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For this dispatch, here's my review for Shaastra Magazine of "Breaking Rocks and Barriers". This is a memoir by the remarkable geologist and mountaineer Sudipta Sengupta. In 2022, I interviewed her for a long article I did on India's scientific endeavours in Antarctica - she was on one of the earliest Indian expeditions to that icy continent. I couldn't wait to read her memoir, and it was a treat. I couldn't get over how she writes about rocks almost as friends, using geological terms in a way that somehow just flows.
(Explanatory note: this article is about the recent Assembly election in my state, Maharashtra. Most of you probably know that the BJP and its allies, the incumbents, swept to a massive majority in the Assembly.)
Here's a possible dilemma for you to think through. It's time for your yearly eye checkup. So one evening, you drop by your friendly nearby optometrist. You're expecting her to sit you down as usual, get you to try reading the usual chart across the room that has letters getting steadily smaller on each row, offer you a card with bits of text in varying font sizes to read ... the usual.
Remember Pluto? For humans of a certain vintage, like me, it was a name familiar from our earliest brushes with astronomy. It was the ninth planet in our Solar System, the furthest from the Sun.
(I wrote this for Scroll.in - about ten days ago, it appeared here.)
Trying in years gone by to tell my kids something about mathematics, nothing was difficult.
Pompeii, famously, is the city that was destroyed and embalmed when the volcano Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. Visiting there, which I did in September with someone I know well, is awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, breathtaking - and there's much more to say too.
Transport yourself to the days of yore, meaning before Whatsapp. OK, long before Whatsapp. You're on a hilltop and I'm on another. We can see each other, but we're too far apart to hear each other.
(The first instalment of this article is here: https://deathendsfun.stck.me/post/470298/Next-door-to-God-1)
Oct 8 2024
... aka stck.me
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