What the hell is Karka Rog? A question for IBN7
The Indian television channel IBN7 carries a message in Devanagari script: Dhoomrapaan se karka rog ho sakta hai: Smoking can cause ‘karka rog’ . Some clever chap, showing off his…
Category: Publications
HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY: Publications and texts of (select) invited lectures, etc.
Sur Kshetra: a Hindi television program
Sur Kshetra is a well meaning watchable popular program currently showing on Indian television It revolves around healthy competition between two teams of Indian and Pakistani singers, which are judged…
Nobel Peace Prize 2012 for European Union
Whether the European Union should have been awarded this year’s nobel Peace Prize may be debated. But there can be no doubt that it needs the money.
Hindoo College Calcutta Revisited: Its pre-history and the role of Rammohun Roy
Rajesh Kochhar (2012) Science and Culture, Vol. 78, No. 7-8 (Jul-Aug), pp. 280-305. (Meghnad Saha Memorial Lecture delivered under the auspices of Indian Science News Association, Kolkata, 28 July 2011). The…
Kodaikanal Observatory as a potential world astronomy heritage site
Colloquium given at Indian Institute of Astrophysics Bangalore, 25 September 2012 Rajesh Kochhar President IAU Commission 41: History of Astronomy Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali [email protected] As…
An interesting insight into Chinese efficiency
Recently I spent two weeks in a hotel in Beijing. I needed an adaptor to get power supply for my laptop from the mains. I was given an adaptor, but…
Why does a week have seven days and how are they ordered?
A week is an artificial unit of time. It has seven days because there were seven geocentric planets. It is however not at all obvious how the names of…