A town needs to agree on the time before it can pray together, trade together or do anything together. Before wristwatches and wall clocks and phones, the agreement came from the sky. In Pulicat, on the Coromandel coast north of … Read More
Untold Stories
The Lighthouse at Pulicat Was Built to Keep Ships Away
Most lighthouses exist to bring ships in. The one at Pulicat, on the Coromandel coast north of Chennai, was raised to do the opposite. It stands over a shallow lagoon and a quiet town of fishing families, and its job … Read More
The Drain of Rome: How India Bled the Greatest Empire in History Dry
In 77 CE, the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder sat down and calculated how much money India was costing the Roman Empire. He came up with a figure of 50 million sesterces every year. Gold, flowing east. Pepper, ivory, … Read More
Wootz Steel: The Indian Metal That Built the Medieval World
The Crusaders called it the most terrifying metal they had ever encountered. When the armies of the First Crusade arrived in the Holy Land in 1099 CE and met the forces of the Islamic world in battle, they discovered that … Read More
The Iron Age Did Not Begin in Turkey. It Began in Adichanallur in Tamil Nadu
The world has a story it tells about iron. Iron, the story goes, was first mastered in Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, around 1200 BCE. From there it spread through the ancient world: to Greece, to Persia, to India, … Read More
Varahamihira: Ancient Astronomer Who Mapped the Comets & Predicted Earthquakes
Who was Varahamihira?Varahamihira was a 6th-century Indian astronomer, mathematician and polymath who lived and worked in Ujjain in present-day Madhya Pradesh from approximately 505 to 587 CE. He was one of the nine gems of Emperor Vikramaditya’s court and authored … Read More
Sushruta: The World’s First Plastic Surgeon
Modern medicine credits plastic surgery to 20th-century European surgeons. There is a Varanasi physician who performed it in 600 BCE. His name was Sushruta. He lived and taught on the banks of the Ganges in the city now known as … Read More
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
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