236 items in this section. Displaying page 8 of 24
Assam's Boys Shine in Asian Cricket
July 22: Two young boys have done the impossible in Assam. They have pushed politicians and the continuing violence, out of the media spotlight. Both boys are stars of the Indian under-15 cricket team. One of them, Palash Jyot Das, is the son of a bank employee. The other, Mrigen Talukdar comes from a poor family. There’s nothing remarkable about their backgrounds. Much is remarkable about their achievements, though. While Palash is Asia’s best batsman, Mrigen is Asia’s best bowler....
Man Who Could Make The Taj Disappear
August 12: Franz Harary is the magician. He has a simple wish: he wants to make the Taj Mahal disappear. Nothing doing, says the Indian government. Harary is an American magician. His specialty is making huge monuments disappear. In ten years, he has done things no other magician has dared do before. In Hawaii he moved a volcano two miles out to sea. In Japan, he made the Tokyo Bay Bridge vanish. At Cape Kennedy in the USA, he made the NASA space shuttle vanish....
The Quake that rocked Gujarat
Where: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India February 5, 2001 : It was 8.45 am on January 26, 2001. A day when the country was celebrating Republic Day. Like their counterparts across India, the people of Ahmedabad, in the western state of Gujarat, were settling down to watch the Republic Day Parade on television. Basant Rawat was one of them. Suddenly the earth began to shake under his feet. Basant ran out of his house. And, the sight that greeted him seemed to be straight out of an action film – Tagore apartments, a five-storeyed building, 400 yards from his house, collapsed like a pack of cards, says a report in ‘The Telegraph’....
Seeing the City
I have a friend with whom I argue a lot. No, that seems as if I am the one who does the arguing all the time. Half the time it is he who says something ridiculous, and then we start arguing! There is one topic that we keep coming back to argue upon. I have stayed in one city all my life — in Delhi, the capital of India. He from childhood has lived in many places — cities as well as small towns across India....
English and Indlish
July 15: Students are often rebuked for using what is known as ‘Indian English’ words. Perhaps these teachers need to know that many Indian words have actually become a part of an Oxford Dictionary. The Asian Age newspaper reported that the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary of Correct English has a section on Indian English. The section has 2,500 words The fifth edition of the dictionary was released recently. Words like bandicoot, bungalow, jungle, chit, cushy, juggernaut are commonly known....
The Bt Brinjal Battle
Where: New Delhi, India February 20, 2010 : India’s environment minister Jairam Ramesh had announced that Bt Brinjal, a genetically modified (GM) plant, would be introduced for cultivation across the country. A storm of public protests followed. As a result, the introduction has been put on hold for the time being. On February 9, 2010, the government of India announced that it needs more time to take a final decision. Bt Brinjal is brinjal modified by the addition of a gene from ‘Bacillus thuringiensis’ (a bacterium)....
The Boy who Lacked Sight but Had a Vision
It was like any other day in school for six-year-old George Abraham. He went to La Martinere school in Lucknow, where he lived with his aunt. The school was open to boys till the fourth standard. That day, as usual, the teacher found that the little boy was holding the book next to his nose. She complained and George had to undergo several eye tests. The doctors found that his retina was damaged beyond repair, and said he would lose most of his eyesight....
The Joy of Flying
Come Independence Day and the markets are flooded with kites. The sky looks like an ocean swarming with tiny tadpoles swimming across from one place to the other. Colourful tadpoles, though! Although kite flying has been popular in India for hundreds of years, historians believe that kite flying originated in China almost 3,000 years ago. There are many stories, which talk about the origin of kites. One of them goes like this: The Joy of Flying [Illustrations by Shiju George] There was a king in China who asked his army men to tie him to a kite and fly him off to the enemy’s territory....
Footprints on Earth
Have you ever been to a national park? If so, you must have tried to trace or locate a wild animal by trying to see its footprints on the soil. For example, people who go to Jim Corbett National Park, in Uttar Pradesh, India, spend most of their time looking for tigers. They do so by trying to look for its pug marks on the soil. If they find even one, they return happy and spin tall tales of adventure to their friends, about “How I saw a tiger”....
Vanishing Vulture
It’s the bird most commonly associated with death. Once a common sight in South Asia, the vulture, or nature’s scavenger, is one of the 78 species in India that is dying out. Faced with a mysterious virus and pesticide poisoning, the population of vultures today is said to be just 5 per cent of what it was (about 20 years ago) in the 1980s. A couple of years ago, the vultures of Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur numbered 2000....