Science and the City of HLF 2026 Positions Science as Central to Understanding Our Urban, Connected, and Increasingly Complex World, reports Naresh Nunna of Neo Science Hub.
For three days at Sattva Knowledge City in HITEC City, the Hyderabad Literature Festival’s “Science and the City” stream assembled an extraordinary roster of scientists, clinicians, journalists, and thinkers to explore how scientific knowledge shapes—and is shaped by—the urban environments where most of humanity now lives. Coordinated by B. Kinnera Murthy and hosted at Orwell 2, the stream’s 14 sessions moved seamlessly from the microscopic world of bacteriophages to the cosmic questions of human migration, from the physical infrastructure of the internet to the invisible architecture of chronic pain.
What emerged wasn’t simply science communication or public outreach, but a searching examination of science’s relationship with power, truth, society, and the human body. The sessions refused easy answers, confronted uncomfortable truths, and insisted that understanding our world requires moving fluidly between molecular biology and geopolitics, between individual experience and evolutionary history, between what we know and what we’ve systematically refused to see.
Foundations and Fault Lines
The Genetic Memory of Language
The festival opened Saturday morning with “Tongues and Genes: A Cross-hatch of History,” featuring science journalist Laura Spinney and geneticist Dr. K. Thangaraj in conversation with Sahana Ghosh. The session embodied interdisciplinary research at its most challenging—three fields (linguistics, archaeology, genetics) touching different parts of the same elephant, speaking different languages to each other while trying to reconstruct human migration patterns from 5,000 years ago.
Spinney, author of work on Proto-Indo-European languages, emphasized the profound fluidity of language, culture, and genetics. “When we put a label on something, like English or Sanskrit, we’re always talking about a thing that is not one thing,” she explained, challenging audiences to recognize that our categorical thinking obscures constant evolution and borrowing.
Dr. Thangaraj illuminated how endogamy—marriage within social groups practiced for generations in India—has created unique mutation patterns in each community. “Every social group has a unique set of mutations. Sometimes they cause diseases,” he noted, reframing diversity not as cultural hierarchy but as biological reality shaped by social practice.
The session grappled with one of South Asian studies’ most contentious debates: what language did the Harappan civilization speak? Without deciphered texts and with limited ancient DNA from the subcontinent’s challenging climate, the mystery remains. But as Spinney noted, hope lies in archaeology of texts—the possibility of finding a bilingual document, a Rosetta Stone equivalent, among the small fraction of Harappan sites so far excavated.
The conversation revealed how scientific authority operates when certainty is impossible. “There are no right answers. There is simply layers, evidence building towards one theory or another,” Spinney acknowledged, describing her book-writing process as “the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
The Physical Internet and Colonial Continuities
At noon, “Tangled Webs: The Internet’s Infrastructure” brought journalist Samanth Subramanian into conversation with Usha Raman to explore the undersea cables that carry 95% of international data traffic. What could have been a technical discussion became an examination of how colonial pathways of power persist in digital infrastructure.
Subramanian’s central revelation: “You can call up a map of telegraph lines from the 1850s or the 1860s, and you can call up the map of sea cables today, and you will see how strikingly identical they are.” The thickest concentrations then and now run from Western Europe to the eastern United States. The only significant change is the dense network in Southeast Asia and the China Sea, reflecting China’s economic emergence.
Even the materials embodied colonial logic. Telegraph cables were coated in gutta-percha, latex extracted from trees in the Malay Peninsula. “The empire basically extracted this latex, coated the telegraph lines in it and then ran these telegraph lines back to Southeast Asia… to control, continue controlling those very territories.”
But the session’s most alarming finding concerned recent consolidation. Four companies—Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—now dominate undersea cable infrastructure. “Two out of every three new cables are being laid by one of these four big tech companies,” Subramanian reported. These same companies control the platforms, the data, and now the physical backbone through which the world’s information flows.
His visit to Tonga, whose single international cable was severed by a volcanic eruption, revealed the extent of our dependency. Banking ceased. Solar panels stopped working because they couldn’t check the internet for software updates. The country was “thrown back to the 1820s, to a pre-telegraph age.”
