Alter Magazine #4 Launch
About Alter:
Alter Magazine is a monthly journal bringing to the world new literary writing on Science, Technology, and Progress, from South Asia.
With every story, we aim to alter our readers views & perceptions, bringing to them contemporary geniuses, cutting-edge ideas, and pathbreaking discoveries. This is a living journal documenting the dreams and dilemmas shaping South Asia’s aspirations for progress, capturing the region’s diverse energies as it seeks not just advancement for itself, but to help write the next chapter of collective human progress.
About the event:
Our fourth issue asks a deceptively simple question: what does it take for a country to know itself?
In 1933, P.C. Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta with a first-year budget of ₹238. What followed was one of the most unlikely intellectual adventures in modern Indian history — a statistician who befriended Tagore, stayed up past midnight with Nehru debating India's economic future, built the world's first household survey system, and assembled India's first electronic computer from war surplus parts in Chandni Chowk.
The ISI's story is about institutions, data, and what a newly independent country of 350 million people needed to see itself clearly for the first time. It is also a story about what happens next.
The launch of Alter Issue #4 will be held on the evening of 22nd May at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore, with a panel discussion on knowledge, institutions, and the long arc of India's statistical imagination.
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