Notes, deep dives, and the odd rabbit hole on whatever we happen to be building or curious about.
India’s badminton champions grew up on courts built with the walls of one family’s home.
In the thriller The Curse of Muziris, an archaeologist hunts for a lost port in Kerala. The port is real. Roman ships came there for pepper two thousand years ago, and today nobody can prove where it stood.
On 23 October 2022, while Virat Kohli chased down Pakistan at the MCG, UPI payments across India dropped sharply, on the day before Diwali.
A Superman powered by Hanuman, a Godzilla that sings, a Tarzan who comes to Delhi and Bonds numbered 116 to 777. Indian cinema has been remaking Hollywood hits its own way for over 60 years.
A laddoo bought for ₹450 in 1994 sold for ₹39 lakh this year. Nobody is paying for the taste.
Get ready to discover why a few shapes and colours live rent-free in your head.
How does a 10-minute delivery app know your street wants chips tonight?
In defence of the dead Spanish streak on Duolingo.
What if that wrong answer is actually doing your brain a favour?
Most of the first tanks broke down before they reached the enemy. Somehow, they still changed war forever.
Over three million square kilometres of the Indian Ocean, the sea is up to 106 metres lower than on a smooth, evenly weighted Earth. A Dutch professor found it from inside a submarine, and after three scientific explanations, its cause is still in dispute.
India's police registered 4,41,534 crimes against women in 2024. The National Family Health Survey suggests that the real figure is many times larger, and the gap between the two numbers is the whole story.
Manipur's sangai lives on a floating mat of dead plants on a lake. This is one reason why nobody has ever counted it properly, and the two latest counts differ by a factor of nearly three.
A hundred years of research and more than a hundred published decipherments, but nobody has claimed the prize money. A second prize also exists, for proof that there is nothing to read.
A businessman flew the tricolour above his own factory, and officials told him he could be prosecuted. He needed nearly a decade to win the argument.
All the wild Asiatic lions on Earth live in one corner of Gujarat. India has known the danger for thirty years and prepared a second home, but it never sent the lions.
For 140 years, nobody questioned a Viking grave full of weapons. Then the bones proved to be a woman's, and suddenly the evidence was not good enough.
Nobody had ever tried an election of this size, with so few literate voters, in a country this poor. Most foreign observers expected it to fail.
A Bombay melodrama about a judge who thought criminals breed criminals became one of the most watched films in the Soviet Union and China. The reason had almost nothing to do with India.
A British admiral chose the date when a question surprised him. It replaced a date that Indians had observed for seventeen years, and on the day itself nobody knew where the border was.
The environment ministry had to declare the peacock again in 2011, because it could not find the original order. And that is not the strangest part of the story.
A cheap veterinary drug killed almost every vulture in South Asia in about fifteen years. People paid the price with their lives.
For most of the nineteenth century, a living thorn hedge ran across India. More than fourteen thousand men guarded it, and its job was to stop you buying cheap salt.
India had its own dinosaurs, from a horned predator of the Narmada to a giant that we know mostly from its fossil dung. The country's last titans nested between flows of erupting lava.
India has three crocodilian species. Only one district on the planet has all three of them living side by side.
One of the rarest sharks on Earth lives in India's rivers. People blame it for attacks that another shark made.
What this place is, who makes it, and what you can find here.