literally:

“This person at Yale and this person in Japan do not think so. They never said that.”

I still remember my reaction.

What exactly was the argument here?

It was not that he had come across an experiment contradicting what I was saying.

It was not that he had found evidence showing that the basal ganglia had no role in spatial navigation.

It was not even that the two famous researchers had explicitly argued against such a role.

They had simply not said it.

And somehow their not saying it had become evidence.

That was the part I found extraordinary.

I had spent decades working on the basal ganglia, reinforcement learning and related problems. I had spent many hours with this student in careful discussion. Yet my claim carried little initial weight in his mind.

By contrast, a casual reading of work from Yale and a two-month internship in Japan had apparently been enough to settle the matter.

The asymmetry was remarkable.

Their silence counted.

My explicit argument did not.

So I did what one should do in science. I went back to the evidence.

I spent hours with him going through experiments by Packard, Knowlton and others on multiple memory systems. We discussed studies showing that animals can solve navigation problems using different strategies, and that hippocampal and striatal systems make distinct but interacting contributions.

Experiment by experiment, the picture became harder to dismiss.

The episode stayed with me because it exposed something deeper than one student's misunderstanding of neuroscience.

It revealed how authority is assigned.

Students, of course, cannot independently verify every claim they encounter. None of us can. We all use reputation as a shortcut. If a scientist has done outstanding work for decades, it is reasonable to give his or her statements greater initial credibility.

Prestige can be a useful prior.

But a prior is not a verdict.

The danger begins when institutional prestige replaces scientific reasoning.

“This person at Yale says so” becomes “this is what neuroscience says.”

“This famous person in Japan never mentioned it” becomes “there is probably nothing important there.”

At that point, authority has quietly displaced evidence.

There was another layer to the incident that bothered me even more.

The student had not merely assigned greater authority to experienced scientists. That would have been understandable.

He had assigned greater authority to distant scientists than to a scientist available to him in his own institution.

This is a pattern I have seen repeatedly in India.

Knowledge from certain places arrives pre-certified.

A statement from Yale, MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge or a prestigious Japanese institute is granted a high initial value.

A statement made locally may have to prove itself from the ground up.

There seems to be an epistemic exchange rate.

The same intellectual currency is valued differently depending on where it is issued.

This is not an argument that Indian students should defer to Indian professors.

Quite the opposite.

I would have been delighted if the student had said:

“I disagree because experiment X shows the opposite.”

That would have been a scientific argument.

The problem was precisely that he was not arguing scientifically.

He was arguing from authority.

And more strikingly, from omission.

“These famous people did not say it.”

That sentence reveals an entire hierarchy of knowledge.

It assumes that if an idea were important, the recognised centres of knowledge production would surely have articulated it.

If they have not, the idea becomes suspect.

That is a profound form of intellectual dependence.

The problem is no longer merely that we admire foreign institutions.

It is that we may unconsciously grant them the authority to define what questions are important, what explanations are legitimate, and even what facts deserve to exist.

Once that happens, researchers outside those recognised centres do not merely have to produce evidence.

They have to overcome an additional burden.

They must first establish their right to be heard.

That burden is especially visible when the person making the argument is close to us.

A professor in one's own department is familiar.

He is seen walking in the corridor, attending meetings, teaching classes, perhaps struggling with administrative forms.

The scientist abroad is encountered through papers, institutional websites, conference talks and reputation.

One appears ordinary.

The other appears canonical.

Distance creates authority.

And familiarity discounts it.

What disturbed me in that old conversation, therefore, was not that a student disagreed with me.

It was that the burden of proof was distributed so unequally.

The famous scientist abroad did not have to make the argument.

He merely had to exist.

The local scientist had to reconstruct the entire argument from experimental evidence.

That is a serious problem for any society that wants to develop an independent intellectual culture.

Science cannot function by reversing the hierarchy and declaring local authority superior.

That would be equally foolish.

The only durable solution is to restore the proper hierarchy:

Evidence first.

Reasoning next.

Reputation after that.

Prestige may tell us whom to listen to.

It should never tell us what to believe.

That student taught me something I have remembered ever since.

Sometimes intellectual dependence reveals itself not in what we believe, but in whose silence we are willing to treat as evidence.

When Knowledge Comes Back to Us from the West

 

Something happened in the parking lot today that left me thinking.

