Miscellaneous

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The Best Little Bird Sanctuary in India

If you went to school in Chennai, chances are you have visited the Vedanthangal Bird Sanctuary, some fifty miles south of the city. As an eighth grader, I went there on a school excursion for the first time. Oblivious to the birds in the distance,...

Dilip Kumar, Improbable Tamil Anthologist

Dilip Kumar, Booksellers and Exporters, was the name of the Tamil literary bookstore he ran in Mylapore, Chennai. For over a quarter century research scholars and avid readers dropped in here to discuss books with the genial owner. This was till 2016. He also shipped...

My Friend from Islamabad

Summer vacation did not mean days off for graduate students in the United States but in those warm months we could take longer-than-usual coffee breaks without feeling guilty. Pocket Park, our campus coffee shop, tiny and transparent, was wedged into a far corner of a...

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:...

Closing The Education Divide

In the Arab world, sheer numbers call for leap-frogging into digital learning, said Maysa Jalbout, CEO of the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education. Over half the 385 million people who live the region are under 25 years of age, she said. A good many...

Kavli Awards Ceremony

[caption id="attachment_3321" align="alignleft" width="300"] pic credit: Kavli Foundation[/caption] This September, I was in Norway to attend the Kavli Prize Awards Ceremony. King Harald presented the million dollar award to scientists who've made important, or as they say seminal, contributions in these 3 fields: Nanotechnology, Neuroscience...