Home > Rakesh Kalshian
The rise of the machines
25 April 2016 8:40 PM GMTLast month a computer program called AlphaGo took on one of the greatest players of the complex board game, Go, and beat him four games to one. Lee...
Calling the bluff on lies
2 April 2016 9:46 PM GMTIt may not be a hyperbole to suggest that the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students who were recently charged with sedition for allegedly raising...
Talk about delusions
21 March 2016 9:57 PM GMTA Beautiful Mind, the 2001 biopic on the economics Nobel laureate John Nash, poignantly captured the brilliant mathematician’s painful struggle with...
I think, therefore, I get well
5 March 2016 10:19 PM GMTWe are all pill-poppers now. Be it a minor indisposition like a sore throat, or a dreaded affliction such as cancer, we have somehow come to set great...
DNA as history and sophistry
16 Feb 2016 9:59 PM GMTThe first Jewish settlers in India arrived about 1,500 years ago from West Asia. Over the years, as they married and mixed into the local populations,...
Unbuttoning the gender straitjacket
9 Feb 2016 10:05 PM GMTEver since homo became sapient, the human mind (predominantly men) conjured up various notions of what it means to be a man or a woman. Barring rare...
Don’t worry, be happy?
8 Jan 2016 10:13 PM GMTCHARLIE BROWNS of the world, take heart. Contrary to what docs and shrinks have been saying for years, being grumpy is unlikely to either hasten your...
The blind spot of science
29 Dec 2015 9:49 PM GMTOur prejudices about names are often coloured by the spirit of our times. A name like Mahan Maharaj, for instance, is likely to conjure up images of a...
Discourse over giving birth to children
10 Oct 2015 10:10 PM GMTNot so long ago, newborns were ushered into the world naturally. Just as in their mammalian cousins, both the expectant mother and her child were...
The Secret Life Of Plants
12 Sep 2015 10:25 PM GMTFor centuries, following Descartes’ ‘I-think-therefore-I-am’ moment, western science looked upon animals as witless creatures given to pure instinct,...
Is anyone out there?
3 Aug 2015 1:00 AM GMTLast month, as the New Horizons space probe was beaming the first-ever images of Pluto, Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire and...
The labyrinth of desire
2 Aug 2015 3:09 AM GMTFor over a decade and a half, Viagra has helped revive the flagging sexual careers of many an impotent man. Buoyed by its soaring success (it raked in...