Taiwan presents an even more precarious case, with 15 cables vulnerable to Chinese gray-zone warfare on one side and geological instability on the other. For the first time in 150 years, Taiwan is considering removing cable coordinates from the public domain—abandoning transparency to prevent sabotage.
Science, Society, and the Failures of Authority
The afternoon’s “Science and Society” session, featuring theoretical physicist Suvrat Raju and materials scientist Satyanarayana Bheesette in conversation with Tejah Balantrapu, confronted the fraught relationship between scientific authority and public trust with unflinching honesty.
Raju articulated what scientists often avoid discussing: their systematic failure to speak up on contentious public issues where powerful interests conflict with ordinary people’s welfare. Taking pandemic modeling as an example, he described how “a very prominent set of establishment scientists” produced models claiming “we can mathematically show that the decisions taken by the Indian government have been optimal.”
“That was of course what the government wanted to hear. But later it led to very bad policy,” including predictions that India had crossed the worst before the second wave. More damning: “The scientists who did this didn’t face any consequences” within the scientific community.
The India-based Neutrino Observatory became a case study in how scientific dishonesty poisons public trust. While neutrino physics poses no military or environmental threat, Raju found it “very hard to persuade” people’s movements of this because simultaneous debates over the Kudankulam nuclear plant saw the Atomic Energy Commission chairman claim “the chance of an accident is one in infinity.”
“When you say that in one case, which is clearly a false statement that people can see, and then you make a true statement in the other case… people don’t trust you,” Raju explained. The lesson: “Not just that people are being irrational but people see the fact that scientists sometimes are betraying their trust.”
The session’s most heated exchange came during Q&A, when Ram Kanneganti challenged the fundamental assumption that developing nations should invest in basic science. Citing the Asian Tigers’ model—”borrow the science, apply it, and become rich, and then invest in science”—he asked why India should fund neutrino observatories when that money could address immediate development needs.
The response reframed the debate entirely: “Given that we are such a large country, we are one-sixth of humanity, I think it would really be an injustice if we were to say that there are basic questions about the world and we can’t explore.” The argument wasn’t economic but ethical—should 1.4 billion people be relegated to perpetually borrowing others’ discoveries?
Urban Ecology and Human-Created Crises
Saturday concluded with “Animal Matters: Observing Behaviour,” where Anindita Bhadra and Deepa Padmanaban, moderated by Somdatta Karak, explored our dysfunctional relationships with urban animals.
Bhadra’s work on free-ranging dogs challenged Global North research biases. When she began studying street dogs, reviewers commented “dogs don’t live on streets” and “how can you do an experiment giving biscuits to dogs? Dogs don’t eat biscuits.” Sixteen years later, labs in the Global North now travel to the Global South to study free-ranging dogs, “following on our footsteps.”
Her research reveals sophisticated perceptual abilities. Dogs recognize humans primarily through visual and vocal cues, not smell. They favor the color yellow. They’re more likely to beg from people making eye contact. Prolonged staring makes them uncomfortable—they look away and move away.
But Bhadra’s sharpest critique targeted well-meaning feeders: “I think we have as humans created this problem by overfeeding dogs.” Traditional practice involved giving leftovers to neighborhood scavengers. Now concentrated daily feeding with rice and khichdi creates overpopulation, obesity, territorial aggression, and the very problems used to justify harsh control measures.
“Who gives us the right to play God?” she asked. “First you overfeed them, you vaccinate them and you take care of all their puppies and make them all survive whereas naturally only 20% would survive… And then you say there are too many dogs, now we go neuter them.”
Padmanaban’s Invisible Housemates chronicled creatures we’ve categorized as pests—cockroaches, rats, pigeons, sparrows. Her research revealed unexpected complexity: cockroaches differentiate between siblings and non-siblings to avoid incest; isolated cockroaches show signs of depression; rats demonstrate empathy.
But the deeper theme was human bungling. In 15th-16th century Europe and 1958 China, sparrows were deemed pests destroying crops and systematically killed. Then crops were destroyed even more—by the worms and pests sparrows had been eating, contributing to China’s Great Famine.
Biologist Rob Dunn’s observation captured our fickle relationship with nature: “When sparrows are rare, we tend to like them. When they are common, we tend to hate them. Our fondness is fickle and predictable, but it says more about us than them.”
