Mallika Darling

"आपकी मल्लिका आने ही वाली है!!" (Your Mallika will be here soon!)

Every summer folks at our friendly neighbourhood Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable outlet tease me about my fondness for this particular variety of mango which happens to share its name with an old Bollywood siren, Mallika Sherawat.

The mango season in Delhi NCR almost always starts with Safeda. In the early summer season these are large, fleshy mangos with whitish bland flesh (hence the Hindi name) which gets sweeter with the rising heat. It sits on vendors carts and market shelves throughout the season even as the other varieties make their guest appearances - Kesar, Dussehri, Totapuri, Mallika, Denga, and Langda.

For many years I used to save the seeds of the ones that were outstanding in taste, texture and sweetness, and carefully try to germinate them in our terrace garden. Despite my careful efforts not one of them turned into a sapling, and I used to wonder why this was the case. It took a post from @ShreeHistory on X to remind me of some long forgotten lessons in Botany.

Mango trees are of two broad types: mono-embryonic and poly-embryonic. In poly-embryonic seeds each seed contains multiple embryos. Most of them are nuclear emproyos produced asexually from the mother's own tissue, making them genetic clones of the mother tree. A farmer just has to plant a seed to reproduce traits.

Most Indian varieties, on the other hand, are mono-embryonic. Each seed contains a single embryo produced by sexual reproduction, a genetic shuffle of two parents. A seed from a Hapus will invariably be a combination of new factors - not the original. So planting this type of mangos is a gamble - you may or may not get the traits you seek.

So the trick here is to do grafting. According to estimates, India has been honing mango cultivars for 6000 years by vegetative propagation. Earliest references to this appear in Kautilya's Arthashastra (300 CE), and in Surapala's VrishAyurveda tradition (1000 CE). The art of grafting, or Kalmi, was raised to new levels during the Mughal period.

The Europeans - especially Jesuit priests - had some hand in developing mango varieties along the Konkan coastline. Hapus or Alphonso is attributed to a Jesuit missionary / horticulturist Nicolau Alfonso, during the 1550s.

Where does all this leave my favourite Mallika? This one is an even more recent vintage. The variety is a hybrid of the South Indian Neelum and and the North Indian Dasheri, and was developed by Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in New Delhi by Dr. Ramnath Singh, just a couple of decades ago!

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* Mexican mangoes - Ataulfo - variety that arrived aroiund 1779 from the Philippines - slowly getting sweeter by the year - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ataulfo_(mango)

* Mallika - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallika_(mango)

Wondering about Whales

 

Recent research shows that communication in the oceanic world of whales is lot more complex and nuanced than we assumed it to be. Just as tonal languages like Mandarin use Tonal languages use variations in pitch — not just consonants and vowels — to distinguish the meaning of a word, whales have their own tonal dialects.

Using new AI-ML tools, scientists at CETI have been trying to decipher the phonetic alphabets of whalese language :) - 156 distinct codas were discovered. They have now come to the conclusion that these codas are far more complex than we imagined. Within specific groups and families whales communicate with a level of nuance that is close to human languages! 

Just like in Mandarin-Chinese, meaning of the word "ma" changes according to the tone to mean 'mother', 'hemp', 'horse' or a scolding, whales too can use the same sound in different tones. This new tidbit lingered in my mind, and reminded me Ed Young's wonderful book "An Immense World". In this book, Yong describes some amazing aspects of whale migration:

• Whales have some of the most insane migrations of any animal on the planet. Some of them go from the equator to the poles, and with astonishing precision, traveling to the exact same area, year after year..
• Biophysicist, Jesse Granger, collected 33 years' worth of records of healthy, uninjured gray whales inexplicably stranding themselves, and compared these incidents with data on solar activity...a striking pattern emerged: whales got stranded the most on days with the most intense solar storms

Penetrating Perception

• In Hawaii, false killer whales often pick tuna oof fishing lines because they know where  the hook is inside that fish!
• 'Internal antlers' - Beaked whales are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside - but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges and bumps, many of which are found only in whales....these might be the equivalent of deer antlers - showy ornaments that are used to attract mates

Infrasonic Rumbles

• Whales evolved from small, hoofed, deer like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. As they adapted, one group of filter-feeding MYSTICETES, which includes blues, fin, and humpback - shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies.
• Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1500 miles, it is really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star..
• A 20Hz note has a wavelength of 75 meters, which means the distance between two peaks of pressure is two to three times as long as the longest blue or fin whale. 20Hz is an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano
• Fin whale calls (20Hz) can travel 13,000 miles - no ocean is that wide! - you could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone off Bermuda!

