In the 1st century CE, in a particularly sunbaked part of Roman Egypt, a Greek mathematician, engineer, and tinkerer named Heron (aka Hero of Alexandria) devised a mechanical object that he used as a parlour trick. The device was simple. A sealed cauldron of water, heated from

October 2015, Tokyo. Golden Gai, to the outsider, seemed like a mistake that had somehow survived. Obviously some bureaucracy had allowed it to remain. A clutch of narrow alleys in the armpit of Shinjuku. Where modern Tokyo had failed to close the deal. It was like a museum with

Once a month, I have a go at translating a sher to produce a serviceable prose version for my own benefit. The business of putting it into metre and rhyme is a labour far beyond my pay grade. Here’s the offering from March. I have a particular fondness for this one, partly for

Why blame our start-ups and PEs Saar.... when among the best sarkari innovations we have is GST on caramel popcorn?

Somewhere between the twilight of the Jazz Age and the beginning of the Great Depression, Scott Fitzgerald was being paid $4,000 per short story by the Saturday Evening Post, the highest circulated weekly magazine in the United States. This is roughly $70,000 per story in today’s

Fascinating nugget about the economics of magazine-writing in the pre-television, pre-internet era. Thanks to literary archaeologist Ambarish Satwik !

What the salad tried to do to us. The first ambition of any plant is to make itself uneatable. Long before anything clever walked on earth, plants settled on poisoning anything with a mouth. If you can’t run, you better taste terrible. The only way to stay alive was to face

The Moka Pot: Instructions for Inheritance Don’t wash it with soap. You’d rinse away The trace of every yesterday. The oils that cling are not unclean. They mark the soul, not just the sheen.

The film Masaan, written by वरुण 🇮🇳, begins with a sher by Pandit Brij Narayan Chakbast. zindagī kyā hai anāsir meñ zuhūr-e-tartīb maut kyā hai inhīñ ajzā kā pareshāñ honā anāsir: elements zuhūr-e-tartīb: manifestation (zuhūr) of order (tartīb) ajzā: parts, components I’m

Cc: SANJAY HEGDE There’s no such thing as a vegetable biryani because there’s no such thing as a vegetable.

Raag Puriya Dhanashree is dusk in sound form. It’s also the raag of deferred heartbreak. Click play on Farida Khanum singing Faiz in Puriya Dhanashree and you’re undone. At roughly the three-quarter mark in the ghazal, at 7.09 minutes, is a sher that pulls off in two lines what