The pain is gone.
Reading some pages of fiction touched off old memories that I’d forgotten existed, bringing back to life words and, with them, sensations. Words were between words, ideas between ideas, color underneath hue. Earlier, I wrote…
April 2013
Where’s all the antimatter? New CERN results show the way.
If you look outside your window at the clouds, the stars, the planets, all that you will see is made of matter. However, when the universe was born, there were equal amounts of matter and…
The wayward and cowardly introspector
No water and power at home today, so I wish you a horrible Tamil New Year’s Day, too. With nothing much to do – and the sun beating down upon Chennai at an unwavering 33°…
The creative process must not be transcendental.
During a conversation with an emotionally intense and literarily prolific friend earlier this evening, the friend said many of the greatest poets had led doomed lives; doomed in the sense that they’d all suffered great…
On the shoulders of the Higgs
On July 4, 2012, when CERN announced that a particle that looked a lot like the Higgs boson had been spotted, the excitement was palpable. A multibillion-dollar search for an immensely tiny particle had paid…
Tragedy, over and over.
This book review, as written by me, appeared in The Hindu Literary Review on April 6, 2013. — Chernobyl is in the past. Well, it’s definitely easy to look at it that way when you…
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Returning to WordPress… fourth time round.
My blog got me my job. After all, it did make a cameo appearance during my interview, drawing an “Impressive!” from the Editor of the newspaper sitting opposite me. Ever since that episode in early…
Some more questions concerning Herschel…
The Herschel Space Observatory, a.k.a. Herschel, was the largest space telescope at the time of its launch and still is. With a collecting area twice as large as the Hubble Space Telescope’s, and operating in…
Big science, bigger nationalism.
Nature India ran a feature on March 21 about three Indian astrophysicists who had contributed to the European Space Agency’s Planck mission that studied the universe’s CMBR, etc. I was wary even before I started to read it.…
Crowd-sourcing a fantasy fiction tale
What if thousands of writers, economists, philosophers, scientists, teachers, industrialists and other many other people from other professions besides were able to pool their intellectual and creative resources to script one epic fantasy-fiction story? Such…