VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN I remember the very first cup of Starbucks coffee I had. At Trondheim’s Værnes airport with my wife Varshita. This was sometime in 2010. This is a store under the aegis of Starbucks International formed in 1994, a few years after Starbucks Corporation was established by the takeover of Starbucks Coffee Company by […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN ‘Come on, Ragnar, Come on.’ The 8-year-old Norwegian boy, Ragnar, from Trondheim — the son of this writer’s wife’s colleague at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, used to say this to himself, when we used to play indoor games like chess or scrabble. We found it amusing at that time. His […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN Music heals just as cricket unites. While the latter teaches brotherhood and bonhomie, the former enables one to befriend oneself, by bridging the invisible but yawning gap between heart and mind, on the one hand, the soul on the other. As I write this piece, a soulful voice from the late 1990s is […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN The tussle between the neoclassical economist — that stubborn, unyielding breed and the ecological economist — the rebellious change-seeking breed — has been going on for several decades now. It has just reached a climax. As per the former — Robert Solow, Joseph Stiglitz and John Hartwick among them —capital has to be […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN Life is like a river, flowing forward towards its coveted destination — a sea of tranquillity, an ocean of painstakingly-achieved success, a lake of love. It flows on, past obstacles, caressing the rocks and stones en route, and thanks them for lessons taught the hard way. As I flow on, rain-bearing clouds keep […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN This is a ‘play’ on the title of one of Leo Tolstoy’s short stories. It continues to be true today. Well, parents must pause and listen to what their daughters have to say; teachers in the developing world — there is a decent degree of equality in the developed world — must learn […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN ‘Nature does not draw boundaries as politicians do.’ The content on these 12 CDs cannot be summarised meaningfully and effectively. Conciseness which is called for, in reviews like these, will tend to defeat the purpose of doing justice to the labour of love being reviewed. I call this a ‘labour of love,’ for […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN Meat, fish and fowl are food for a vast majority of Homo sapiens. They are also embellishments on the table. They trace their origins back upstream to poultry farms, pig-pens, marine and freshwater ecosystems and cattle-sheds. They are also well-entrenched components of the primary [animal husbandry and fishing] and secondary [food processing] sectors […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN She died fighting, gasping for breath, in front of my eyes, a little after midnight on January 10, 2020. A dark night in the northern hemisphere, literally for everyone, and metaphorically for me. In fact, the darkest my life has ever seen or will see. Varshita died fighting, yes. But, that is how […]
VENKATESH GOVINDARAJAN If charity begins at home, sustainability begins with Self. This, in essence, crystallises the tangibly wonderful analogy between holistic individual human development and sustainable progress of nations, or humanity as a whole. Holistic human individual development entails the three chakra synthesis — physical, mental-emotional-psychological, and the spiritual — or, body, mind and soul. This […]