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Tengo poco Sanskrit

I was born into a Tam-Brahm family, which is short for Tamil Brahmin -- through no fault of mine I hasten to add! An ancestor of mine was in fact a Hindu priest in Tamil Nadu. You can expect people from such families to...

The Making of Life In the Death Zone

Starting in the early 1970s, two German boys—one from the East, one from the West—with binoculars around their necks spent their teenage years pacing either side of the insurmountable Iron Curtain, the “death zone,” looking for birds. Today, the former pen pals are striving to...

The Universal Correspondent

Those were the days when I was struggling to establish myself as a journalist. They used to call me Universal Correspondent since I had no authority to represent any particular publication. Still, I was busy from morning till night, moving about on my bicycle or...

The Odd Couple

The first of these stories featuring an old couple and a host of zany characters appeared in the Tamil weekly Kumudham in 1963 and has entertained fans ever since. The writer was Bhagyam Ramasami; the illustrator Jayraj. Sita Patti [full name: Sitalakshmi Appusamy], the madisar-clad sixty-plus bombshell, is the president of a ladies...

Elephant Conservation Conundrum

Those who grew up in southern India may fondly recall temple elephants with their tinkling neck-bells. As children, we didn't notice the shackles on their legs. Elephants have iconic status in India, they were used in warfare, and also in construction and transportation, apart...

The Cricket Woman

Physical courage is generally not a requirement for studying science, but field biology seems to call for this quality. Swati Diwakar spent many a night in an evergreen forest in South India collecting data for her dissertation on crickets taking the occasional viper bite in...