Every single day, without exception, 100,000 people climb the Tirumala Hills in Andhra Pradesh to stand before Lord Venkateswara. Not during festivals. Not during special occasions. Every ordinary day of every ordinary week of every ordinary year, one hundred thousand … Read More
Culture
Aryabhata: The Ancient Indian Mathematician Who Calculated the Earth’s Rotation
In the year 499 CE, a twenty-three-year-old mathematician in Kusumapura, the ancient city that is now Patna in Bihar, finished writing a book. The book was called the Aryabhatiya. It was written in Sanskrit verse. It was 121 stanzas long. … Read More
Sariska Tiger Reserve: The Forest That Brought Tigers Back From Zero
Three thousand years ago, if you believe the Mahabharata, the Pandava brothers spent part of their twelve years of forest exile somewhere in the Aravalli Hills of what is now Rajasthan. Three hundred and fifty years ago, a Mughal emperor … Read More
The Mystery of Iron Pillar Delhi Unveiled: How Ancient Tech Beat Rust for 1,600 Years
Every metal has a shelf life. Leave a piece of iron in the open air and the process begins almost immediately. Oxygen from the atmosphere combines with moisture from rain and humidity. A thin film of iron oxide forms on … Read More
Lakshmi of Pompeii: The Indian Goddess Who Was Buried Under Mount Vesuvius
On the morning of August 24 in the year 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted. By the following day the Roman city of Pompeii, which had been one of the most prosperous trading cities in the Mediterranean world, was buried under … Read More
Fairy Queen Train: Ride One of the World’s Oldest Working Steam Locomotives in India
The Fairy Queen was built in 1855 by Kitson, Thompson and Hewitson. That sentence, read carefully, requires a moment to absorb. Not restored to look like 1855. Not rebuilt using modern parts inside a Victorian shell. Built in 1855. The … Read More
God Particle India: The Kolkata Physicist Behind Higgs Boson
On the morning of July 4 2012, scientists at CERN in Geneva announced one of the most significant discoveries in the history of physics. After a quest spanning nearly half a century, physicists had found a new subatomic particle consistent … Read More
Ancient Indian Philosophy and Quantum Physics: The Nobel Connection
In October 2022 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists, Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum … Read More
Chitradurga Fort: The Woman Who Held It Alone With a Pestle
High above the windswept plains of Karnataka, where boulders rest like forgotten gods and the sky meets stone in a quiet embrace, Chitradurga Fort rises, unyielding, untamed, and utterly unforgettable. It has seven concentric walls of fortification. Nineteen gateways. Thirty-eight … Read More
Kanada’s Atomic Theory: The Ancient Indian Philosopher Who Discovered the Atom 2600 Years Before John Dalton
John Dalton is credited with discovering atomic theory in 1808. He was 2600 years late. In approximately 600 BCE, in a small town near what is now Dwaraka in Gujarat, a philosopher named Kanada sat down, wrote the Vaisheshika Sutras … Read More