Figuring Things Out

The latest economist (15 Jan., 2022) makes makes a claim that seems absurd at many levels - "In an index of societal discrimination aga...

  On the banks of Manimala river in Tiruvalla, Kerala, there is a place called Thottabhagom. Perhaps the area gets it name (~ 'garden ar...

 How things change in one year! At the beginning of 2021 everybody seemed perplexed that the much anticipated first wave of Covid-19 had som...

A few days ago, an old friend, a physician, shared a graph that got me puzzled. It showed an NHFS-5 graph plotting percentage of men with di...

What happens when the sublime meets the ridiculous? Maybe one of the things you get is goat cheese. Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuren) is supp...

Lighting changes everything.  Last week I visited the Indian Museum in Kolkata after more than a decade, and I was struck by the way in whic...

I am now in a South Kolkata state-of-mind.  It took me a couple of days to get used this, and it is so, so different from the mental framewo...

Something unusual happened today - I stopped to gawk at a bicycle.  It was a mildly smoggy winter morning in Noida, and I was driving down o...

  A few decades ago, one of my professors used to be fond saying, "Nothing in nature exists without a purpose!".  His point was th...

 Call it a calculated conspiracy of algorithms but over the last week I watched two 'recommended' TED videos, each dealing with with...

  Today's Doodle honours Kano Jigoro, the 'Father of Modern Judo ' on his 161st birth anniversary. A series of neat panels illus...

It's 5:30AM and there is a nip in the air. You look out from the balcony and your gaze moves up from the empty roads, the streetlights, ...

Remember this post about 'The Most Translated Books of the World' ?  Well, a few days ago, I decided to pick one of the few European...

Paravur Kayal (lagoon), Kerala Has the Covid Pandemic changed the way Indians travel? What has been the impact of the cascade of lockdowns  ...

 The precise shifting positions of the rising and setting sun through the year is a phenomenon observed thousands of years ago. The ancient ...

  Every now and then the great circus of Whatsapp forwards comes up with a gem, and this is one of them. A beautifully illustrated poster on...

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"--Vladimir Ilyich Lenin What has been happening...

 Indians have been suckers for more than six decades. This was my main takeaway from Vijay Gokhale's recent book, "The Long Game - ...