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While in Kenya last week on an official trip, I drove down from Nairobi to a small town called Magati, past the Rift Valley. I was headed to...

Recreations in Agriculture, Natural History, Arts and Miscellaneous literature , by James Anderson, LLD was published in April 1799. James ...

While paying her last respects to Shammi Kapoor who passed away last week, actress Madhuri Dixit was quoted as saying "He was a very fi...

In a post dated October 2005 and titled, “Dark thoughts of a closet MCP”, I had imagined the mind of a chauvinistic male. The post began th...

Caught in the humdrum of life, we dismiss many things as ‘routine’ or ‘mundane’. Because of this tendency to trivialize, many important thin...

Would you buy the book based on this review ? The Vice President of India Shri M. Hamid Ansari released a book entitled “Man’s fate & ...

A Christian Missionary touring South India, in the year 1842, provides this description of the Tirunelveli Brahmin, which I found quite amus...

The Journal of the Society of Arts , Britain, 1870, reproduces a speech delivered by Lord Napier on the subject of ‘aesthetics’ in design of...

South Indian Sketches, written in 1842, is a compilation of letters from a Christian Missionary, S.Tucker, (who is touring India), to a you...

In one of his lectures, Francis Fukuyuma summed up “Asian values” ( as popularized by leaders like Lee Kuan Yew) as “a system in which peop...

A friend visiting Chennai expressed surprise that many restaurants here continued to serve snacks in stainless steel plates and coffee in st...

Every argument between a diehard devotee of Satya Sai Baba and a non-believer will end with the former saying, “Whether you believe in his p...

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at Princeton University, in his article in the Washington Times on the subject of “What will f...

After Bin laden was eliminated, I heard a US media person (sorry, I didn’t note his name, but trust me, I heard him) say that it was a clear...

Once, during my school days (many decades back), a dreaded Science teacher was asked to stand in for a History teacher who was absent on tha...

In his book, “Mother Tongue ", Bill Bryson explains the difficulty of designing a typewriter to type out Chinese letters: Since every...

Jason Kottke links to a video of a wooden box with a flip switch. Once the switch is on, a bent rod pops out of the box and switches it off...

In an article in Science 2.0 that dealt with White dwarfs, Neutrons and Neutrinos, there is the inevitable reference to Dr Subrahmanyam Cha...

The British had a meticulous system of ‘examining’ their officers returning from India and collecting evidence. These were  elaborate sessio...

A news report says: Tamil Nadu chief minister M Karunanidhi today said Home Minister P Chidambaram's remark that Election Commission (...