The story of HE 842, a B24 liberator

I started out writing a fictional story set in our village at Pallavur starting with an object falling out of the skies and crashing into our paddy fields. The much consternation it subjected the villagers to, the investigation of the fallen object and the general furor it created would form the h…

Letters in Post

I am sure many of you will remember a time when we used to wait patiently for the postman to deliver a much-awaited letter. The post was always capable of evoking strong feelings, at times it was a job interview or an appointment letter or it could be a distasteful invoice or bill to be paid, a lo…

Farewell to a Friend - S Muthiah (1930-2019)

We are not destined to meet some people and, in my case, S Muthiah was one of them. I have always held him in great esteem, high regard and in our various communications found him never to be distant or aloof, considering the stature he had in Chennai, a city he would have loved to and I still con…

Sound memories from Sholay

1975 was the year the blockbuster film Sholay was released – I had finished school and joined College to master Electrical Engineering just the previous year. The music was already all over the radio waves. Radio Ceylon had been playing a couple of tracks and interestingly, the LP’s and EP’s which…

The Peacock Throne and the Grosvenor

A Mughal throne in Pondoland? Many years ago, I wrote about the peacock throne and touched upon this very topic at the tail end of that article. The story has not died despite the musicologist, historian and Grosvenor investigator Percevial Kirby’s empathic statement that the ship never really cont…

Dr Barnard – The X-Ray man at Madras

Perhaps Dr. Christian Barnard’s blazing trail with his work on open heart surgery during the late 60’s eclipsed the valuable contributions of another, the Captain Thomas William Barnard, O.B.E., F.H.A., F.R.P.S., M.S.R. who refined X-Ray techniques some three decades earlier, during his tenure at …