An essay in my 6th grade Hindi textbook was titled “Shok Sabha” and narrated the scene during a Hindu bereavement ritual. In it was described the life of a “Rudaali” (“one who cries”) or a professional mourner from Rajasthan. She was a peasant woman who wore black and was hired to mourn at the untimely death of a young […]
An essay in my 6th grade Hindi textbook was titled “Shok Sabha” and narrated the scene during a Hindu bereavement ritual. In it…
Daniel Todes’s massive tome on physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), the man who, our textbooks tell us, trained dogs to salivate to a bell, transformed almost everything I had come to learn about that towering figure over my twenty-year career as a psychologist. For one thing, Pavlov rarely ever used a bell in his experiments. Instead […]
Daniel Todes’s massive tome on physiologist Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936), the man who, our textbooks tell us, trained dogs to salivate…
Srinivasa Ramanujan via Wikipedia Commons My father, a south-Indian from a traditional Coimbatore home, was passionate about numbers and my childhood was spent listening to stories of very particular hero’s; No, not Wonder woman – He told me about Srinivasa Ramanujan who he said, finished a three hour math exam in thirty minutes and came up with multiple solutions […]
Srinivasa Ramanujan via Wikipedia Commons My father, a south-Indian from a traditional Coimbatore home, was passionate about numbers and my…
