Plus Ultra

In the short-story “Strychnine in the soup” by P.G.Wodehouse, Cyril Mulliner is in love with a girl called Amelia and she loves him too. Unf...

The Monthly Miscellany brought out by the East India Company, in its edition of March 1816, carries a description “On the persons of the Hin...

The “Oriental’ style of letter writing characterized by flowery language, sycophantic tributes and ornate sentences, is illustrated in this ...

Right from school, we are taught to concentrate on what we are doing and not let our mind wander around. Single-minded focus - whether in st...

I had a Maths teacher in school who, apart from his prowess in Maths, had this amazing handwriting and a fetish for drawing near-perfect cir...

The Asiatic journal and monthly register for British India and its dependencies, Volume 27 published in March 1829, has this interesting, e...

“What a subject: her nose is too big, her mouth is too big, she has the composites of all the wrong things, but put them all together and po...

I can’t remember a single trip to Kerala when I did not come back with a packet or two of fresh banana chips. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, when I u...

In the famous movie, “Twelve Angry Men”, the jury trying a young man for murder charges is convinced that it is an open and shut case and th...

“It cannot have escaped your notice that I have long entertained toward you sentiments warmer and deeper than those of ordinary friendship. ...

In a fascinating piece , Bear McCreary explains the pattern and physics behind the theme music of some famous science fiction movies such as...

I came across this video of the climax scene of “Star Wars’ – but with a slight difference. It’s got a laughter track added. So, what was i...

As a disciplined air traveler who checks in his suitcase, and carries a small laptop bag always, I find it annoying when fellow passengers w...

Smita Prakash, in a column in The Midday describes the travails of parents desperate to get their kids into nursery schools: There are 4,5...

Many years back, I decided I would call up my colleagues on their birthdays and greet them. The system was simple. The office had a data bas...

Everybody today rants about the pain inflicted by mobile phone users in public places. No place is safe- theatres, airports, trains, temples...

Using percussion and wind instruments to inspire awe or to frighten the enemy has been an age-old tradition. The Mahabharata describes how L...

“Primum non nocere”, Latin for ‘first,do no harm’ is one of the fundamental tenets of medicine and is part of the Hippocratic Oath that doct...

The Times of India reports : Australian captain Michael Clarke feels a "team-first orientation of sustained pressure and sacrifice...

In the same New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik on “imprisonment’, that I had linked to in my previous post, there is this passage in the begin...