Feature Story
The Great Emu War: When the Birds Refused to Surrender!
History has no shortage of improbable episodes. Few, however, rival the spectacle of a modern army taking on a flock of flightless birds—and losing the argument. In 1932, after a punishing d…
The Faithful and the Forgotten: Loyalty in The Odyssey!
Odysseus takes ten years to come home. His wife takes ten years to wait. But the epic's real architecture is not built on these two alone — it survives on a whole scaffolding of lesser loyaltie…
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff — A Stoic Inheritance!
There is a book by that name. It became a phenomenon. But my father never needed to read it. He lived it. He would walk into a room and the room would change. Not because he was loud — though…
The Man Who Refused to Bow!
Everyone remembers Thomas More for a book he wrote about a country that does not exist — UTOPIA, an imagined island nation he invented to hold up a mirror to the greed and folly of his own age.…
The Man Who Wanted to Disappear!
(On Kafka's birthday, and the strange afterlife he never asked for) Today, July 3rd, is Franz Kafka's birthday. He would have turned 143. He asked Max Brod to burn everything — every diary, ev…
Mata Kalika:When the Sangeet Martand Called Upon the Dark Mother!
(click here to listen) The goddess Kali does not wait to be invited — and neither does this composition. Mata Kalika does not ask for your reverence. It arrives, assumes it, opens a do…