Ganesha on the Dashboard

Take the way we go about buying a new car. We identify an auspicious date and time, then proceed to break a coconut, plonk a plastic deity of Ganesha on the dashboard and zoom off at great speed, refusing to wear our seat belts. Supposedly educated, smart and tech-savvy, Indians can be surprisingly unscientific in their daily lives. Think of the crores spent every year remodelling homes according to Vaastu, in the hope of changing luck; and the continued horrors of female infanticide, because it is only the son who can help the father’s journey to heaven . . . This unsparingly critical, scathingly analytical book points out the shocking lack of scientific temper among the vast majority of Indians, and how this holds us up as a nation in the twenty-first century.