Bodies, Movement, and Memory
The Science of Motion as Social Transformation
Sunday morning’s “The Science of Movement and an Active Lifestyle,” presented in partnership with Hyderabad Runners Society, brought together Dr. Rajat Chauhan (sports medicine physician and La Ultra founder), Keerthana Swaminathan (sports psychologist), and Rajesh Vetcha (Hyderabad Runners Society founder) with moderator Rajesh Velcha.
Chauhan opened with a paradox that defied achievement culture: he lowered the entry barrier to his brutal high-altitude ultra-marathon from 222 kilometers to 111 kilometers. “Indians started participating, because for 111, they were qualifying.” Regular people completed 111 kilometers, then 222, then 333. In 2019, an Indian became one of only three people worldwide to complete 555 kilometers.
“That’s courtesy, lowering the bar rather than raising it,” Chauhan emphasized. “If you want to accomplish more, do less… Start with less and get very far.”
But his most transformative work targets girls in Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas—residential schools serving India’s most marginalized girls from broken homes and minority backgrounds in Mewat district, Haryana. The “Run to Fly” program intervenes during puberty, when girls face systematic discouragement from physical activity.
“You’ve been playing with your cousins, your friends, your family, all this stuff. And things start changing… and you’re told not to play with them, and you’re impure… don’t go to the temples,” Chauhan explained. “That’s the first phase, when you’re told not to move, by everyone. By so-called well-meaning people.”
The program’s efficiency is remarkable: 10 hours per year training 3-4 older girls who train younger students. 3,000-4,000 girls have participated. Evaluation focuses not on athletic performance but confidence, self-perception, and ambition. “They dream about becoming a constable, they dream about becoming a nurse. What I’ve changed for them is… why don’t you plan becoming a doctor or a surgeon? Why don’t we try and think about becoming the IPS officer, why only a constable?”
Chauhan’s blunt assessment: “Medals are way overrated. They don’t change a thing.”
An audience member asked the session’s most uncomfortable question: what are the physical and mental benefits of running ultra distances, and what’s the bare minimum that’s enough?
Chauhan’s answer was characteristically direct: “If you do 7 or 10 kilometers, you’re doing enough. After that, it’s about madness.”
The moderator interjected with humor: “It’s not IQ—Intelligence Quotient. It’s Insanity Quotient.”
Scars as Biological Memory
“Scars: Totems of Memory,” featuring Dr. Sayan Basu (L.V. Prasad Eye Institute) and Dr. Sveta Chakrabarti (Manipal Institute of Regenerative Medicine) with moderator Rohini Subrahmanyam, explored how bodies encode, transmit, and remember damage across cellular, immunological, and tissue scales.
Basu explained scarring’s evolutionary logic: “From an evolutionary point of view, we prioritize survival over function. Whenever there is trauma or wounding, the body tries to heal as quickly as possible, which helps us survive the trauma.”
Using Deadpool as illustration: “If you have seen the movie which correctly portrays how it would happen… he has to spend days or weeks when his limbs are growing back. And he is very vulnerable during that period.” Evolutionary vulnerability is fatal. Scarring is triage: stop bleeding, close wounds, survive today—worry about optimal function later.
But in the cornea—one of the body’s few completely transparent tissues—scarring creates opacity that interferes with vision. Basu’s clinical and research work focuses on flipping the switch from repair to regeneration, using stem cells, biomaterials, and 3D bioprinting to achieve scarless corneal healing.
Chakrabarti’s work revealed that wounding isn’t a local event. Blood cells migrate to distant organs, including the gut, days after muscle wounds. “These blood cells can actually move to different sites of the body and tell even very distant sites that there has been an injury and some sort of a change has to happen at the organ function.”
When this communication is blocked genetically in fruit flies, the gut becomes leaky and microbiota changes. The finding has human parallels: “Patients of atopic dermatitis who are scratching a lot, there are changes seen in their gut as well.”
Most remarkably, even “primitive” innate immune cells—which conventional immunology says can’t maintain memory—show epigenetic memory. Wounded flies survive deadly pathogens better than naive flies. “Because they’ve had an injury, their DNA is opened up. Next time a pathogen comes, they produce all the peptides that would be needed to kill the microbes.”