Boom Boxes

• The sperm whale does something even stranger. Its titanic barrel of a nose can make up a third of its 52-foot body, and the phonic lips lie at the very front. When they viberate, most of their sound goes backwards through the whale's head. It passes through a fat-filled organ called the SPERMACETI (once prized by whalers), bounces off an airsac at the back of the head, and then moves forward through another fatty organ called the JUNK (deemed worthless by whalers). The sound emerges from this absurd detour is the loudest in the animal world. At 236 decibels, it's basically an explosion - it is around 44 times the loudness of a thunderclap!
• Adjusting for the difference in fluid density, a 236 dB underwater sound translates to approximately 170 dB in the air.
• For comparison, a standard rocket launch registers at about 140-160 dB, and sustained exposure to 150 dB is widely considered the threshold of ruptured eardrums and severe physical trauma for humans.

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 References & Links

The discovery of the sperm whale phonetic alphabet (Anton Petrov) @whatdamath

Natural History Museum - why are sperm whales so loud ? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=hThIOKlZ_3I 

Photography as Darshan

Raghu Rai, a famous Indian photographer, passed away this week (26/04/2026).

Having grown up seeing his amazing photographs in newspapers and magazines it felt a bit strange to see those same images turning up on the small but all pervasive screens of the new social media. Over the past few days, while we collectively mourn his passing, friends have posted PDF copies of his book "Picturing Time" (2015) on Whatsapp; YouTube algorithms brought up some of his earlier interviews where, with his usual charm and wit, describes his own world view, the difference between "drishti", the act of seeing, and "darshan" which is much more difficult to describe: 

Kehte hain ke kann kann mein bhagvan hai. They say that God exists in every grain. This is not to say that you lift a stone and you will find God. The ability to connect. With anything and everything. Significant or mundane. Precious or ordinary. When you start caring for everything, everything around you starts caring for you in some way or the other, so you stand connected. You connect with every inch of space and respond. It’s having a complete awareness of things, and by that I mean not only the physical but also the emotional and spiritual aspect. Even a breeze blowing — what does it do to you and the entire space around you? This is what is so magical about human life and the human spirit — that some people appear from somewhere, some situations arise from somewhere to bless you with the unexpected — and that is darshan. This is the way I look at it.

It is quite amazing to think how Raghu Rai managed to turn up with his camera - almost Forrest Gump like - at almost every historical event over the past 60 years. He was there at Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's funeral (1966); the ascent, descent and assasination of Indira Gandhi; Mother Teresa, Dalai Lama; The Bangladesh Liberation War (1971); Pokhran N-tests (1974); Operation Bluestar and Bhopal Gas Tragedy (1984), Kargil War (1999), not to mention his photo chronicles of some of India's greatest artists - Statyajit Ray, Bismillah Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, MS Subbalakshmi, S Balachander.

In the last set, these are my favourites :)

Uppal in the 70s

 

Last week on X, I came across a site that took me down the memory lane.

The link to Felt Map Archive site came from @tejamalladi and the site had a collection of declassified satellite pics of Hyderabad starting from the 1960s. Almost immediately, I found myself searching for Uppal, the place where I spent my wonder years, and seeing with varying degrees of awe, amazement and nostalgia, the landscape of my childhood. 

We were in Hyderabad from 1970-1980. Our family stayed briefly at Tilak Nagar and Seetaphalmandi before moving to the Survey Colony at Uppal. It was a small corner of Hyderabad but seen from a child's eyes it was filled with boundless spaces, a place where children could explore and discover new things everyday, where the seasons were marked by passing obsessions - flying kites, cricket, football, gilli-danda, kancha (marbles), comics, rock-climbing, over and above the anticipation and preparations leading up to annual fete's, exhibitions, and the grand festivals of Holi, Diwali and Makar Sankranti.

The earliest map on this site dates back to 1967, and it is interesting to see how this part of the city evolved over the past 60 years:

1967: A stark, barren area marked by two distinct features - a distinct triangular area marked for the Survey of India (SoI) campus, and the dark, worm-like Musi river winding to the south. Maybe this was the time when the government had acquired agricultural land for the Industrial Development Area and residential colonies.

