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Finding rabbit holes in spreadsheets
I joined the archives as a subject-matter expert in physics, to help create metadata – essentially information about the existing digitized archival materials that makes it easier to be discovered, managed, and preserved. My role was to look at physics-related material at the archives through the lens of someone trained in the field. During my… read more
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K S Krishnan’s Annotated Map of South India
A scientist, a snail researcher, and a historian observe and reflect on one object – a map belonging to neurobiologist K S Krishnan. The map is one of the many papers that document a collaborative project during the early 2000s, initiated by K S Krishnan to collect cone snails from across the east and west… read more
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The Almirah – In Search of Jamal Ara’s Papers
“”Birds of Bihar… Birds of Bihar…” she would keep mumbling this over and over again in her last days. I am not sure why she kept repeating the phrase. Perhaps it was a draft of a book that she was writing, or a project she wanted to undertake. I do not really know. But as… read more
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Out of focus
As a biology major interested in the history of science and medicine, the P K Sukumaran collection piqued my interest. For one, he hailed from Thalassery in Kerala, north of my hometown, and his research on understanding sickle cell anemia was something that we often came across in newspaper reports and biology textbooks. But my… read more
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Mani Ramaswami on Chasing Conotoxins and Bringing Biology to the Beach
This interview developed from initial conversations that took place in 2025, when Mani Ramaswami visited the Archives at NCBS exhibition, ‘Untitled, Undated’, and shared his thoughts on an exhibit displaying the cone snail/conotoxin project by biologist K S Krishnan. A few weeks later, the exhibition curator, Dhatri, sat down with Mani, who joined online from… read more
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Cranes, Ladakh, and Sálim Ali
At first glance, doesn’t it seem like a typical field image from the 1970s? Men with binoculars and cameras, an all-male group of researchers in the foreground of a barren landscape. Let’s zoom in now: there are soldiers in uniform, military jeeps, and also what appear to be barracks in the background. Now, for me,… read more
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Reflections on OH Workflows – With special focus on Sensitivity Reviews
My first introduction to Oral Histories was in 2022, when I began summarising interviews with conservationists at the Archives at NCBS. The summary would consist of a document with archival identifiers, a biography, and an abstract featuring indexed headings with details under each. Bound by deadlines, however, we had to streamline this time-consuming process. The… read more
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“Launch”
February is archives at its busiest. Anyone dropping by the space will find the team running down corridors with a trolley full of boxes, frantically removing staple pins, chugging down sugar with extra coffee, drowning in front of spreadsheets, and having meetings after meetings because the big ol’ “launch” is approaching. In Archives at NCBS… read more
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Archiving a cytogeneticist’s material
I immensely enjoyed archiving A P Krishnaja’s material, primarily because as a Biology graduate with molecular biology research experience, sifting through her laboratory data felt like looking through a window to the past. Various laboratory methods have evolved over time to accommodate the growing needs of the researcher, but certain routines have been preserved from… read more
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Federico or a manifesto on the ethics of description
If I speak – If in this minute, I prise open the spines of old texts and extract the root Mirror it ten-fold to consequence and stymy it in time – have I caught history? Like one might catch a cold? Is it upon me, the malign epic, the stentorian saga? By my naming do… read more
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