Category: Journalism
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How many satellites has India launched?
From the experimental satellite Aryabhatta launched in 1975, to RISAT-2BR1 in 2019, India’s space odyssey has spanned 44 years and over 100 satellites. RISAT-2BR1, India’s 32nd earth observation satellite, was successfully launched on board the PSLV-C48 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on December 11. This also was the 50th launch of the Polar Satellite…
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The widest and narrowest win margins of the Lok Sabha 2019 election
Candidates in the 2019 Lok Sabha election had their fair share of wafer-thin and landslide victories. In absolute terms, C. R. Patil, the newly minted BJP MP from the Navsari constituency in Gujarat, defeated his closest rival Patel Dharmeshbhai Bhimbai (INC) by the highest number of votes (6.89 lakh). Uttar Pradesh’s Machhlishahr constituency saw the…
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Keeping the filter kaapi hot for 50 years
He pours a cup of tea from one of the hundreds of flasks in his shop and pushes it towards this journalist. “This is important for your story,” says M Balasubramanian, who runs the Sharadha Agencies Flask Hospital on Kutchery Road, Mylapore. The shop was started by his father in 1961 and is filled with…
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Raise a toast to ‘Royal’, the king of sandwiches
The year: 1999; Opening scene: Sheik Dawood hops onto his bicycle and pedals for about 14 km from his house in Maduravoyal all the way to TTK Road, to sell sandwiches from a bunk shop. It’s just bread and jam, vegetable sandwich and bread omelette at the time. Fast-forward to 2016. The bunk shop has…
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Tiruvallur: Haunted by the shadow of bonded labour
The same Cooum River that flows through Chennai snakes into Tiruvallur too along its 72-km journey. But unlike in Chennai, where Cooum is filthy, in Tiruvallur, it’s what outside the river that’s filthier – the shadow of bonded labour. The blight obliterates generations with back-breaking labour at rice mills or unending toil in the searing…
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The Great Trigonometric Survey of India
From dense forests to tough hilly terrain, battling disease, tigers and local resistance, the Great Trigonometric Survey that measured the ends of the country started in Chennai on April 10, 1802 In the plains of the delta region of what was then Tanjore district, two centuries ago, when the biggest exercise of manual land survey…