Next time you are at a social gathering, try this little experiment. Ask friends and family to name a female scientist. Most will come up with the name of Nobel laureate Marie Curie; some may mention the unheralded Rosalind Franklin. No one seems to know of accomplished Indian women in science. Our textbooks don’t speak of such pioneering figures; newspapers (including The Hindu) rarely run memorable profiles of present day female researchers. This anthology of essays, now available online,  featuring nearly one hundred Indian women scientists [...]

Suggest to a present-day high school student in Bangalore who is interested in chemistry that she should not have the same professional ambitions as a boy in her class and she will likely laugh right in your face. Today, in most countries of the world, women can qualify themselves for a career in teaching and research, and aspire to the topmost positions in both academia and industry. There is no barrier stopping women from achieving their goals, not on paper, at least. Read the rest [...]

I am an early riser. During the dark winters of New England, I am up even before the sun, and that, you’ll agree, takes some doing. But though I am up, I am, usually, not about. Venturing out before the neighbors have had a chance to shovel the sidewalks is unwise, I’ve discovered, and I don’t bother getting out before 8 AM. In my South Indian hometown, Chennai, getting a head start on the day made practical sense because the sun could turn the outdoors [...]

Recently, Tulika Publishers of Chennai held a I*Heart*Mangoes contest to coincide with the launch of its latest picture book The Sweetest Mango. I won a copy of the new book. My Review of The Sweetest Mango You can’t be a non-resident Indian and eat fresh Indian mangoes too. I live in Boston and don’t travel to the home country during the summer months, so I am pretty resigned to this fact. This July, however, I was in for a pleasant surprise when I walked into my neighborhood bookstore [...]

Once upon a time, auto rickshaws in Madras had functioning meters, so the legend goes.Asking the auto drivers to turn on that boxy contraption today is like committing a small crime. The unrevised, state-fixed fare is blatantly unfair to these men in khaki. But pay the arbitrary sum they demand and, chances are, it won’t fair to you in the long run. What gives? A tech-savvy NRI, recently returned to his hometown, wanted to do something about this. Crowd sourcing, a form of distributed problem [...]

If the preservation of a heritage building delights us, then we rejoice doubly when an old building is put to new use. Take the case of this 49 year old, two-storied bungalow in Nungambakkam that now houses Rasvihar, a jewelry shop, and Sarangi, the Kanjivaram sari store. This is such a perfect setting for the traditional merchandise: you have to wonder why no one thought of this idea before. The very space, with the mango tree in the well-tended garden, must make for a very [...]

The poem was written on a sort of impulse. It was triggered by a comment I heard from a friend of mine – quite a culture-vulture himself – about another writer based in Bombay. My friend said that this writer was “so Bombay”, meaning so typically a Bombayite or a Mumbaikar. It got me thinking about how he or others might see me and so this poem got written. At the core of it, of course, lies my own love for the older version of [...]

In Singapore, the pasar melam – the roadside market – comes alive well after sunset. Tiny lights strung up on make-shift store fronts give the outdoor shopping scene a festive air. Lychees, mangosteens, rambutans and other tropical fruit are on display in the fruit stalls, but one formidable-looking fruit holds it its own against the competition. It is summer, the durian season, and in South East Asia durian is king. Cradling the spiky fruit in her palms, a patron examines the probables at length while her family [...]

Recently, it occurred to me–while I was at a bar, of course – that my hometown has one thing in common with New York’s oldest and most famous borough, Manhattan: both have cocktails named after them. But while the Manhattan, a classic, was invented in the Big Apple, the Madras certainly did not originate in its namesake city on the Coromandel Coast. Read the rest of the article here. pdf.

In 1998, Umesh Malhotra, then an employee of Infosys Technologies, did a year-long consulting stint in the United States. He lived in the Bay Area of California with his wife and then-five year old son. The book-loving couple was drawn to the local public library; in particular, they liked the children’s section which, besides being well-stocked with books, had a variety of activities for kids. When the Malhotras returned to India, they searched Bangalore in vain for the equivalent of that cheerful space. Public libraries [...]