Malayali’s best friend – The Coconut

What can a Malayali do without a Coconut? After all, it is the ‘Kera Vriksha’ of Kerala and some attribute the states name itself to the tree, but probably it is the other way round. Sept 2 nd is world coconut day , did you all know that? And Tom Hanks made the nut popular all over again with his mov…

Ramanujan - The Hindoo Calculator

High above, the plane had taken off from Vegas, rising over the arid Nevada deserts, headed for Raleigh, North Carolina. The desert was opening out with hues of red and brown, deep chasms or canyons splitting the empty terrain as though enormous forces had ripped the surface apart. My eyes were bec…

Cabral’s hostages

Idakkela Menon and Prangoda Menon were two hostages that Portuguese commander Pedro Alvarez Cabral took back with him to Lisbon after a fight with the Zamorin’s troops on 16th Jan 1501, or so I read in the Cochin state Manual. Whatever happened to them? The quest for an answer proved to be a very i…

The Malayali and the pachyderm

The elephant army of King Puru was the reason for Alexander’s retreat from India many centuries ago. You can imagine that for the uninitiated, this massive animal or many of them can give daymares and nightmares. While the trainers knew that the animal was not really meant for war, it did scare the…

India the marvelous

I can conclude now that it was fate and Rudyard Kipling which brought Samuel L Clemens, AKA Mark Twain to India, and as I am bound to explain my comment, I shall do so with gusto…. Let us first look at ‘fate’ aspect - Twain even though famous through his books, went virtually bankrupt by 1895 and wa…

Zheng He (Cheng Ho) in Calicut

A towering seven footer Mongol Hui Muslim, who entered the Ming King’s (Yongle emperor Zhu Di – the third Ming king) service, Zheng He, is immortal for his astounding navigational quests. When the Ming army captured the Yunan province, the 11 year old Ma Sanpao was one of the many castrated and put…