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 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 […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a pioneering, also provocative, psychologist. His work led to the emergence of a new understanding of human behaviour while changing the contexts of how society viewed everything from penitentiaries to childcare. Skinner deliberated that free will was an illusion and that all our actions were a result of conditioning […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR It was Nicholas Copernicus who first proposed, in 1853, that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but it, in fact, revolved around the sun. It took over a century for the idea to sink in — a gradual and rather agonising transformation. The Darwinian perestroika has been no different, notwithstanding […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Rahul Dravid is a man of steely resolve — and, a quiet achiever. He’s to cricket what Kalidasa, or Saint Thyagaraja, is to Indian art. A classical practitioner with the humane soul and a master composer with a sequence of divine melodies, Dravid was the game’s ‘Methuselah’ in terms of sheer intensity, skill, […]
RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Nelson Mandela remains a brilliant subject — a subject that is every biographer’s dream-come-true. His long life spanned the tribal rituals of rural Africa, the Anglicised tenets of the 1940s, the Gandhian ‘formula’ of anti-apartheid battles, a short guerrilla resistance, long imprisonment and, finally, power — power that brought majority rule to South […]