pic credit: MIT
Making ketchup glide, pesticides stick
pic credit: MIT Drops of water bead up or roll right off the leaves of the lotus, making for that metaphysical metaphor – live like a lotus in the water. But the leaves of plants…
picture credit: GVB
Virtual Walk Through Sowcarpet
Sowcarpet is often described as Chennai’s “Little North India,” in tourist book style. Bustling and bazaar-like, this old neighborhood is not too far from the city’s iconic Central Station. This area has the city’s first…
Dilip Kumar, Improbable Tamil Anthologist
Dilip Kumar, Booksellers and Exporters, was the name of the Tamil literary bookstore he ran in Mylapore, Chennai. For over a quarter century, till 2016, research scholars and avid readers dropped in here to discuss…
My Friend from Islamabad
Summer vacation did not mean days off for graduate students in the United States but in those warm months we could take longer-than-usual coffee breaks without feeling guilty. Pocket Park, our campus coffee shop, tiny…
The Way We Use English in India
Had fun doing a review of this book. The “issueless” couple – who might they be? If you are thinking it is partners with no marital woes, a couple on some kind of permanent honeymoon,…
The Bohrs in Mylapore -- pic courtesy Alladi Krishasami
When Niels Bohr came to Mylapore
In the summer of 1958, Alladi Ramakrishnan returned to his elegant bungalow, Ekamra Nivas, in Madras after an unpaid sabbatical in the United States. The young Reader from the University of Madras had spent a…