Vijee Venkatraman

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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, you’d be wrong. In the Indian context, at least,...

Can postdocs be job creators instead of job seekers?

As Ronan McGovern was finishing up his Ph.D., he was eager to commercialize the energy-efficient seawater desalination process he had developed. He had already done some legwork to find a market and had found an interesting lead—but he had also hit some roadblocks. Like most...

A Living Room in Mylapore, A Lab for Ideas

In the summer of 1958, when Alladi Ramakrishnan returned to Madras, he carried with him the afterglow of a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton —an experience that had quietly rearranged his sense of what a life in science could be. At the...

Gentle Giants of Gujarat

“My first memory of whale sharks is when I was 10 years old, traveling from Mombasa to Bombay via Porbandar on a ship,” recalls Mike Pandey, an Indian wildlife filmmaker who was born in Kenya. He had seen these majestic creatures—the world’s largest fish—swim alongside...

The Ramachandran Plot

The double helix is, perhaps, one of the most iconic structures from the world of science. In Chennai, not far from the banks of river Adyar, there’s an auditorium in the heart of a national research centre that appears wholly unremarkable, but for its name:...

My Aunt, the Matunga Mami

It is more than a year since Ramesh Mahadevan passed away. Some day his writings may vanish from the net too. So, I am going to put up the best of his writing on my site unless it violates some law or the other. To...