Author: Syed Hasan Zia Rizvi
On a humid October afternoon in Hyderabad, a PhD student in the department of civil engineering was deeply focused on a PDF document that resembled a brick wall rather than a window through which she could see. This was the central document of her work on flood resistant infrastructure, but beyond 30 pages of hard to understand equations and very technical English, there were only two or three ideas she really needed. Somewhere else in the city, a school teacher was facing the same paper for quite different reasons. He wanted to explain his students the causes of floods and…