Home - Vijee Venkatraman

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Lost in Curiosity

In most known frog species, males advertise their sexual availability with mating calls while females choose their partners in silence. So when graduate student Johana Goyes Vallejos heard of an obscure frog species with vocalizing females, she wanted to know more. The inch‑long, nocturnal frog, known as the...

I am a graduate of the Science Journalism program at Boston University.This website is a digital portfolio of my articles, essays and short stories translated from Tamil.

Carnatic legend M. S. Subbulakshmi's portrait often appears on this website. It is rendered by my biophysicist cousin in YInMn Blue -- this pigment is a novel material that keeps both its brilliance and its cool under the hot sun -- it is just the nerdy thing we bond over. Do check out her small joyous creations at YarnivoreGoods.

FOOD & TRAVEL

Casteless Collective & Modi Mastan

Stars twinkled overhead; sparks flew from the embers of corn sellers’ coal stoves at Besant Nagar Beach. It was a typical Sunday evening crowd—families, couples and vendors. But at the far end, in the Urur Olcott fishing village, something interesting was underway: the Chennai Kalai...

Keeper of Pigments at Harvard Art Museums

Art is not an afterthought, Narayan Khandekar is often fond of saying. The Lascaux Caves in France, sometimes called the Sistine Chapel for Prehistoric Art, is his favorite example. Living on hunted bulls, bison, and reindeer, some early humans still took the time to grind...

City Lights, Vanishing Stars

One December evening I climbed up to the mottai-madi, the bare terrace atop my parents’ four-floor apartment building in Chennai and waited for darkness to descend. The sun still hung low—an orange-red orb in the distance. Overhead, rose-ringed parakeets zipped towards their nightly roosts, squawking...