RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR You are caught in a traffic jam. No big guess. You have an important meeting lined up. No real surprise. Welcome to the stress labyrinth — an inevitable part of our life and existence. Stress is more than just a warped logjam. It has biotic and functional nitty-gritties and psychosomatic outcomes. It changes […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When Linus Pauling, the legendary chemist and two-time Nobel laureate, discovered that a specific heritable protein variation in a single component of haemoglobin protein complex resulted in sickle cell anaemia, it initiated a new era in biomedical sciences. Years later, the gene responsible for the haemoglobin variant was discovered — including an entire […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Your happiness quotient has a positive immune base — the true reflection of a strong immune system. This is because negative responses affect our immune response — while long periods of stress and negativism are evidenced to be a major risk for illness. To highlight virologist Ronald Glaser’s words, “Nobody believed, in the […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Our brain is an extraordinary engineering marvel — it does thousands of tasks without getting into boredom. Think of it — the thumping of our heart, lung function, or the surge of oxygen into our blood stream. The list is endless. The brain is a ‘pharmaceutical’ wonder — it maintains and processes hundreds […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Picture this: Charlie Chaplin’s memorable film, City Lights [1931], where he plays the little tramp, as usual. He saves, in one hilarious sequence, a drunk from leaping to his death. The drunk turns out to be a millionaire who befriends Chaplin and the two spend the evening together, drinking and partying. The next […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Balletic, in every sense of the word, great spinners are not typified characters, howsoever mildly they may illuminate the sap-green stage. They are important and often peculiar human beings whose strong realm of individuality is the source of their talents. For a variety of reasons: mental, physical, artistic, or technical, and magical — […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR December 1974. The mood in the English cricket camp is anything but upbeat. It is as cold as the far-from-hospitable ‘bleak’ weather back home. Cricketing forays Down Under are, no less, under the cloud for a side that had, until then, been the epitome of professionalism — an English archetype. Mike Denness’ touring […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Our mind and body are designed to react to anxiety and stress by generating a surplus of chemicals and hormones — cortisol, epinephrine and norepinephrine, among others. This prompts the ‘alarm bell,’ followed by frenetic activity through the adrenal glands. This is also, in effect, the trigger for the pituitary gland to respond […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR A great all-rounder is too often a graceful character that instils a sense of fear, and awe, in the opposition. Keith Miller, a champion performer, from Down Under, espoused the description to a T. Miller, a terror in many a batsman’s mind, was a world-beater — all by himself. A giant of an […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR All intelligence, it’s rightly said, leads to god. This is the ultimate truth — the sum of the parts and part of the whole. All things, big or small, also lead to god — because god is supreme intelligence. Where there is no god, there is no intelligence. Where there is, likewise, no […]