Vijee Venkatraman

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World’s Largest School Lunch Program

On any given school day, one industrial kitchen in Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, is astir well before dawn. In this food factory run by the Akshaya Patra Foundation, workers prepare hot lunches for over one hundred thousand children in the city's state-aided schools. Inside the...

Cosmic Quest

Anil Ananthaswamy is the author of The Edge of Reason, a work of narrative non-fiction. The book tells the story of scientists whose research into the workings of the universe takes them to remote places. And, it celebrates those very destinations which make certain scientific...

Tibetan New Year nears, bearing a sweet dish

SOMERVILLE — Losar, the Tibetan New Year, begins with a spoonful of dessert. Dresyl, also known as deysee, is a warm dish of sweetened rice that women make for their families on the morning of this festive day. “In Tibet, we would add droma, which...

Bombay cafe makes a bang in London

LONDON — Dishoom, which opened last summer and calls itself “A Bombay Cafe in London,’’ takes its name from the Indian comic book equivalent of “Pow!’’ and “Wham!’’ In some Bollywood films, “dishoom’’ is, at times, said out loud in fight scenes when someone throws...

Making Each Other More Human

A husband and a wife working in the same scientific discipline are ideally positioned to be collaborators, but aligning ambitions in the professional niche of fundamental research is seldom easy: Institutions must accommodate not just one scientist but a pair. And once a...

The Making of a Madras Calendar

This is a work of art which celebrates the quotidian life in Chennai, or Madras, if you prefer the capital’s older name. If you are fortunate enough to have acquired one of the 500 copies its creators, the founders of Whoa Mama Design (WMD), handed...