Vijee Venkatraman

Home > Articles by: Vijee Venkatraman

Melding Indian spices, she’s in a class by herself

SINGAPORE -- The streets of Little India in Singapore have at a vibe that is quite distinct from the other neighborhoods in the city. Here, hit Tamil tunes spill out of record stores, which makes passersby want to break into dance (a dappan kuthu step...

Ethan Zuckerman on how to engineer serendipity online

In a wired world, finding information about events in a distant part of the world – the score of a soccer game, the aftermath of a military coup, or a nascent hip-hop movement in a conservative country – is straightforward. Even if news sites overlooked...

An electric workout through pedal power

After classes, Sally Peach, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has a long list of to-dos. She wants to hit the gym, tackle schoolwork, and, as captain of an intramural soccer team and member of a campus health advocacy program, she has plenty of e-mail...

A ‘miracle tree’ that could feed sub-Saharan Africa

As a child growing up in India, I greeted the appearance of one particular vegetable on my plate with exaggerated distaste: tender seedpods from the moringa tree, locally known as “drumsticks.” Imagine my surprise when I heard a health worker from sub-Saharan Africa describe this...

Spiderman & Insect Research

Few stop to marvel at the backyard tree-scaler who limbers up palms to pluck coconuts for a living in South India. Considering that the trees reach up to a height of 60 feet and coconut grow at the very top of the tree, the hazards...

Designs for a better world emerge from M.I.T. summit

For three weeks this summer, masons and mechanics, farmers and welders, scientists and a pastor threw themselves into creating low-tech solutions to big problems that persist across the globe. Converging here at the MIT, these 61 inventors from 20 countries divided into multilingual teams, each...