Vijee Venkatraman

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Crossings

Anyone who has crossed a busy road in a metropolis without well-regulated traffic, in say Mumbai, India, can understand the plight of a deer trying to cross a two-lane highway, in rural United States. Evolution has not prepared deer for encounters with automobiles. Over one...

The Madras Hedgehog

For the longest time, I thought hedgehogs were simply critters from British children’s books. But three different species of hedgehogs — living, breathing mammals — inhabit the Indian subcontinent alone. Of these, we know very little about the Madras Hedgehog (Paraechinus nudiventris), says Dr. Brawin Kumar,...

Amrutanjan and The American Legend

Chennai can be proud of having hosted the FIDE Chess Olympiad of 2022 in style and at such short notice too. Believe it or not the seeds for this event may have been sown fifty years ago, in the United States. In 1972, at the...

Virtual Therapeutics

Phantom limb pain is a neurological paradox: a limb that no longer exists can still hurt. For many amputees, the sensation is intense, persistent, and unmistakably real. The sensation has been described in medical literature as far back as in the 16th century and has...

Curiosity-driven Research, Curd Rice & Pickle

You may be familiar with MS Blue, the distinctive shade of blue, named for the legendary Carnatic vocalist M.S. Subbalakshmi, but now “Mas Blue,” is all set to wow the world of art. “Mas” comes from the initials of Prof. M.A. Subramanian, the material scientist from Madras,...

Bionote

The poem Bionote, K.Srilata says, was written on a sort of impulse. “It was triggered by a comment I heard from a friend of mine – quite a culture-vulture himself – about another writer based in Bombay. My friend said that this writer was “so...