1974: In less than 10 years a lot of developments can be seen - the SoI campus now has its distinct buildings (STI, PMP). The buildings that temporarily housed Kendriya Vidyalaya Uppal (KVU) and the vast grounds have appeared. You can even spot the ber trees and the kutcha road that led to the SoI back-gate, and the huge tamarind tree near the junction. The Survey Colony has also come up - once again vast, barren open spaces crisscrossed by footpaths. This was the time when we used to sleep on the terrace in the summers, and SoI staff were handed out long bamboo sticks to guard against dacoits. The dusty footpaths also took us for our shopping and haircut visits to Uppal village. So many memories pop out from this map - the smell of fresh cowdung and dust, the taste of 'Gandhi' coin mints (5-10p each) from the tiny shops at the junction, the taste of soda from a classmates home bottling unit at Beerappagadda, the collection of prosopis thorns under Hawaii chappals; girgits (chameleons), itchy caterpillars and the stinging bite of black ants; early morning calls from friends in the summers that led to day long tramping around all over the place...

1979: This is how the place looked just before we moved to Trivandrum. A new KVUppal school building came up closer to the SoI Colony. For whatever reason all the children were asked to carry one chair each and walk in a line from the old school to the new one (the benches came by truck). There was a major tree-planting drive with pits dug all over the colony, new fences and boundary walls came up. Within these new boundaries we learnt to ride bicycles in the Kainchi (scissors) method because shorter children's bicycles were were unheard of. Outside the new fences were assorted factories making everything from Waterbury's Compound and medicines to biscuits, so we always knew which way the wind was blowing! A shop came up next to the dispensary, and a permanent Ayappa-temple platform now came up across the road in the open grounds behind Type-III quarters. Our universe expanded to regular trips to Habshiguda and Tarnaka to visit friends, and to NGRI campus for weekend movies at their open-theatre (Paakeezah, Aradhana, Mera Naam Joker,  Junglee!)

As I look at the map and distant memories come trickling in, I wonder who came up with the brilliant idea of marking a huge triangle (equilateral, each side 0.5km), as the campus of the Survey of India. For the second oldest government organisation in India (after the army), what a wonderful, permanent tribute to the Great Trigonometric Survey of India'!

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REFERENCES and LINKS

ESRI Imagery - https://www.esri.com/en-us/home

Running, Pain and Latin

Distance running is a fun way to learn Anatomy, and Latin :)

A part of the fun is of course taken away by the fact that these lessons come packaged in pain. A few years ago, after what seemed like a regular run, my right heel started hurting. I thought I had stepped on a sharp stone, or that I had twisted my heel. After many unsuccessful sessions of massages, rubbing in balms and oils (esp. Murivenna), I looked up the symptoms on the web and discovered "Plantar Fasciitis". It has nothing to do with plantations of fascists. This is simply latin for inflamed feet - plantar (sole of the foot) and fascia (band/sheath of tissue) with -itis (inflammation). For some reason this painful condition is also called "policeman's heel".

Another term you hear among the latinised running communities is "IT Band Injury". Anybody can get this injury - not just software engineers or musicians - because IT here stands for Ilio-Tibial. And the band here refers to a tendon that stretches along the length of the longest bones in your body - the tibia. An injury of this connective tissue gives you IT Band Syndrome (ITBS) - an aching or sharp pain on the outside of your knee or hip. Once again massages are not of much help and what worked in my case was simple, consistent exercises - toe-curls, rolls, stretches.

Last Sunday, 22 Feb., 2026, we had the New Delhi Marathon (NDM). This year's event was sponsored by Cognizant and attracted over 30,000 participants in four events: Full Marathon (42 km), Half Marathon (21 km), 10km and 5km races. I participated in my usual Half Marathon. It was a well organised event with plenty of water-stations, good signages, clean toilets, decent food (hot chole-kulche!), band-baaja, and nicely spaced out dispersals (no clash with the 5km folks walking abreast). I even managed to meet an old college friend from Trivandrum after 36 years, and in getting back to the sub-2-hour timing (1:58:22)!

A day after the run I am now back to my Latin vocabulary. The new words are - Quadriceps and Iliopsoas - the two sets of muscles that seem to have developed Delayed Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS). It is peculiar pain that makes the simple act of descending staircases particularly painful.

Quadriceps femoris is Latin for 'four-headed muscle of the femur'.  The four heads are - Rectus femoris, vastus lateralis, vastus intermedius and vastus medialis. Vastus is a Latin word meaning "vast," "immense," "huge," "enormous," or "monstrous", while rectus simply means "straight", "upright", or "direct". Straight and huge - the quadriceps are the largest muscle sets in the human body.

Is there a way to avoid this pain? If past experience is anything to go by, it is unprepared muscles that develop DOMS after a distance run. So would isolation exercise like leg extensions help? Let's see...

