The Blog
On Single-Sex Labs
[caption id="attachment_3680" align="alignleft" width="133"] Anna Mani[/caption] India's first Nobelist C.V. Raman maintained a strict separation of sexes in his laboratory, his student Anna Mani recalls in this profile by Abha Sur. Raman would mutter ``Scandalous!'' every time a male and a female student walked...
Read MoreTengo poco Sanskrit
[caption id="attachment_3614" align="alignleft" width="300"] Rare Book Society of India[/caption] I am a Tam-Brahm, which is short for Tamil Brahmin. My ancestors were Hindu priests. You can expect people from such families to have a smattering of Sanskrit, the language of liturgy. My great-grandfather worked in...
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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...
Read MoreThe Name is Bond. James Bond
The fictional British spy's name originally belonged to an ornithologist, an authority on birds of the West Indies. The author Ian Fleming who lived in Jamaica was an avid birder himself. His book was going along well, he just wanted a name for his protagonist...
Read MoreCurious Case of The Sex Reversed Insects
[caption id="attachment_3129" align="alignleft" width="300"] Female penis of N. aurora.Credit: Current Biology, Yoshizawa et al.[/caption] They say there is nothing new under the sun. But consider this newly discovered genus Neotrogla with four insect species, in the caves of Brazil. The females have the equivalent of...
Read MoreThe 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...
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