The campus of the Institute for Plasma Research in the village Bhat in the outskirts of Ahmedabad stood out in a city which is renowned for its architectural gems. Visitors to the campus make interesting comments about the layout. The necessity for the extra wide corridors has been attributed to accommodate the oversized egos of the scientists working there! The building has been called a Taj Mahal. But the most cryptic comment was made by Lech Walesa, the former President of

The air in the control room of the Agni-3 facility of India’s latest fusion startup in Gandhinagar didn’t smell like the future. It smelled of floor wax, recycled air, and the sharp, metallic tang of ozone that always preceded a plasma shot. Dr. Aditi Ghosh stared at the vast array of monitors in front of her and the group of young scientists peering at them. After decades of “almost,” “maybe,” and “thirty years away,” the world had stopped looking at fusion as a savior and s

The humid breeze of the Arabian Sea carried the heavy, unmistakable scent of cardamom and black pepper across the Willingdon Island docks. For Madhav Menon, that fragrance was as much heritage; as it was a challenge. As a third-generation spice exporter in Cochin, Menon was steeped in spice stories. The “Queen of the Arabian Sea” had traded in “Black Gold” for centuries. But the modern global market was not much impressed by history; It was obsessed with safety. A single ship

Image created by Google Gemini The humid air of Surat usually smelled of salt and diesel, but inside the laboratory of Harishbhai Shah, it smelled of ozone and machine oil. Harishbhai was not a traditional diamond merchant. He never sat on a white floor cushion with a magnifying glass, niggling over the clarity of a stone. He was a man of the machine. Specifically, a compact, affordable tabletop Plasma Wakefield Accelerator that occupied the basement of his nondescript labora

The year was 1964. My role as a lecturer at Athanasius College, Kothamangalam, was beginning to feel like a trap. I could see the trajectory ahead: aging, taking tuitions, marrying, building a house, and achieving a comfortable affluence — all while being unable to do what I truly craved: research. The “bug” had bitten me during my student days in Trivandrum, where I would listen, spellbound, to post-graduate physics students debating modern physics, even if I understood bare

In the mist-shrouded peaks of the Kulu Valley, where the air smells of cedar and ancient snow, a revolution was brewing — not of swords, but of silk-soft fiber. For generations, the weavers of Himachal Pradesh had a love-hate relationship with Angora wool. It was the warmest substance known to them, a thermal miracle capable of trapping heat in the most brutal Himalayan winters. But Angora had a flaw: it was too perfect. Under a microscope, the fibers were as smooth as glass.

The air in Moradabad is a heavy soup of coal smoke and metal dust. The ghosts of a thousand years of craftsmanship hide in the street corners. To a stranger, the noise of the “Pital Nagri” — the Brass City — is a chaotic din. But to Salim, the rhythmic tink-tink-tink of hammers hitting metal was like a heartbeat. It was the sound of his grandfather shaping prayer lamps for temples, and the sound of his father crafting ornate vases for the mansions of Delhi. The narrow, soot-s

The sun over Dhaneri does not rise; it attacks. In this small village perched on the jagged, arid lip of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, the dawn is a pale, heat-muffled drumbeat. For decades, the rhythm of life here has been dictated by the “Matka Walk.” Before the first light can even turn the sand to gold, the women of Dhaneri — led by elders like 58-year-old Kamla Devi — begin a four-mile trek toward a brackish well that is more mud than mirage. For Kamla, water has never b

Image created by Google Gemini In the colonnaded heart of Connaught Place, where the whitewashed Georgian arches met the high-tech sheen of the new millennium, the huge sign in burnished bronze said “Oxidize”. Next to that, through the heavy glass door, you enter the boutique. Here, the hum of high voltage instruments created a textured hiss that competed with the distant, rhythmic honking of the traffic in the Inner Circle. Elias, the lead “Plasma Tailor,” moved with the gra

In the fertile plains of Punjab, where the horizon is usually a blurred line between golden wheat and the dusty haze of the Grand Trunk Road, a new kind of silhouette had emerged. Rising above the traditional brick kilns of Ludhiana was a structure that looked less like a factory and more like a captured piece of a spacecraft. This was Agnivarta Energy. Inside the main hangar, Vikram stood on the observation deck, watching the blue-violet glow of the plasma torches through a

Figure created by Google Gemini The year is 2028, and Murugan was a man caught between the dirt of the past and the lightning of the future. On his family’s acreage in the Kavery delta, the old, raised platforms of wooden planks covered with heavy duty tarpaulins to keep moisture seeping into and decomposing the manure had been replaced by something sleeker, stranger, and infinitely more temperamental: a Plasma-Assisted Ammonia Synthesis and Delivery System (PAAS-D). Murugan

My fascination with Dick Francis novels began when I bought Reflex (1980) from an airport bookshop. The protagonist of Reflex, Jockey cum photographer Phillip Nore is a remarkably well-crafted character: multi-faceted, intellectual and reflective. He drifts along in life, taking whatever comes his way without high expectations or high self-esteem. He had a difficult childhood, his mother often dumping him with her friends while on whimsical jaunts. This left him self-dependen

My wife and I started reading “Mother Mary Comes to Me”, simultaneously, I in my kindle and she with the physical book. This is Arundhati Roy’s 2025 memoir exploring her tumultuous relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, framed by Mary’s death at 89 and drawing from Roy’s life in Kerala and beyond. My wife was shocked by the brutal honesty of the book, its depiction of people and the events in her life. Its portrayal of Roy’s relatives, some of whom happen to be known to us p

Abraham Verghese’s book, “The Covenant of Water” has become a best seller. The Story begins in 1900, in the princely state of Travancore. The place is Parambil, a fictional village in Travancore, a princely state renowned for its unique cultural and historical identity. Today this is part of Kerala, the southern-most state of India. St Thomas Christians flourish here. Much of the novel’s events unfold against this backdrop. Mariamma, a 12-year-old girl is being married off to

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