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REFERENCES & LINKS

• https://www.samsonphysicaltherapy.com/blog/why-the-front-of-your-thighs-hurt-after-running
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliopsoas
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricep
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitishttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantar_fasciitis
• https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21967-iliotibial-band-syndrome
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thonakal_Gopi
• https://www.uniindia.com/news/sports/sports-delhi-marathon-leads-spd18/3750206.html
• Timing - https://mysamay.in/event/info/4fbe9261-c999-4868-9a1e-acd64b0b79f8

 

 

How Did They Know?

 

Each civilisation had a different way of looking at the stars. They found different patterns and linked them to a wide range of traditions, legends and stories. 

What is amazing is not the patterns but the level of detail they were able to observe in the night sky. A few years ago the jolly, ebullient Khurshed Batliwala gave a talk listing out a few things ancient Indian scientists observed and recorded - 

The Great Bear and Arundhati-Vashishta

The core pattern of this constellation is hard to miss. It looks like a giant kite with a long tail. The Greeks called it Ursa Major, the Great Bear, and saw a far more elaborate pattern - the quadrangle of the kite became the torso of the bear, the tail became its neck and head while the surrounding stars took the shape of a fat tail and spindly legs. 

Ancient Indians, on the other hand, focused on the core form and called it the "Sapta Rishi" - the seven sages - Bhrigu, Vashista, Angiras, Atri, Pulastya, Pulaha and Kratu. Of these Vashista is of special interest because the ancients noticed that this bright spot in the sky was not one but two different stars in close proximity - a double-star. They named the second star after the sage's wife, Arundhati. Each of these stars correspond to the following Arab-Greek equivalents:

• Bhrigu - Benetnash
• Vashista ("most excellent) - Mizar ("girdle")
• Angiras - Alioth 
• Atri - Megrez
• Pulastya - Phecda
• Pulaha - Phecda
• Kratu - Dubhe 

Brightness of celestial objects is measured in Apparent Magnitude. This is on a reverse logarithmic scale, which means that the brighter an object is, the lower its magnitude number. In the Great Bear constellation, the brightest star is Alioth (mag 1.76 - 33rd brightest in the sky), followed by Dubhe (m 1.79), Alkaid, Mizar / Vashishta (m 2.23), Merak, Phecda, and Megrez. 

Note that Mizar / Vashishta is not the brightest, yet it is a well-known naked eye double star with the fainter star Alcor (Vashistha's wife, Arundhati - 'washed by the rays of sun'). This is the double-star, as Batliwala points out, that newlyweds in South India view formally because they rotate in perfect synchrony, and symbolise a balanced, harmonious, and lifelong marriage of mutual respect. References to this symbolic traditions are found in early Vedic literature, including the Rig Veda and especially the Brahmanas (like Taittiriya Brahmana). Out of the thousands of stars in the night sky how did the ancients decide to select this double star?

Batliwala goes on to describe other instances in ancient records and traditions that make us wonder about their perceptiveness:

• The depiction of Varaha avatara in iconography carrying a round earth, long before the Egyptians of Greeks discovered that the earth was round;
• Antares ("like-Mars"), the 16th brightest star in the sky was named "Jeshta" (biggest, eldest, oldest). How did they figure that this star is 40,000 bigger than the sun, ad one of the biggest stars known to man?
• Rust-proof pillars - the one displayed in Delhi and another the Kollur pillar, said to have been built by tribals to welcome Adi Shankaracharya (8th century CE)
• Metallurgy - Zinc extraction from ore was known for 4000 years . A difficult metal to extract because it liquifies at 997C and turns into gas at 1000C. So it had to be extracted within a 3 degree window. The ancients metallurgists did this by turning the furnace up-side down. This technology was copied by the Chinese and in turn, patented by William Champion (1709-89) in Britain
• The value of Pi up to 30 decimals encoded in a Krishna sloka in the KatapayaSankhya format where numbers associated with alphabets: (eg., 1 = ka, ta, pa, ya)

Recently a few more examples turned up in a post titled, "How Much did the Ancients Know ? It’s fascinating". It records the work of one Dharampal (1922–2006), an Indian Gandhian thinker and independent historian who became known for re-examining India’s pre-colonial society using British archival records. 

Dharmpal notes that Hindu astronomers, many years BCE, represented the planets in ways that encoded precise astronomical knowledge. Jupiter was depicted with four dancing girls circling around it. Saturn was represented as a figure with seven arms, one of which grasped a ring. 

