Vijee Venkatraman

Home > Articles by: Vijee Venkatraman

The New Breed

BEFORE dawn, a Roomba sweeps the floor in my home in Boston. Suckubus (as we call it) can get tangled up with shoelaces or carpet tassels and need rescuing. At the local grocery store, a robot called Marty patrols looking for spills, summoning employees loudly...

Cat in the Agraharam

The wealth of contemporary Tamil literature has always been just out of reach for readers like me who speak the mother tongue well enough but tend to stumble over the printed word. But you don't need Tamil roots to appreciate this new collection of translated...

The Bird That Changed a Canal’s Course

In 1836, T.C. Jerdon, a 25-year-old surgeon, arrived in the Madras Presidency. After training at the General Hospital, he was sent to treat troops battling insurgency in a district nearly halfway to the Calcutta Presidency. Once the rebellion was quelled, he joined his cavalry regiment...

Coded Bias

In her first semester at the MIT Media Lab, Joy Buolamwini faced a peculiar problem: commercial face‑recognition software detected her light‑skinned classmates but couldn’t “see” her. Only when she donned a white plastic mask in frustration did the system recognize her face. Coded Bias is...

Meenakshi and The Supernumerary Nipple

Legend says that the Pandya king, the ruler of Madurai, rejoiced at the birth of his daughter. She had beautiful eyes, like a pair of chiral fish. So she became Meenakshi, which is Sanskrit for “fish-eye”. The royal child had another physical characteristic, which the...

Girl, Decoded

As she sat in a taxi headed to Cairo International Airport in September 2001, Rana el Kaliouby remembers thinking, “Am I really going through with this?” A married woman and hijab-wearing Muslim, she would be on her own for the next 3 years, pursuing her...