Culture
In an interview to The Wire Science last month, Venki Ramakrishnan, the molecular biologist, acknowledged that Indians had a bizarre relationship with the fact that he was a Nobel laureate: … the business from India was really strange because I’d left India when I was 19. I had almost nothing
Culture
Instead of dismissing it with a gracious modesty, I'm going to shamelessly record for posterity that The Master quoted in Anand Venkateswaran's essay on J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hindu Literary Review is yours truly. The full text of my quote to Anand, who is
Culture
In all the DnD games I’ve played, I’ve felt there’s a tension between allowing the story to progress and the characters all helping each other participate in that progression. For example, we as players play a game because we want to enact a story even while we
Culture
An online culture zine called Phantom Sway just discovered Mongolian folk rock and can't stop raving about it (I found the article because 3 Quarks Daily picked up on it). What the superficial review fails to mention is the depth of this genre – like all genres – and restricts
Culture
Can't believe I'm so late to the party. It seems that a year ago, Steven Erikson put the Kharkhanas Trilogy on hold, delaying the publication of the third book. The second book, Fall of Light, came out two years ago and was a difficult read in
Culture
I found this evocative image on Twitter today. It’s by a Russian artist named Yuri Shwedoff and the image is part of his ‘Space Series’, available to view and appreciate on Behance. I don’t know the provenance of the overlaid text though. At a glance, it’s clear
Life notes
Just the other day, I’d mentioned to a friend that Steven Pinker was one of those rare people whose ideas couldn’t be appreciated by proxy, such as through the opinions of other authority figures, but had to be processed individually. This is because Pinker has found as much
Uncategorized
Can perceptions arising out of cultural needs override evolutionary goals in the long-run? For example, in India, the average marriage-age is in the late 20s now. Here, the (popular) tradition is to frown down upon, and even ostracize, those who would engage in premarital sex. So, after 10,
Uncategorized
A lot about our biology is intertwined with our culture. When such an association is encountered for the first time, it could sound interesting, intriguing even, but with time, it becomes an evident relationship because our culture plays an important role in our upbringing. For example, think about how the