De Nobili-The Roman Brahmin

Madurai – The last time we passed Madurai was on 31st Oct 1984, the day Indira Gandhi was assassinated by Beant Singh and we were en-route Kodaicanal for our honeymoon, bussing through the trouble prone and riot hit streets of Calicut & Madurai. But that was a stray incident; in general, as you...

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Mysteries of a 'chellapetti'

The thoughts of this decadent object and the peculiar habit of betel leaf chewing in India entered my mind when I saw these two ‘ambis’ in conversation. They were Kamal Hassan and Delhi Ganesh (from the movie MMKR). Watch this clip if you want a quick introduction to the Palakkad ambi’s peculiar...

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Hillary, Pandey, Sean and me…

Now this sort of rhymes like in the movie Me, Myself  and Irene, right? Well, there is something common in all the above names. The first three were mountaineers. Two, the first and the third climbed Everest. The second named taught me the rudiments of mountaineering and the fourth, i.e. me…met...

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Whistlers in Istanbul

When my friend, who now spends time designing microchips in the arid deserts of Arizona, told me this story, in his own peculiar way, I laughed so much that my stomach hurt for the rest of the day. You can easily make out from the account that he was a good story teller. Whether I will do justice to...

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Da Vinci to the rescue - after 500 years

As we all agree, Leanardo Da Vinci was a rare genius and an enigma. Not only was he a great artist and painter, painting masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa, the last Supper and the anatomical wonder ‘Virtuvian Man’, but also an inventor par excellence. Whenever I leaf through the copy of the book ‘Ancient...

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