All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 183 in total
Malpe Fishing Community: The Original Fishermen of the Karnataka Coast and Why They Are Being Pushed Out of the Sea They Have Always Fished
The boats leave before you are awake. By the time visitors arrive at Malpe harbour in the morning, the day's work has already been underway for hours. The fishing fami...
Shankarapura Mallige: The Jasmine That Wakes Before Dawn and the Farming Families Who Cannot Afford to Sleep In
The flowers have to come off the plants before the heat of the day. This is not a preference. It is biology. Jasmine blossoms at its most fragrant in the cool hours be...
Udupi Cotton Weavers: The Last Forty-Two Families Keeping a 200-Year-Old Craft Alive at Talipady
In 2017 the Kadike Trust conducted a survey of Udupi cotton saree weavers across two districts of coastal Karnataka. They found forty-two. Not forty-two workshops. Not...
Coast to Canopy: Seven Days Inside Five Communities That Are Keeping Karnataka's Living Traditions Alive
What does responsible tourism actually look like when it is done properly? Not the marketing version. Not the brochure version. The real version, where communities dec...
Tirupati Balaji Temple Tour: Why 100,000 Pilgrims Visit the World's Richest Temple Every Single Day
Every single day, without exception, one hundred thousand people climb the Tirumala Hills in Andhra Pradesh to stand before Lord Venkateswara. Not during festivals. No...
Aryabhata: The Ancient Indian Mathematician Who Calculated the Earth's Rotation to Within One-Hundredth of a Second in 499 CE
In 499 CE a twenty-three-year-old mathematician in ancient Bihar finished writing a book. The book was 121 stanzas of Sanskrit verse. And in those 121 stanzas he made ...
Sariska Tiger Reserve: The Forest That Hid the Pandavas, Imprisoned a Mughal Philosopher Prince and Brought Tigers Back From Zero
Three stories from the same forest. Three thousand years ago, the Pandava brothers sheltered somewhere in the Aravalli Hills during their twelve years of forest exile....
Iron Pillar Delhi: 1600 Years. Open Air. Zero Rust. The Mystery That IIT Kanpur Scientists Finally Solved
Leave a piece of iron in the open air. Within weeks it rusts. Within years the rust penetrates deep into the structure. Within decades the metal is compromised. This i...
Lakshmi of Pompeii: The Indian Goddess Who Was Buried Under Mount Vesuvius for Nineteen Centuries and What She Tells Us About Ancient India's Global Trade
On the morning of August 24 in the year 79 CE, Mount Vesuvius erupted. By the following day the Roman city of Pompeii was buried under four to six metres of volcanic a...
Fairy Queen Train: Ride One of the World's Oldest Working Steam Locomotives From Delhi to Alwar in Rajasthan
In 1855 three engineers in Leeds, England, built a steam locomotive for the East Indian Railway Company. They named their firm Kitson Thompson and Hewitson. The locomo...
God Particle India: The Kolkata Physicist Whose Rejected Paper Made the Most Important Discovery in Physics Possible
On July 4 2012 scientists at CERN in Geneva announced one of the most significant discoveries in the history of physics. After a quest spanning nearly half a century, ...
Ancient Indian Philosophy and Quantum Physics: What Three Nobel Laureates Proved and What the Upanishads Said Two Thousand Five Hundred Years Earlier
In October 2022 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists for proving something that most people find genuinely difficult to believe. Two particles, o...
Chitradurga Fort: The Woman Who Defended It Alone With a Pestle, and the Fort That Held Out for Four Hundred Years
In 1779 Hyder Ali had been trying to take Chitradurga Fort for twenty years. Three sieges. Three failures. Against seven concentric walls. Nineteen iron-spiked gateway...
Kanada's Atomic Theory: The Ancient Indian Philosopher Who Discovered the Atom 2600 Years Before John Dalton
John Dalton is credited with discovering atomic theory in 1808. He was 2600 years late. In approximately 600 BCE, on a dusty road near what is now Dwaraka in Gujarat, ...
Indus Valley Script Decipherment: The 4000-Year-Old Mystery That AI, a Million Dollar Prize and a Race Between Scholars Is Finally Beginning to Crack
There is a seal in the collection of the National Museum in Delhi. It is approximately four centimetres square. It is made of steatite, a soft grey stone. It was carve...
Madhava: The Kerala Mathematician Who Invented Calculus 200 Years Before Newton and Whose Work May Have Reached Europe Through a Spy Network of Jesuit Missionaries
In 1666 Isaac Newton invented calculus. This is what most of the world was taught and what most of the world still believes. There is a problem with this version of ev...
Wheat vs Rice: How Two Grains Quietly Shaped Two Indias
Why does Punjab celebrate its new year in April with bonfires and a festival built around cut wheat, while Tamil Nadu celebrates its harvest festival in January, watch...
Chanakya's 40 Ways to Steal: How Ancient India's Most Dangerous Book Catalogued Every Way to Rob a Government, and How a Librarian Found It Again Eight Hundred Years After It Vanished
In 1905, a young Sanskrit scholar named Rudrapatna Shamasastry was working through a heap of palm leaf manuscripts in the Mysore Oriental Library, doing the kind of ro...
Panini: The World's First Programmer Wrote Code in Sanskrit, Twenty Five Centuries Before Computers Existed
In 1959 a computer scientist named John Backus invented a notation for describing the grammar of programming languages. It is called Backus Naur Form, and it is one of...
The Building in Kolkata That Produced Six Scientists Who Changed the World
There is a building on College Street in Kolkata. It was built in 1875. Its architecture is the confident Victorian Gothic of a colonial institution that expected to l...
