I’ve always wondered why there’s no Nobel Prize for Naming or an Oscar for outstanding nomenclature. Surely in a universe with more than a b...

Carnatic music is like the Rubik’s cube. Only a few practitioners of the art are able to ‘get it’. The rest of us gyana soonyams (dimwits) ...

Gold is not the most expensive substance in this world. Sorry, it ain’t platinum either. Nor diamond. If you had cared to look beyond the te...

One of Gabbar Singh’s favourite expletives was ‘suar ke bacche’ (progeny of swine). Logically speaking, it should have never gained tracti...

Everyone’s been so blinded by the inclusion of four British Asians (Moen Ali, Haseeb Hameed, Adil Rashid and Zafar Ansari) into the English ...

The currency bomb has been dropped. And we can’t stop talking about it. The believers seem to think that the Darth Vaders of black money hav...

In a nation that has innumerable conversations over trifling matters such as Arnab’s noisy exit and the return of ‘Koffee with Karan’, it he...

October 29th was a red letter day for Indian sport. That was the day, when Mahendra Singh Devaki, Virat Saroj, Rohit Purnima, Ajinkya Sujata...

Diwali is round the corner. And pity, no one knows about John Walker. He’s the modern day Prometheus who invented the first-ever friction ma...

I have a simple test for measuring the IQ of a city. Just put all its restaurants under the microscope and evaluate them for evidence of wit...

One of the prerequisites for being an academic is you have to look and sound very academic. Which is why you’ll rarely spot Elvis Presley si...

Dravid and Kumble are not the only legends associated with Karnataka. Every city in the state is a tale wrapped in a yarn inside an anecdote...

If irony had a capital, it would be in Islamabad. Because when Pakistan was born it was touted as the ‘land of the pure’ based on the premis...

There’s something very likable about Scotland. It’s the only country in the world to have the Unicorn as the national animal. That’s today’s...

It takes a lot to flummox Superman. But in 1967, a smallish, mischievous looking bloke from the fifth dimension got the better of Superman j...

Consider this: You’re flying an international airline, full of foreigners. There are only two Tamilians on the plane. You and one more guy s...

Geographically speaking, Spain is about 7900 kilometres away from India. But culturally speaking, they’re much, much closer as we owe nearly...

If you meet a guy who has a five-egg omelette and three fried-egg sandwiches laden with cheese and mayonnaise for breakfast, you’d probably ...

Google has its massive headquarters in Silicon Valley and it’s famously called Googleplex. The seemingly unremarkable name has something ver...

Jason Statham, the action hero of Transporter, and the Brit star with more Facebook fans than Narendra Modi (54 million fans, at the last co...

Ludwig van Beethoven had a nasty surprise in his childhood. He was told that he was the second Ludwig van Beethoven of the family. He didn’t...

Winston Churchill spoke about very many things in his life spanning nine decades. To me, the most insightful statement was this: “I am fond ...

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had four sons: Harilal, Manilal, Ramdas and Devdas. One of them turned out to be a rebellious drunk and was disow...

If large pockets of the world still think we are a land of snake charmers, we are equally guilty of nursing some bizarre notions about Afric...

Steel making has got nothing to with Child Sexual Abuse, right? Wrong. In India, after much public pressure, the government passed a law in ...

For 300 weeks, I’ve been serving you a curious potion laced with a hint of trivia, a slice of etymology and a dash of name history. You’ve b...

There’s a new villain in the grand narrative of India. It’s the diamond-watch wearing asura who lives the rich life in a castle in a farawa...

T Rajendar can legitimately claim to be our first ever rap star. He could effortlessly rhyme thangachi with kottanguchi long before Baba S...

Real story. A famed venture capital fund once beseeched us to come up with a meaningless name for an apparel start-up. We tried reasoning wi...

We’re so ignorant about South Korea that some of us may even assume Charles Correa to be a Korean architect. No, I kid you not! Beyond the u...