I met an undergraduate student from my department. He had taken one of my courses earlier. He was excitedly telling me about a book he had been reading — Max Bennett’s A Brief History of Intelligence. He spoke about it with the unmistakable excitement of someone who had suddenly seen something important.

It was almost as though he had had a revelation.

I listened for a while, slightly puzzled. Much of what he was describing seemed quite familiar to me — questions about how intelligence evolved, how different parts of the brain contribute to increasingly sophisticated behaviour, how neuroscience and computation might be brought together into a coherent story.

Eventually I asked him:

“Have you read my book?”

He looked uncertain.

“Is that Demystifying the Brain?”

Yes.

He had not read it.

There was a small irony here. This was not a student from some distant university. He was a student in my own department. He had actually taken my course on broadly the same subject. Yet somehow the ideas had not registered then with anything like the force with which they were now arriving through a book written by a Western author.

I do not mention this to criticise the student. Nor is this about Max Bennett’s book, which may well be an excellent book.

What interested me was the phenomenon itself.

I have seen versions of it for decades.

An idea presented by an Indian professor in an Indian classroom often remains simply course material. The same or a similar idea, encountered later in a book by a well-known Western author, suddenly becomes an intellectual discovery.

Why?

The Familiarity Discount

Part of the explanation is probably universal.

We tend to undervalue what is close to us.

The professor whom one sees walking down the corridor, drinking tea in the department, arguing in meetings and occasionally struggling with a projector in class does not possess much mystery. He belongs to everyday life.

The distant author does.

A beautifully produced book, written in confident prose, published internationally, reviewed widely and surrounded by the invisible machinery of intellectual prestige arrives with a certain authority.

The idea is not merely heard.

It is announced.

And therefore the mind attends to it differently.

There is probably a kind of familiarity discount operating here. What comes from nearby appears ordinary. (In fact, when I asked "Why" the student promptly said "familiarity".) What travels a great distance acquires value.

But in India, I think something deeper is happening.

Who Has the Right to Explain the World?

Modern Indian education has trained us remarkably well to acquire knowledge.

But it has not trained us equally well to believe that knowledge can be organised, interpreted and given a new framework from here.

There is a subtle hierarchy operating in our intellectual life.

Western scholars are often allowed to produce the grand narrative.

Indian scholars are expected to contribute details.

A Western scientist may write a book explaining how the brain works, what intelligence is, how consciousness emerged, how civilisation developed or how economies function. We approach such a book prepared to encounter a worldview.

When an Indian scholar attempts the same synthesis, we often approach it differently. We ask: Where was this published? Who has cited it? Which internationally recognised authority supports it?

The difference is profound.

It is not simply that Western work is considered better.

It is that Western work is unconsciously granted the right to define the intellectual landscape itself.

Indian work, meanwhile, is treated as something that may occupy a small region within that landscape.

The Map and the Footnote

This produces a peculiar asymmetry.

The Western narrative becomes the map.

Indian work becomes an annotation on the map.

Once that happens, Indian scholarship becomes strangely optional — even to Indian students.

One may become a neuroscientist in India without reading major books written by Indian neuroscientists. One may study economics without seriously encountering Indian economic thought. One may study psychology, philosophy, history, sociology or education largely through conceptual structures developed elsewhere.

Indian authors may certainly be cited.

But citation is not the same thing as intellectual authority.

The more important question is: Whose framework are we thinking inside?

This is where the parking-lot conversation becomes more than an amusing personal anecdote.

The student had already encountered some of this intellectual territory.

But perhaps he had not encountered it as a territory.

He had encountered lectures, concepts, models, equations and examinations.

Then a book arrived and said, in effect:

Here is the great story. Here is how these pieces fit together. Here is how intelligence emerged.

Suddenly the pieces became a landscape.

The Power of Narrative

This also points to something Indian academics themselves must recognise.

It is not enough to produce good research.

It is not even enough to produce original ideas.

Ideas need narratives.

A civilisation that wishes to become intellectually self-confident must develop the ability not merely to discover facts, but to organise facts into meaningful wholes.

Books matter.

Textbooks matter.

Popular science matters.

Terminology matters.

Diagrams matter.

Public lectures matter.

History matters.

The stories we tell about knowledge matter.

Western academic culture has become extraordinarily effective at this. An idea may begin as a set of technical papers, but gradually an ecosystem forms around it. Review articles integrate it. Books explain it. Conferences reinforce it. Textbooks canonise it. Popular writers carry it into society.

Eventually the framework begins to appear inevitable.