The session concluded with a philosophical question: in a future where molecular control allows scarless healing, what should we choose to remember?
Basu emphasized that complete elimination would be dangerous: “You don’t want to get rid of the body’s ability to scar… But you may want to control how badly it scars or how severely it scars.” Current increases in adult-onset allergies stem partly from insufficient childhood exposure.
Chakrabarti agreed: “The reason we scar is to keep us safe and survive… Maybe this effect of the scar might in fact educate your immune system for the future.”
Lessons from India’s Space and Atomic Pioneers
Monday morning’s “Outliers in Science” brought the festival’s final session into conversation with its opening themes—how does a developing nation build scientific capacity while managing immediate needs? Dr. Dinesh C. Sharma (author of Space: The India Story) and Bakhtiar K. Dadabhoy (author of Homi J. Bhabha: A Life), moderated by Tejaswini Dhurde, examined institution-building in post-independence India as a model for navigating today’s AI revolution.
Sharma emphasized that India’s space and atomic energy programs succeeded because “the founders had a clear vision and pathway right at the beginning.” These institutions grew “in the shadow of scarcity of resources, particularly foreign exchange, and the weight of a bureaucracy that India inherited in 1947″—constraints that forced innovation rather than paralysis.
Vikram Sarabhai’s approach proved particularly instructive. His “project-oriented approach” and “emphasis on developing applications of space technology when India did not even have a rocket or a satellite” created ISRO’s distinctive work culture. He nurtured teams to deliver concrete results while building institutional capacity—a model relevant as India confronts AI’s demands.
Dadabhoy painted Homi Bhabha as “a multifaceted personality—a Renaissance man, a lover of music and an accomplished painter, besides being an accomplished scientist and institution builder. He was both a visionary and a doer—a man of thought as well as a man of action.”
The session connected directly to Saturday’s debate over research priorities. Ram Kanneganti had argued India should borrow science and become wealthy before investing in fundamental research. The Bhabha-Sarabhai model offered a third path: build institutions with clear applications while maintaining space for fundamental inquiry, navigate scarcity through vision rather than abandoning ambition, and recognize that institution-building itself is scientific work requiring both thought and action.
As India enters the AI era facing familiar constraints—limited resources, bureaucratic inheritance, pressure for immediate returns—the post-independence pioneers’ success offers not a blueprint but a reminder that visionary institution-building under constraint has always been India’s outlier contribution to global science.
Beyond the Documented Sessions
The stream’s remaining sessions explored equally vital terrain. “When Viruses Became Our Salvation” examined bacteriophages as alternatives to antibiotics in an age of antimicrobial resistance. “When Pain Becomes Invisible” featured neuroscientist Dr. Arnab Barik and endometriosis surgeon Dr. Vimee Bindra revealing why 270 million Indians suffer chronic pain and why women’s pain, dismissed as “normal,” takes a devastating 7-10 years to diagnose.
“India’s Scientific Ecosystem at a Crossroads” explored the delicate balance between basic research and commercial innovation, while “Institution-Building in India’s Scientific Journey” examined how post-independence science leaders navigated scarcity to build world-class programs—lessons for the AI era.
The Stream’s Deeper Architecture
What made “Science and the City” extraordinary wasn’t any single session but the intellectual architecture connecting them. The stream moved fluidly between scales—from DNA folding to internet infrastructure, from individual pain experience to population health, from microscopic immune cells to geopolitical cable routes.
Several themes emerged across sessions:
The Question of Memory: How do bodies, societies, and systems remember past trauma? Genetic mutations encode endogamy. Immune cells remember pathogens through epigenetics. Scar tissue preserves structural memory of injury. The internet’s cables follow colonial telegraph routes. Each form of memory shapes present function while resisting change.
Power and Infrastructure: Whether undersea cables, scientific institutions, or feeding networks for stray dogs, infrastructure isn’t neutral. It embodies the interests of those who built it, concentrates power in specific hands, and creates dependencies that outlast their original justification.
The Failure of Authority: Scientists who model pandemics to serve government interests. Tech companies controlling the internet’s physical backbone. Doctors dismissing women’s pain as normal. Expertise without integrity breeds justified distrust that undermines even legitimate scientific work.
