Hitchens died two days back fighting oesophageal cancer for over a year now. How many people wished that he would in the last days of his life renounce the acerbity with which he attacked religion of any sort. With the three other horsemen – Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (cf the four horsemen of the apocalypse), the public debates they had with...

An unusually punctual gathering on the dais greeted me at Rotary Club. Thankfully, this was a gathering of unimportant people both on and off the dais; none of those species of “Very Important People” often sporting Anna-like caps were invited to the gathering and things started on time. P Sainath was supposed to be speaking on “Rural India after...

The Zoological Survey of India has an illustrious history. On 1st July, 1916, the organisation was instituted with a mission to “…to promote survey, exploration and research leading to the advancement in our knowledge of various aspects of exceptionally rich life of the erstwhile British Indian Empire” (Emphasis mine). Alfred William Alcock was a British...

The story was tragic. A Tuberculosis patient from India who died because the system which was expected to provide for his treatment failed to deliver… and then the dessert arrived. The setting? The official dinner of the First Global Symposium on Health Systems Research organized at the Montreux Casino. A photo of the dying TB patient formed the background for 20...

It is indeed great days for learners, especially for those who are self-directed, auto-didactic as they are apparently called. With the explosion of those delectable tablets made by that company Lieutenant Dan invested in and the claim that many other products are what evoulutionary biologists would call Batesian mimics, the access and availability to information...