Category Archives: Literature / Culture

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR  It is a common question — what’s the most extraordinary scientific legacy of Charles Robert Darwin’s vision of life? The answer is simple. Chance variation, juxtaposed by its primary motif of natural selection. A marvellously simple, yet elegant, tale of how organisms are created and extinguished. Modern biology expresses this fascinating story in […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Partap Sharma, playwright, author, actor, director, filmmaker, and voice-over artist, with the golden larynx, was a genuine article. He not only carved a special niche for himself in everything he did, or explored, but he also set a benchmark — all his own. Sharma’s foremost job was, of course, keyed to his gilded […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When football legend and the only three-time FIFA World Cup [1958, 1962, and 1970] player, and winner, Pelé stated he was feeling ‘better,’ after surgery for colon tumour, he also lost no time to quip — thanks to his archetypal humour — that he could not wait to get back to playing the […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Circa 1932-33. The future, if anything, looked bleak for English cricket, thanks to the phenomenal, and extraordinary, capabilities of a one-man ‘nuclear taskforce’ — Sir Don Bradman. What’s more, it was also a time when the enormously endowed Aussie had looked most likely to carrying on with his ecstatic occupation of crucifying England’s […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Children, as psychologists contend, can offer amazing insights. As physicist Robert Oppenheimer articulated, “There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics because they have modes of perception that I lost long ago.” This is not all. If we think as most of us do […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Wimbledon has come a long way — and, there’s a long way yet to go for the hallowed tournament. It’s, therefore, time for us to delve into nostalgia, down memory lane, after the curtains came down on yet another Wimbledon journey, last month. Here goes — When tennis players — 22 of them […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The free-market economy has made life comfortable for many of us; it has also opened up choices that did not seem to exist before. This sounds great, but it does not explain why we are bamboozled by a frenzied world that we have created for ourselves. Our computers keep us occupied, and while […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The horrendous COVID-19 pandemic compelled us to realise that the most expensive things in life do not really bring profound happiness. Yet, the fact also is — blame it on our short-term memory — we are always drawn to them. It is rightly said that objects imitate life at the material level. In […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR It’s over five+ decades ago that the one and only John Wayne accepted the role of Major John Reisman in The Dirty Dozen [1967], a spectacular, runaway blockbuster. He asked Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [MGM] for certain script changes, albeit he pulled out of the project to make The Green Berets [1968]. He was replaced by Lee […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth got together and published Lyrical Ballads, with A Few Other Poems, in an edition of 500 copies, over 225 years ago, the whole idea was exciting, all right. But, it wasn’t a tizzy, or an earth-shattering event, really. Rather, it was a humble beginning. Yet, beneath […]