Fountain Head

  Raksha Bandhan A myth, a morning in Calcutta in 1905, and one request made in the open. Draupadi tears a strip from the border of her sari. That is where it begins — not with a festival, but with an accident. Krishna's finger is bleeding. The sugarcane knife, or the chakra, depending on who is telling it. The room fills with remedies. She offers cloth, without ceremony, without a priest, without an auspicious hour, without a thread bought for the purpose. The epic as we have it is thrifty about this scene; the tradition around it is generous. But every telling keeps the same arithmetic. Years later, in the assembly hall at Hastinapura, when Dushasana pulls at her sari and every man who might have spoken looks instead at his own hands, the cloth does not end. It goes on and on until an arm gets tired. A hand's breadth of cloth, repaid as an endless bolt of it. That is not sentiment. That is a ledger. The rakhi was never a gift. It is a claim: small, bright, publicly worn , tha...

  Madurai · Field notes Cool Guts Jigarthanda is a drink, a cold chain, an argument about heat — and, eventually, a gangster film. It is also the one thing in Tamil Nadu you are forbidden to stir. Ice cream China grass Reduced milk Badam pisin Nannari syrup The tumbler comes back to you sweating. Not the glass—you. It is past nine in the evening on the street near Vilakkuthoon, the lamp-pillar in the middle of Madurai, the stone has been giving back the day's heat for three hours, and the man behind the counter has already begun pouring your second before you have set down the first. He did not ask. Nobody asks. In this city the second glass is a load-bearing assumption. What arrives is not really a drink. It is a cross-section. Hold it up before you ruin it and you can read the whole thing like a core sample: a dark seam of syrup lying at the floor of the glass, a stratum of chewy amber above it, then a body of milk cooked down so long it has gone the colour of wet sand, and on to...

22 August 2026 · Madras Day · the city turns 387 Dear Madras , Every August we do something slightly ridiculous. We wish a city happy birthday. This is not a history lesson — it's a love letter with some dates in it. சென்னை · மெட்ராஸ் Est. 22.viii.1639 Reading time ~7 min Marina Beach, about six in the evening. Original illustration. I — The founding The receipt for a city Here is the part that never stops being funny: Madras began as a property deal. On 22 August 1639 , two agents of the English East India Company — Francis Day and his superior Andrew Cogan — secured a grant of land from Damarla Venkatadri Nayak , a viceroy serving the last of the Vijayanagara line. What they got was not a kingdom. It was a strip of sand, roughly three miles long and a mile inland, pinned between the Cooum and the sea, with a fishing settlement called Madraspatnam on it and the village of Chennapatnam just beside....

Freedom Is a Song We Keep Singing 15 August 2026 · India's 80th Independence Day A song that was born before freedom was 12 January 1947. Independence was still seven months away. That week, a Tamil film opened in cinemas—Naam  Iruvar ("We Two"), directed by A. V. Meiyappan, and the very first film produced under the AVM banner. The story itself was modest. But the film did something that outlived it: it brought Bharati's poems into a movie hall. Aaduvome pallu paaduvome. Vetri ettu thikkum etta. Sung by D. K. Pattammal, set to music by R. Sudarsanam. The film opens at a Subramania Bharati memorial gathering. It ends at the celebration of Gandhi's 77th birthday. Freedom hadn't arrived yet—and people were already singing. In January 1947, months before the flag went up, a film put Bharati's verses on a cinema screen. India wasn't free yet. People sang anyway. That is the whole point of the song. The historian Randor Guy wrote that ...