Human Interest

The Antikythera Mechanism – Forgetting Knowledge

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As someone fascinated by technology, reading about the oldest computer in the world was a revelation. It was more than 120 years ago, in 1900, that a shipwreck was discovered off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera by sponge divers. It was identified as a Roman cargo ship and over the next year, a…

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BIRGing – The Lure of Reflected Glory

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Long before Marvel came up with the idea of putting interesting snippets of the next movie in between the post movie credits, there were many who would watch the scrolling list of those involved in making the movies (especially English), to spot Indian names. And in recent years, with a lot of post production as…

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Melodious Memories from a Forest in a Pitch Black Night

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It was a visit to the Tribal Museum that rekindled memories of that night. In order to preserve and promote the skills as well as tradition of their unique wall paintings, the Museum had gotten a few Saura men to Bhubaneswar and employed them to create paintings in their style that could be sold or…

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Leveraging the Crowd – When Strangers Step up

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It was a WhatsApp message from another young alumnus of my alma mater XIMB that brought Nikita’s request to my attention. Nikita and her husband Manoj were both recent alumni, and I was not connected directly with them. Manoj, a young professional working in the development sector is directly involved in the upliftment of vulnerable…

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Seven Learnings from a bout with Covid

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It was on the intervening night of the 6th and 7th of May 2021 that our pup Bruno decided he would sleep with us on our bed. It was as he and I struggled to find equitable space on the bed that my fever and body aches began. As I awoke in the morning, the…

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The Value of Wisdom

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It was on Mother’s Day that Prasad lost his mother to Covid. And this was but one of the tsunami of tragedies that hit our nation as the pandemic reared its head again after a lull. All talk of waves, peaks, plateaus and variants become meaningless when a loved one becomes a statistic, and most…

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Humour – The balm for trying times

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The genre that I love reading the most is humour, and I confess to harbouring an intense envy of writers, who with such ease let loose a barrage of words that leave their readers clutching their sides as they roll about on the floor, laughing their hearts out. My earliest tryst with humour was through…

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Criticism – Accept, Stifle or Ignore?

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As a child, I remember feeling puzzled when reading about people being referred to as critics. I wondered why anyone would want to criticize something, and more importantly, why others not only allowed the critic to make unpleasant remarks, but actually paid him for doing so. As I grew older, I understood that the critics…

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What’s in a name? Quite a lot actually!

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When Shakespeare wrote the lines “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet” for Juliet’s soliloquy in Romeo and Juliet, he struck a chord – after all, a name is given for identification and does not necessarily give or describe attributes. However, in today’s day…

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Science Fiction to Fact – The Future is Now

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Growing up in Bhubaneswar in the Seventies and Eighties, one of the most eagerly awaited events in life was the release of a new James Bond movie. Literally cut off from the mainstream of life in a small town, these movies gave us a vicarious glimpse into a world with fast cars, glamorous ladies and…

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