Visibility and Invisibility: Free-ranging dogs studied as model organisms. “Pest” species revealing unexpected intelligence. Chronic pain that medical systems refuse to see. Undersea cables carrying 95% of data traffic. The invisible housemates. What we systematically refuse to see shapes us as powerfully as what we study.
The Violence of Care: Overfeeding dogs creates the problems used to justify culling them. Systematic discouragement of girls’ movement masquerades as protection. Clean environments prevent immune system education. Sometimes harm wears the face of concern.
Ethics of Knowledge: Should India invest in neutrino physics or infrastructure? Who decides what research matters? When does pursuit of understanding become a luxury the poor subsidize for the wealthy? The questions weren’t resolved because they’re genuinely difficult.
A Festival That Trusted Its Audience
Perhaps most remarkably, “Science and the City” trusted its audience with complexity, contradiction, and unresolved tension. Scientists admitted failures. Researchers acknowledged uncertainty. Experts presented competing frameworks without declaring winners.
The sessions refused the easy narratives that science communication often defaults to—”science will save us,” “traditional knowledge is superior,” “technology is neutral,” “experts know best.” Instead, they insisted that understanding our urban, connected, crisis-prone world requires examining how knowledge is produced, who benefits from specific framings, and what systematic blindnesses our categories create.
When Suvrat Raju argued that scientists must speak up on contentious public issues with “basic honesty and scientific integrity,” he wasn’t offering a simple prescription. He was acknowledging that the scientific community has systematically failed this responsibility, that failure has consequences, and rebuilding trust requires more than better communication—it requires scientists willing to challenge power even when that power funds their research.
When Anindita Bhadra said “let them be” about urban animals, she wasn’t being naive about overpopulation. She was diagnosing how human intervention—feeding, vaccinating, controlling—creates the very problems it claims to solve, a pattern visible from stray dogs to sparrows to our own immune systems.
When Samanth Subramanian traced undersea cables back to colonial telegraph routes, he wasn’t simply noting historical continuity. He was revealing how pathways of power persist through technological change, how four American tech companies now control infrastructure that shapes global information flow, and how geopolitical tensions are bifurcating the internet itself.
Science in the City, Cities in Science
The stream’s title proved prophetic. This wasn’t science explained for urban audiences but science understood as fundamentally urban—shaped by cities’ density, diversity, infrastructure needs, and social conflicts.
Urban dogs navigating human spaces through visual and vocal cues. Fruit flies as model organisms for understanding inter-organ communication. Corneal scarring in a city with one of the world’s premier eye institutes. Internet cables landing in coastal cities that were colonial ports. The science and the city were inseparable.
But cities also appeared as sites where science confronts its limits. Where expert recommendations conflict with lived experience. Where global knowledge systems meet local practice. Where what counts as evidence, whose pain matters, and which animals deserve to live become political questions that expertise alone can’t answer.
The Hyderabad Literature Festival’s third edition, held once again at Sattva Knowledge City in HITEC City, positioned science not as separate from but central to understanding literature, culture, politics, and human experience. The “Science and the City” stream delivered on that promise, assembling 14 sessions that moved from molecular mechanisms to geopolitical infrastructure, from evolutionary history to contemporary crisis, from individual bodies to population health.
What emerged was more than science communication. It was an examination of how knowledge operates in a world where expertise has been weaponized, where authority has been abused, where care masks control, and where the invisible—whether cables, immune cells, chronic pain, or despised creatures—shapes our lives more powerfully than what we choose to see.
As the three days concluded, audiences left not with easy answers but with better questions, not with reassuring narratives but with productive discomfort, not with faith in expertise but with frameworks for evaluating claims, interrogating power, and recognizing their own systematic blindnesses.
In a city that houses some of India’s premier research institutions and pharmaceutical giants, in a nation grappling with development priorities and scientific ambitions, in a world where technology concentrates power while promising liberation, “Science and the City” offered what literature festivals at their best provide: space to think together about questions too important for easy resolution and too urgent for academic abstraction.
The science was rigorous. The stakes were clear. The conversations continue.
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