Category Archives: Uncategorized

In the morning, I had managed to read a few pages of Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics, a new book by Sandhya Ravishankar about the DMK supremo, and noticed that even though it’s a journalist’s book, and even though Mukund … Continue reading →

On average, people don’t read as many books as they used to before because what we want to read has become available in more forms. We read articles on the web, tweets and posts on the social media, emails, WhatsApp … Continue reading →

The National Council of Science and Technology Communication, under the Department of Science and Technology (DST), has floated a new initiative to promote science communication by researchers, particularly PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. It’s being called the ‘Augmenting Writing Skills for … Continue reading →

Puja Mehra wrote an excellent breakdown of the Narendra Modi government’s economic performance of the last four years, the duration for which it has been in office. You should read it if you’re interested in this sort of thing (and … Continue reading →

I got myself a new phone today – the iPhone 6S. Before the purchase, I had spent hours on Amazon looking for the right phone within my budget, and quite possibly went through at least two score models. During this … Continue reading →

I’ve got two things to say about my Elon Musk piece from yesterday. The piece was well-received, insofar as I was expecting it to be: there were a few bouquets, many brickbats. One troll called me “a Marxist in the … Continue reading →

Jean-Paul Sartre famously refused a Nobel Prize for literature (in 1964) because, he said, he didn’t want to be “institutionalised”. His eagerness to prevent this transformation wasn’t misguided. Perhaps more famously, at least among science journalists, many Nobel laureates in the … Continue reading →

After the IPL 2018 concluded last night, Star Sports TV has been doing reruns of the tournament, showing highlights from all the 60 matches as well as compilations of the performances by category. One of these categories is “longest sixes”. … Continue reading →

Kamaljit Bawa is the first Indian to receive the Linnaean Medal in the 140-year old history of the Society awarding the medal. This line is from a press release I received this morning from a PR person at the Ashoka … Continue reading →

I watched a Tamil film today, Romba Nallavan Da Nee (You’re a Very Good Man; 2015). The story’s antagonist appears to have dissociative identity disorder. This disorder used to be called ‘multiple personality’ disorder (MPD). However, in the film all … Continue reading →