We forget that somebody constructed it.

India produces a considerable amount of research today. What it produces much less frequently are canonical narratives emerging from its own intellectual centres.

That is a serious limitation.

This Is Not a Call to Reject Western Knowledge

The answer, obviously, is not to stop reading Western authors.

That would be absurd.

Science belongs to humanity. Ideas must travel freely. We should read Bennett, Damasio, Dehaene, Friston, Sapolsky and every other thinker who has something interesting to say.

The question is not whether we should listen to them.

The question is whether we can also listen to ourselves.

Intellectual self-confidence does not mean declaring Indian work superior because it is Indian. That would merely replace one prejudice with another.

It means being able to encounter an idea without first asking where it came from.

It means allowing an Indian researcher the same intellectual possibility we instinctively grant a researcher elsewhere: perhaps this person is not merely adding another brick to an existing structure.

Perhaps he or she is proposing a different structure.

When Does an Idea Become Knowledge?

That, ultimately, is what stayed with me after the student walked away.

At what point does an idea become important to us?

When we first hear it?

When we understand it?

Or when somebody with sufficient cultural authority tells us that it is important?

There is something troubling about a society in which an idea can be born locally, taught locally, discussed locally — and yet remain almost invisible until it travels abroad, acquires another voice, and returns wearing the clothes of authority.

Then we welcome it enthusiastically.

Sometimes we even experience it as a revelation.

Perhaps one of the tasks before Indian intellectual life is therefore not merely to produce more knowledge.

It is to recover the confidence to recognise knowledge before it comes back to us from elsewhere.

Roots and Branches: Civilization as the Foundation of India's Economic Growth

 

In recent years, India has witnessed an unprecedented wave of optimism about its economic future. The vision of Viksit Bharat by 2047, projections that India could become the world's third-largest economy, advances in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, and startups—all these have generated tremendous hope about the nation's future.

Yet, amidst this excitement, a fundamental question is rarely asked. What is the true foundation of a nation's long-term prosperity? Is it investment? Technology? Government policy? Or is there something deeper?

Reflecting on this question, one notices two distinct schools of thought in contemporary India.

One school argues that we should follow the path taken by the West. Better infrastructure, industrialization, foreign investment, world-class universities, cutting-edge research, advanced technology, and Nobel Prizes—these, they believe, are the keys to development. In short, their aspiration is to make India "another America."

The other school emphasizes rediscovering India's ancient civilizational heritage—its culture, languages, philosophy, and traditional knowledge. They argue that development remains incomplete if a nation loses touch with its roots.

These two viewpoints are often seen as being in conflict. Each tends to view the other with suspicion. To the first group, the second appears trapped in the past. To the second, the first seems captivated by a rootless modernity.

But this conflict is largely an illusion.

Economic development and civilization are not opposing forces. They represent two different levels of the same evolutionary process.

Economics tells us how wealth is created.

Civilization builds the psychological and social foundations that enable a society to create wealth generation after generation.

In a recent interview, the Indian economist Sanjeev Sanyal made an important observation. Societies that have preserved a deep sense of civilizational confidence over centuries are also better equipped to sustain long-term economic growth. Respect for history, trust in institutions, and the willingness to invest for the future are all qualities that grow within a culture.

Interestingly, the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis, despite coming from a very different political tradition, arrives at a similar conclusion. He argues that economies cannot be understood merely in terms of markets, interest rates, or monetary policy. History, social institutions, the stories people tell themselves, and their shared beliefs are integral to the functioning of an economy.

The two economists may differ in their political outlooks, but they converge on one important point: an economy does not function in a vacuum. It is deeply rooted in a culture, a civilization, and a shared social consciousness.

This brings us to an important distinction.

Cultural pride does not mean empty slogans. It does not mean romanticizing the past or looking down upon others.

Authentic cultural renewal means providing higher education in our own languages, studying our classical texts, making modern scientific knowledge available in Indian languages, reinterpreting our arts, literature, and intellectual traditions for contemporary times, and maintaining a living connection with our civilizational heritage even as we pursue world-class scientific and technological research.

Such cultural confidence nurtures self-respect. Self-respect fosters creativity. Creativity builds institutions. Institutions generate wealth. Economic growth then ceases to be a temporary miracle and becomes a living stream of prosperity flowing across generations.

A tree does not stand because of its branches. It stands because of its unseen roots.

