An epic story of peoples, cultures and adventures among the world’s highest mountians Himalaya, home to an astonishing diversity of indigenous and local cultures, crossroads of trade, meeting point and conflict zone for the world’s superpowers, where Jesuit missionaries exchanged technologies with Tibetan Lamas, Mongol Khans employed Nepali craftsmen, American merchants exchanged musk and gold…
Clarity of statistics amid disinformation and mutant algorithms The threat of pandemic had made us crave data: Millions pore over R numbers, the technicalities of vaccine trials and testing accuracy, once of interest only to biostatisticians, are now daily front page news. Can we really trust the statistics our governments are publishing about the virus? Does…
New History of humankind through the prism of work from the origins of the life on Earth to our ever-more automated present. The work we do bring us meaning, moulds our values, determines our social status and dictates how we spend most of our time. How did work become the central organisational principle of our…
Louise Gluck, a US Poet has won this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. She was recognised for “her unmistakable poetic voice, that with austere beauty makes individual existence Universal” said the Swedish Academy, which oversees the award. Gluck born in 1943, in New York, lives in Massachusetts, and a professor of English at Yale University.…
Roberto Saviano is an Italian like a fusion of Salman Rushdie and James Ellroy Savage. Just like Rushdie after the Iranian Fatwa, Saviano lives under police protection, as a result of death threats issued against him following the publication of the first Gumarrah in 2006 which sold over 10million copies globally and adapted into a…
Superpowers have always dominated their region by exerting an outsize an overbearing influence like China’s involvement in Southeast Asia, US looms over Latin America, Russia treat ex-Soviet States as its “near abroad”, creating unease among its smaller neighbours. The stunning growth of China has although yanked up the region’s economies, but its militarisation of the…
Megalopolises cities like Chicago where 6 per cent of its inhabitants died of Cholera pandemic in 1854, the outbreak killed 8. 600 in 1892 and the great plague claimed the lives of over 100, 000 for London (a quarter of the population) between1665-1666. Although cities have only ever been inhabited by a tiny minority of…
Arathi Raghunath, from Kerala, south India, made a world record at the Universal Record Forum (URF) for completing 350 online courses in three months. Arathi is a second-year MSc Biochemistry student at the MES college. She completed the course offered by State University of New York, University of Virginia and University of Rochester during Covid-19…
Trust your team, be radically honest and never, ever try to please your boss. These are the ground rules if you work at Netflix. These trade secrets have revolutionised the entertainment and tech industries, and this was part of a unique cultural experiment that explains how the company has transformed itself at lighting speed from…
While other leaders were marshalling resources to combat the greatest pandemic in modern times, President Donald Trump was watching Fox News over six hours a day which his staff refers to as “executive time”. In January 2020, when Fox News began to downplay COVID-19, the president was quick to agree. In March, as the deadly…