Vijee Venkatraman

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Old Sarayuite

Picture taken on 15, July 1966, at the inauguration of Alakananda Hostel at IIT, Madras Janaki Seshadri is to the immediate left of Ujjal Singh, Governor of Tamil Nadu. In 1966, Janaki Seshadri arrived at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IITM), excited to be...

Tamil Paperbacks in New Orleans

If you want to be fluent in a language, experts say, you should briefly relocate to a place where the language is spoken. It will force you to find the words to interact with locals – this is the immersion method. Perhaps the reverse is...

Quark

Quark, a boardless eatery at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, was a student haunt. Deep inside the campus, flanked by hostels, the canteen would open late in the evening. As students, we went there for an after-dinner snack or a hot drink, so we...

Erdos visits Madras

On a winter’s day in January 1975, two men walked down the sandy stretch of the Marina Beach in Chennai. It was still afternoon, but there was a breeze blowing, and they had the place pretty much to themselves. One was a teenager, a...

Madurai is not just Meenakshi, of course

And so, I add the less-known myth of Alli Arasani, another warrior-goddess to the myth. View of The Taming of Alli The legend of Alli is deeply rooted in the cultural and political landscape of Pandyamandalam, with Madurai as its mythic and historical center....

S.Muthiah (1930-2019)

I called him on a whim. One December, back in Madras to see my parents and to thaw out from a Cambridge winter, I dialed the number of a man I had never met but whose writerly voice I knew well. For years, at...