Part 1: El Niño: How a Warm Patch of Pacific Water Came to Rule India’s Monsoon

Part 1: El Niño: How a Warm Patch of Pacific Water Came to Rule India’s Monsoon

How can a patch of warm water thousands of kilometres from India determine whether its farms flourish or fail? And how did a mathematician help uncover one of the greatest hidden connections in the planet’s weather? In the first episode of this three-part story, we trace the strange history of El Niño and the centuries-long struggle to predict the Indian monsoon. The journey begins off the coast of Peru, where fishermen gave a deceptively tender name—the Christ Child—to warm waters that devastated their rich fisheries. From there, we travel to nineteenth-century India, where catastrophic famines made forecasting the monsoon a matter of life and death. Early meteorologists chased sunspots and elusive cycles, while an Australian astronomer glimpsed something extraordinary: droughts thousands of kilometres apart seemed to occur in step. The breakthrough came with Gilbert Walker, an eccentric Cambridge mathematician fascinated by birds, flutes, ice-skating and boomerangs. With the painstaking calculations of Indian clerks—including the remarkable Hem Raj—Walker uncovered a vast atmospheric seesaw across the Pacific: the Southern Oscillation. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Producer and editor: Jude Weston

India's Dinosaurs | Part 3: The day it all ended

What if we told you that one of the most extraordinary dinosaur fossils ever found was in India — a snake caught mid-strike, coiled around dinosaur eggs, frozen in time for 67 million years? In this series, The Rearview, we have travelled from the earliest dinosaurs to the giants that walked the Indian subcontinent when it was still adrift and to the discoveries that continue to reshape what we think we know. From India’s own titanic long-necks and the fearsome Rajasaurus, to the astonishing fossil boom in China that is rewriting the global dinosaur story. In this final episode, we ask the biggest questions of all: how did it end? The rock from space, or the fire from below? Tune in for answers and more. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Producer and editor: Jude Weston

India's Dinosaurs | Part 2: The Coal That Found a Lost Continent

What does coal have to do with a lost supercontinent? And how did one tiny Punjabi town give India both its dinosaur hunters and one of the greatest actors in its cinema? In 1840s Bengal, the East India Company wasn't hunting prehistory — it was hunting fuel for its steamships. But the men sent crawling through Indian coal seams kept stumbling onto something stranger: fossil plants that matched Australia's, tusked reptiles that matched South Africa's, and polished boulders that meant central India had once lain buried under glacial ice. Piece by piece, a cadre of young Irish geologists and Central European specialists drew the map of Gondwana — the vanished half of the planet, named for a forest region of the Narmada — and never quite got the credit. Then the story turns personal. Follow the thread from India's first weatherman to the remarkable Sahni dynasty of Bhera: a patriarch who built himself from nothing, a palaeobotanist felled days after Nehru laid his institute's foundation stone, and a grandson who bent to tie his shoelace and found a nest of dinosaur eggs. Coal, ice, eggs, and a family that produced scientists and film stars alike. The map that explains India's dinosaurs — drawn by men looking for fuel. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Producer and editor: Jude Weston

The Story of India's dinosaurs | Part 1

What did the world's greatest anatomist mistake a dinosaur bone for? And how did the man who hunted India's most feared serial killers end up discovering Asia's first dinosaur fossils? The first episode of Rearview opens in a cold Oxford study in 1677, where a scholar turns over a colossal bone and confidently declares it the thigh of a Roman war-elephant. That sets the tone for two centuries of outrageous confident error: bones mistaken for whales, fish, rhinoceroses, and — in one glorious near-miss — awarded the scientific name Scrotum humanum. The reason everyone got it so spectacularly wrong turns out to have nothing to do with stupidity, and everything to do with a the, yet unknown concept of 'deep time.' The episode then traces the two rival Englishmen who finally cracked it — a chaotic, bear-keeping Oxford clergyman and a Sussex country doctor whose wife may, or may not, have found the decisive tooth by a roadside — before crossing four thousand miles to the Narmada valley, where a thug-hunting East India Company captain accidentally dug up the earliest dinosaur bones ever found in Asia, and left behind, almost incidentally, a thread that leads to Mowgli. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Producer and editor: Jude Francis Weston

Visvesvaraya, Cauvery and Karnataka’s Water Legacy

When people speak of Sir M. Visvesvaraya, they usually remember him as one of India’s greatest engineers. As Diwan of Mysore in the early twentieth century, he championed ambitious infrastructure projects that he believed would modernise the princely state and drive economic growth. Among his most significant achievements was the Krishna Raja Sagara, or KRS, dam across the Cauvery River. Visvesvaraya strongly supported the project because Mysore needed reliable water storage and electricity. One important motivation was to provide power for the Kolar Gold Fields, then among the most important mining centres in India. The dam helped transform Mysore’s economy by supporting industry and expanding access to electricity. But the KRS dam’s impact went far beyond mining. The vast reservoir enabled large-scale irrigation across parts of present-day Karnataka. Farmers increasingly cultivated water-intensive crops such as sugarcane and paddy, bringing prosperity to many regions but also creating a growing dependence on Cauvery waters. That agricultural transformation had long-term consequences. As irrigation expanded upstream in Karnataka, concerns grew downstream in what is now Tamil Nadu, where farmers also depended on the river. Competing demands eventually evolved into one of India’s most enduring inter-state water disputes. More than a century later, debates over sharing the Cauvery continue, linking today’s politics and agriculture to Visvesvaraya’s vision of development through engineering. Hosts: Jacob Koshy and Sobhana K Nair Recorded and produced by Jude Francis Weston Edited by Shiksha Jural and Jude Francis Weston