National Science Centre

This guide to the National Science Centre in Delhi opens with Sushruta, the ancient surgeon whose handbook catalogues more than three hundred operations and over a hundred and twenty instruments, one of the oldest surgical texts on earth. It moves through the museum's Heritage Gallery, tracing forty-five hundred years of Indian science: the invention of zero, three-thousand-year-old astronomy, and early industrial-scale zinc smelting. The Sushruta exhibit, just past the entrance, is worth pausing at longest.