Snobbery comes in many forms. It can be because someone feels superior because he or she comes from a particular social background or a branded school, college, university and profession. Or it can be because you feel superior to those who can’t speak English or, even if they can, their accent
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It was a wonderful spring in North India this year. The temperature stayed between 15 and 30 degrees Celsius throughout March. Usually, it goes up to 33–35. There was periodic rain as well. And there were occasional strong winds. Together they blew away the pollution. The birds sensed the good times
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Egypt as a travel destination was on our bucket list for a long, long time, and that we waited so long to visit that beautiful, historic country was because we tried to club it with Israel, or Iraq, where we have been going every decade — from
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The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) pulled off a major feat last month. It successfully organised the first edition of Women’s IPL in which five teams took part, namely, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Lucknow and Gujarat. The women played perfectly acceptable cricket and I must say I enjoyed the
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You could call it his Eureka moment. Marine engineer Anjan Mukherjee was reading an article in Nature magazine on the technique used by the snapping shrimp (Alpheidae) to harness energy to attack its prey, when the thought struck him that the same method could be employed to
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It was day-long fun and merriment for 400 children from 10 childcare homes and protection centres at 22nd Chinnara Utsava, more popular as Orphanage Olympics, hosted jointly by RC Mangalore Central, RID 3181, and RAC Mangalore City, at the Canara High School. [caption id=”attachment_40825″
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Winter in North India, where I have been living since 1958, is becoming shorter by the year. It’s gone from being for 90 days to just half that. Until the mid-90s, it used to start just after Diwali in mid-November and stretch till the first week of March when the minimum
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Four years ago, a survey conducted in twenty tier-1, 2, and 3 cities estimated that an average citizen in urban India travels about 1,000km a month, or roughly 35km a day. When you extrapolate from this estimate and tot up the distance travelled by a population as
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Last month I had written about my short, three-month sojourn at the University of Cambridge in 1983. I had gone there to write a paper on the Latin American debt crisis. Six years later I applied to, and was invited by, Queen Elizabeth House (QEH) in Oxford. I was to spend a
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All of us have at some point or the other received invitations for what are billed as ‘green events’. These are happenings where the organisers profess to follow broad sustainability guidelines from planning to implementation. This is understandable given people are increasingly becoming environment conscious. In fact,
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If you’ve been to a South Indian wedding or a festival celebration in the south, you would’ve probably seen rows of people sitting cross-legged on the floor — with plantain leaves placed in front of them — patiently waiting for the servers to first place salt on
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