The Pongal festival ingrained in the popular imagination conjures up images of cooking rice in an open fire, buffaloes and cows being decorated and celebrated and people meticulously arranging sugarcane, turmeric leaves, flowers and other paraphernalia. In tribal villages of the Western Ghats,...
As the winter sun was gradually turning intense in the sky, it seemed like everything was falling into place for 25-year-old Arvind Raj on Monday. The annual Pongal jallikattu was gaining pace and it was his home turf, as the youngster hailed from Palamedu village. Arvind was one among the...
Born in Puducherry, historian Dr J B Prashant More developed an interest in the life of iconic Tamil poet Subramania Bharati, who stayed incognito in Puducherry from 1908 to 1918. More has written books on the life history of the poet in French, English and Tamil. More speaks to Dr Badri...
The movement to restore stolen artefacts including precious 1,000-year-old antiquities to their countries of origin is set to gather momentum in 2023, with India making new claims to museums abroad and individual collectors. Potentially, they would attract cultural tourists, both national and...
What’s recorded alone is not history; in fact, there are several great lives that have sunk into oblivion unnoticed and unrecorded. Life, after all, is no bed of roses; thorns too have been woven into it. Only those understanding this have survived the shocks and startling hurdles that life...
One of the ills plaguing government offices across the country is an unrestrained number of public holidays, causing inconvenience to the public. The list of public holidays for 2023 released by the Tamil Nadu government recently has even led to an unnecessary conundrum. The list has September...
It’s a given that cinema has penetrated into the core of the society. No wonder, schools are no exceptions. That explains why no eyebrows were raised when a little girl at a recent school function swung and swayed to the glamorous song-and-dance number Arabic Kuthu from the Vijay-starrer Beast...
The other day rummaging through my attic for something, I caught sight of a trunk that aroused my curiosity. For a moment, I held myself back, fearing it might be a Pandora’s box. Yet, undaunted, I went on to open the box to find a book bathed in dust. Dusting off the book, I noticed that it...
This week I made yet another discovery in my attic. An old book of articles written by Tamil writer Thi Ja Ra (Thingalur Jagathratchaka Ranganathan). Most of these articles were published in Hanuman, an important Tamil literary magazine of the 1940s. The book titled Pozhuthupokku (Pastime)...
This time around, from my attic tumbled out an old book which, re-read out of curiosity, took me to the world of political slugfests and rows of decades ago. The 52-page book Naan Kanda Periyar (The Periyar I saw) was published by Tamilagam way back in 1957. My attic (paran) is home to old...
