There is a peculiar, almost pathological need for the human species to validate its own insignificance by awarding shiny discs to people who point expensive cameras at the abyss. Shri Kulkarni, a man who has spent his life peering into the cosmic void from the comfort of Caltech, has recently been handed the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal. It is an honor previously bestowed upon the likes of Einstein and Hawking, which effectively makes it the scientific equivalent of a participation trophy for those who have successfully avoided the crushing mundanity of a real job. But of course, in our current hellscape of status-worship, Kulkarni isn’t just an astrophysicist; he is a branch on a very specific, very wealthy family tree. The media, in its infinite thirst for sycophancy, can’t help but remind us that he is the brother-in-law of Narayana Murthy, the billionaire architect of the seventy-hour work week.

One must imagine the family dinners. On one side of the table, you have Murthy, a man who views the human soul as an untapped resource for corporate productivity, advocating for the youth to sacrifice their fleeting existence to the altar of the Infosys ledger. On the other side, you have Kulkarni, who studies 'transients'—cosmic events that flicker and die in the blink of an eye. The irony is almost too heavy to bear: one man wants to squeeze every millisecond out of a human life for profit, while the other watches stars explode and realizes that a billion years is just a rounding error. It is a perfect microcosm of our species’ delusion. We are obsessed with ‘exceptional achievement’ within families, as if brilliance were a recessive gene passed down alongside a preference for expensive tea and a disdain for the working class.

Kulkarni’s work at the Palomar Transient Factory is, by all academic accounts, transformative. He built instruments to watch things go pop in the night. He tracks supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and other celestial tantrums. But let’s be honest: the universe is going to keep expanding and eventually freeze into a cold, dark nothingness regardless of whether a man in Pasadena has a gold medal in his drawer. The RAS Gold Medal is a desperate human attempt to scream into the silence, to pretend that our taxonomies of the stars actually matter. We classify the heavens because we are terrified of the fact that we cannot even manage our own planet. We celebrate a 'tradition of intellectual ambition' from Maharashtra to California, yet we ignore the fact that this ambition is almost always reserved for those already cushioned by the safety net of the global elite.

The narrative surrounding Kulkarni is draped in the suffocating fabric of meritocracy. We are told he emerged from a 'family of exceptional achievers,' as if the Murthy-Kulkarni clan possesses a biological monopoly on the speed of light. It is the same old story: the Right loves it because it reinforces the idea that some people are simply 'born better,' and the Left loves it because it’s a story of 'diverse' success in STEM, provided that success comes from a background already steeped in hyper-competitive academic privilege. It is a bipartisan celebration of the status quo. Kulkarni has 'shaped modern astronomy,' but what, pray tell, has that shape done for the rest of us? We know more about the binary systems of distant galaxies than we do about how to keep a single city from sinking into its own greed.

And then there is the 'Gold Medal' itself. A heavy piece of metal to compensate for the weightlessness of modern existence. The Royal Astronomical Society, an institution so old it probably still remembers when the sun moved around the earth, hands these out to maintain the illusion of prestige. By linking Kulkarni to his billionaire relatives, the press isn’t just reporting news; they are performing a ritual of power-worship. They are telling you that if you work hard enough—or if you’re related to the right person who thinks you should work seventy hours a week—you too might one day get to look at the stars and realize how utterly pointless your seventy-hour week actually was.

Ultimately, Kulkarni is just another high-achiever in a world drowning in them. He has mastered the art of observing the universe in motion, yet he remains tethered to a social structure that is static, rigid, and deeply boring. The stars are exploding, the galaxies are colliding, and humanity is sitting in the dark, clutching its medals and checking its stock options, hoping that the light from a dead star will somehow justify the darkness of its own making. It won't. But congratulations on the medal, Shri. I’m sure it will look lovely on the mantelpiece while the rest of us figure out how to pay the rent in a world your brother-in-law built.