Vedic Mythology About Aviation

In the 12 January edition of Hindustan Times, eminent Nehruvian Ramchandra Guha expressed dismay over the controversy surrounding the Indian Science Congress where it was claimed that ancient Indians were well versed in aeronautical technology among other things.
First of all Mr. Guha should be informed that the the section under which the much controversial paper was included has itself been titled ‘Vedic Mythology about Aviation’. So the Indian science congress organizers were clear about the distinction between mythology and aeronautics.
Now it is often mentioned in many non-Hindutva journals also that Shivkar Bapuji Talpade a Maharashtrian scientist did make a contraption fly in the air before a large audience in the Chowpathy beach of
I was living in Bangalore, presented as the ‘centre’ of the ‘knowledge revolution’ allegedly sweeping my country. But I suspected that writing code was not necessarily the same thing as producing original scientific knowledge. And I knew for a fact that Bangalore itself did not have a single decent library, while the city’s main university had not produced much original research in the past three decades. To be sure, there were isolated examples of excellence. In my city, we had the Indian Institute of Science and the National Centre for Biological Sciences, both reasonably well-functioning centres of scientific research. Elsewhere in my country, there were such places as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad. And both Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University had some fine social scientists and historians on their faculty. Yet in the aggregate, the quality and quantity of cutting-edge research was woefully meagre for a country as large as ours. The talk of India becoming a ‘knowledge superpower’ was not just premature. It was, frankly, absurd.
If one notices the timeline, Mr. Guha mentions that the past ‘three decades’ meaning 1960-1990 timeline: one would be baffled. Is Mr. Guha unaware that these were the decades when India was under the firm grip of the Nehruvian establishment which gifted the nation with a stagnant rate of economic growth derisively
But what is equally important to recognize is the condition to which these institutions were reduced by the Nehruvian ideal of socialism. Tripathi informs us that 45 labs were established by Nehru. Thanks to Nehru’s dogged commitment to socialism, which has been resolutely practiced by his party since his demise, these labs became institutionally decrepit and pathologically unproductive.
In 1989, a Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) lab director had remarked that “asking scientists to do industrial research is close to prostitution” – such was the mindset of the leaders of government research laboratories. The disdain towards industry and profit defined the CSIR culture for decades – the cue came from Nehru who was acerbic towards private industry, and famously said once that profit is a dirty word…As for DRDO, it continues to be an inefficient, bureaucratic organization. It begun developing the Arjun tank in 1972, and it took 32 years for the tank to enter production. Costs for the Arjun tank escalated from Rs 155 million in 1974 to Rs 3 billion by 1995. DRDO’s Tejas light-combat aircraft development program commenced in 1983, and took some two decades to complete its maiden flight, finally inducted into the Air Force last year after nearly almost 30 years. Smaller-scale projects that DRDO has worked on include mosquito repellents, body creams