• The Dancing Girls of Jupiter: Four moons of Jupiter were not known in Europe before 1609, when Galileo first observed them through his telescope. Even then, only the third and fourth satellites were occasionally visible to the naked eye, and only in the clearest atmospheric conditions. The fact that Hindu astronomical tradition represented Jupiter with exactly four attendant figures suggested a knowledge of these satellites that predated European discovery.
• The Seven Arms of Saturn: Until 1783, European astronomy recognised only five satellites of Saturn. The sixth satellite was not discovered until 28 August 1789, when William Herschel identified it. The seventh satellite was observed by Herschel only after he had completed his grand telescope of forty feet focal length, and was first seen on 17 September 1789.

There is no mention of lenses or telescopes in the scriptures and records, so how did ancient Indians see and record details of celestial bodies with such amazing accuracy? 

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REFERENCES & LINKS

Katapayadi Sutra - https://www.eviolinguru.com/kadapayadi-sutra.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_(star)

How much did the ancients know? - https://substack.com/home/post/p-188261182 

Kyauktada Katha

George Orwell's book, "Burmese Days" is centred on a fictional town called Kyauktada 'in Upper Burma'. It is the story of an English timber merchant named John Flory set in the 1920s. Kyauktada is actually a district in Yangon so it seems Orwell drew his inspiration for this story from his stay at a small town called Katha ('story' in many Indian languages), on the banks of the Irrawaddy.

The book brings to life the life and times of the British colonial enterprise in the 1920s, seen through the eyes of a merchant named John Flory. He lives in a small, insular community of Britishers who are already nostalgic about the violence used to bring the natives to heel. In the words of the local administrator, "In my young days, when a butler was disrespectful, one sent him along to the jail with a chit saying 'Please give the bearer fifteen lashes'. Ah well, Eheu fugaces!"

Flory is a misfit at the  British-only club, an oddball in the sense that he is not as disdainful of the locals. An Indian doctor, Veeraswami  - 'very slimly' according to his compatriots - is a good friend with whom him enjoys long conversations. It is in these conversations that Orwell frames his views on  the Empire. Here the roles are reversed, it is Veeraswami is a a loyal subject of the empire, an admirer of all things British, while Flory is the skeptic who thinks he is living a lie -

"But my friend, what lie are you living?' 

"Why, of course, the lie that we're here to uplift or poor black brothers instead of to rob them.. Look at our schools - factories for cheap clerks. We've never taught a single useful manual trade to the Indians..."

This anti-Empire line of thought is expanded through the Veeraswami-Flory conversations:

"What was at the centre of his thoughts now, and what poisoned everything, was the ever bitterer hatred of the atmosphere of imperialism in which he lived. For his brain to develop - you cannot stop your brain developing, and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are absolutely committed to the wrong way of life - he has grasped the truth about the English and the Empire. The Empire is a despotism - benevolent no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object..."

"The real backbone of the despotism is not the officials but the army. Given the Army, the officials and business men can rub along safely enough even if they are fools. And most of them are fools. A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets."

"With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love - yes, English men do often love Indians - native officers, forest rangers, hinters, clerks, servants. Sepoys will weep like children when their colonel retires. Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moments. but alliance, partisanship, never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a 'native' quarrel is a loss of prestige."

No wonder Orwell was wary of a backlash if the book were to be published first in Britain. He wisely decided to publish this book in USA instead.

I loved the flowing prose in "Burmese Days", and the way he brings out his characters - especially the Burmese ones. One particularly obnoxious one is Ko Po Kyin, "the crocodile" and his wife, Ma Kin Kin...dressed in a guangbaung of pale pink silk, an ingyi of starched muslin and, and a paso of Mandalay silk. Another interesting character is is Ma Hla May, Flory's mistress who aspired to be a bo-kadaw - a white man's wife - but is discarded as soon as Elizabeth, a young lady turns up at Kyauktada. The crocodile uses her to undermine Flory and destroy his rival, Veeraswami. 'Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned', especially if she turn up at the most unexpected places screaming Pike-san pay-like! Pike-san pay-like ('Give me the money') !

This is only my second Orwell book after Animal Farm many years ago. It is William Dalrymple's podcast on that led me to Burmese Days, so if you don't have the time read books do listen to this particular series on the remarkable life and times of George Orwell.

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LINKS and FURTHER READING

* Orwell and Dalrymple on English Class (2022) - https://quillette.com/2022/05/02/orwell-dalrymple-on-english-class/

* Empire Podcast - Episode 302 - https://youtu.be/s_vrCr3XW8o?si=92s71EOZ5hjpqvh6