Handwritten and block-printed books Thiksay Gompa is the largest monastery in Ladakh. It is a Tibetan Buddhist monastery of the Yellow Hat (Gelugpa) sect, set atop a hill, 19 km from Leh. It bears a remarkable resemblance to the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. One...
An introduction to one of the translated poems reads 1932 at Shanti Niketan: While being a guest of a great Indian poet, with his personal help, I have prepared a small present for Lithuanians. This is a pearl of Tagore’s work called ‘Fruit Gathering’. This...
Tagore translations in Lithuanian A Lithuanian traveller, explorer and anthropologist, Antanas Poska travelled to India on a motorbike all the way from Vilnius, in Lithuania, in 1929! In the course of his stay in India, Poska became an ardent fan of Rabindranath Tagore and reportedly...
Most languages per state According to The People’s Linguistic Survey of India, Arunachal Pradesh tops the list of states with the most languages, with over 90 variations. Assam and Orissa feature next. Maharashtra ranks higher than the Hindi belt (made up of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh,...
Languages in India: losses and gains in 50 years On September 5, 2013, a new survey of Indian languages, entitled The People’s Linguistic Survey of India (one of the largest in the world) was released. The enormous exercise was conducted under the supervision of the...
Utterly Butterly delicious Amul The story of Amul- Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd. (GCMMF) – and how its late chairperson, Dr. Verghese Kurien, made the cooperative a roaring success in the country, is well-known. Equally well-known and well-loved are its ‘utterly-butterly’ delightful advertisements and...
Staggering price for a paan-daan Over the centuries, the average Indian’s post-meal ‘chew’, the digestive ‘paan’, or betel leaf, has taken on fancy flavours and perhaps a fancier price. There was a time when Rajas, Maharajas, and their Rains and most other nobility swung important...
Princie, the pink diamond ‘Princie’, a rare, intense 34.65-carat pink diamond, described by Christie’s as one of the world’s largest and finest pink diamonds, was mined from the ancient Golconda mines. It belonged to the Nizam of Hyderabad and was auctioned in 1960 by his...
Paintings sold for Rs. 10 crores The highlight of Christie’s South Asian Modern and Contemporary Art sale in 2013 was Vasudeo S. Gaitonde, who was regarded as one of India’s finest abstract painters. He passed away in 2001. Two of his previously never-before-seen paintings fetched...
Doctors for You From Assam’s violence-hit Kokrajhar to Andhra’s floods, Dr. Ravikant Singh and his NGO, ‘Doctors for You’, are summoned first for medical relief during natural or man-made disasters. It all started when Dr. Ravikant was a medical student in Mumbai and his native...