Likewise, the strength of a nation's economy does not rest merely on its industries, highways, and factories. The invisible roots that nourish them—history, culture, language, education, and civilizational self-confidence—are the true foundation.

If India is to become a developed nation by 2047, it will need not only stronger branches, but even stronger roots.

(English translation of my article in Eenadu published today)

 

A Country Becomes Beautiful When Its People Begin to See

 

We live amidst extraordinary landscapes—temple streets layered with history, villages that wake to mist and birdsong, coastlines that shift colour by the hour. And yet, our everyday surroundings often feel neglected. A wall peels and remains unattended. A street gathers clutter until it fades into the background of daily life. Public spaces slowly become no one’s responsibility. We pass through them without really looking.

This is not only a failure of governance. It is a failure of attention.

No policy can beautify a country whose people do not feel beauty in their surroundings. Cleanliness drives can remove dirt; regulations can impose order. But they cannot create the quiet desire to make a place aesthetically alive. That desire emerges only when people begin to see their environment differently—not as a backdrop, but as something worth caring for.

History suggests that such a shift often begins with artists.

In nineteenth-century France, painters like Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne left the city and turned their attention to villages and countryside. They painted fields, cottages, rivers, and narrow streets—ordinary places, rendered with extraordinary attention to light and colour.

Houses on the Hill by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

 

What changed was not the landscape, but perception. The everyday acquired dignity. Villages became objects of admiration. Over time, these images entered public imagination, and places like Provence and Arles came to be seen not just as locations, but as aesthetic identities.

Art did not merely depict beauty. It taught people how to notice it.

A similar sensibility took shape in Japan. Artists such as Hiroshige Ando captured fleeting scenes—a road in the rain, a bridge at dusk, travellers in passing moments. There was no spectacle, only attention to the transient and the ordinary.

This way of seeing did not remain within art. It entered life itself—into how spaces were arranged, how streets were maintained, how small details were treated with care. Over time, it produced an environment where even the simplest settings appear intentional and serene.

Japan’s aesthetic refinement did not arise by accident. It emerged because people learned, gradually, to see.

Cherry Blossoms under the Full Moon by Utagawa Hiroshige

 

In the United Kingdom, this relationship between art and environment has evolved into public participation. The landscape tradition shaped by artists like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable continues today through competitions and programs that bring artists into real settings. People watch, engage, and begin to look more closely at landscapes they might otherwise ignore.

Flatford mill, John Constable

 

Beauty becomes not distant, but shared.

India has already shown, through initiatives like Swachh Bharat Mission, that collective behavior can change. But cleanliness is only a beginning. A place can be clean and still feel lifeless. The deeper challenge is to move from cleanliness to care, from compliance to pride.

That transition cannot be enforced. It must be felt.

What might such a shift look like? It could begin with artists turning their attention to the lived environments of India—streets, neighborhoods, villages, small towns. Painters, photographers, and students could treat these spaces not as problems to be fixed, but as subjects worthy of attention.

When a place is painted, it changes—not physically, but perceptually. A familiar street, seen through an artist’s eye, reveals patterns and relationships that were previously overlooked. Those who live there begin to see it differently.

And that difference matters.

A shopkeeper who sees his street as something that can be beautiful may think twice before adding to its clutter. A resident who sees her locality represented with care may feel pride. A child who sketches her surroundings begins to notice details others miss, forming a relationship with her environment that is attentive and responsible.

Such changes are small, but they accumulate. They influence behavior. They shape expectations. Over time, they create a culture in which beauty is not exceptional, but normal.

Institutions can support this shift—through competitions, exhibitions, and platforms that celebrate local environments. Schools can encourage students to observe and represent their surroundings. Media can highlight places for their aesthetic potential, not only their problems. But these are enablers. The transformation itself is personal.

It lies in how we look.

Do we move through our surroundings without seeing them? Do we accept visual disorder as inevitable? Or do we pause, even briefly, to notice light, colour, and form?

A country becomes beautiful when its people begin to feel that their environment is not neutral. It reflects what we value.

This awareness cannot be imposed from above. It must be cultivated through repeated acts of attention.

The beginning is modest. An artist paints a street. A student sketches a corner. A community takes pride in its surroundings. These acts may seem small, but they reshape perception. And when perception changes, behavior follows.

India does not need to discover beauty. It is already present. What we need is to recover our ability to see it—and, having seen it, to care.

Perhaps the first step is not to clean a street, though that is necessary. It is to look at it, quietly and attentively, as if it were worth painting.