While our modern lives everywhere depend heavily on the fruits of science and technology, in India we see a conundrum.  On the one hand Indians have fully embraced modern technologies.  On the other hand, there is often behaviour that suggests a rejection of the scientific method, even by those with advanced educational degrees in science and technology and indeed, even among practicing scientists. What are the reasons for this phenomenon? Is scientific thinking limited to the field of science? Has the scientific method been fully internalised within the scientific enterprise? What indeed is scientific thinking? Is scientific thinking a "Western" concept? Is scientific thinking oppositional to religious belief? Why did we need a National Scientific Temper Day when we already have been celebrating  National Science Day since 1986? These are some of the questions that I will attempt to address.

Professor Prajval Shastri is an astrophysicist of over four decades. She investigates the physics of giant black holes that are found in the centres of distant galaxies using telescopes at multiple frequencies based on Earth as well as in space. She got her PhD from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, and after post-doctoral research positions in the University of Texas at Austin, University of California at Berkeley and the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, she was a faculty of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, for 23 years. She has been a Fulbright fellow at Stanford University, Senior Associate at TIFR-ICTS, Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), Australia and Emeritus Scientist at the Raman Research Institute. She is currently an Adjunct Professor, ICRAR. She is extremely passionate about public engagement with science. She believes that the cultivation of scientific thinking is for everyone, uses astrophysics as a vehicle to engage lay audiences of all ages with these questions in multiple languages, and works for the people's science movement towards this goal.  She is also deeply concerned about the inequities in the sciences and attempts to bring an intersectional lens to the endeavours to mitigate them. She is the founder and past chair of the Gender in Physics Working Group of the Indian Physics Association and a past member of the Working Group for Gender Equity of the Astronomical Society of India. She is Chair of the Women in Physics Working Group of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, past  Vice-Chair of the Executive Committee for the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development and currently on the Steering Committee of the Earth-Humanity Coalition for IDSSD.  In addition to her research publications and popular articles on astrophysics, her published work includes writings on gender inequity as well as science and society.