Sunday Long Reads: Of inner sanctum of a chrysalis, OTT, films and books of 2022, and more

READ MORE

When scientists filmed the inner sanctum of a chrysalis

The Common Peacock – the magic of iridescence (Source: Ranjit Lal)

Every child knows that if you pick up a butterfly and let it go, it will leave a faint calling card of the finest dust imaginable on your fingers: That ‘dust’ is actually a magic dust, and under powerful microscopes have reveled itself to be scales, one of the most important components of the butterfly’s wings and beauty. (The scientific name of the family of butterflies and moths is Lepidoptera, meaning ‘scale-wing’.) Researchers also figured out mostly what happened when a caterpillar turned into a chrysalis and what happened inside the chrysalis: the caterpillar dissolved into a gooey ‘soup’ and with the help of beautifully choreographed hormones and enzymes taking their cues precisely, the dormant butterfly cells, deliberately held back from maturing, now began to develop into the various parts of the insect, nourished by the rich caterpillar soup.

READ MORE

Express editors recommend: Books to look out for in 2022

Here are top books to look forward in 2022

From non-fiction to poetry to fiction, these are some of the coming year’s most anticipated titles

READ MORE

The Dream of Revolution by Bimal Prasad and Sujata Prasad lays bare JP’s quest for revolution and why his legacy lies forgotten

Political leader Jayaprakash Narayan (Source: Express Archive)

I spent my childhood in a quiet part of outer Bangalore once called Sarakki Layout, but later renamed JP Nagar. My father liked to complain about losing the warm, vernacular ‘Sarakki’, and I was never curious what lay behind ‘JP’. A decade later, I could draw a hazy relation between those initials and a handful of parties across the country, relics of an older political force that went by the same initials.

READ MORE

When Indira Gandhi decided to storm the Golden Temple

History of Punjab, history of Sikhs, Hindu-Sikh relations and the events leading up to and including Operation Bluestar at the Golden Temple on June 5 and 6, 1984, take up a third of the volume of civil servant BD Pande’s memoir ‘In the Service of Free India’. (Express photograph by Swadesh Talwar)

Bhairab Datt Pande, known to his generation as B.D., served in the Indian Civil Service from 1939 to 1977. His memoirs, written largely by hand, in 1986, two years after he demitted his last government assignment, carried his instructions that they should not be published before 1st January, 2001 or five years after his death, whichever was later. B.D. Pande died in 2009. His daughter Ratna Sudarshan has painstakingly edited and published the memoirs in 2021. The reader and present and future generations must be grateful to her for making available within the covers of a book an insider’s perceptive account of economic and political developments in India in her first four decades after independence. By extraordinary happenstance, B.D. was in the midst of the maelstrom of the fraught years of the Emergency and the period leading to the storming of the Golden Temple.

READ MORE

ADD and Reclaiming Preferred Identities

ADD is neurodivergence, not a deficit said Shelja Sen.

Dear You,

I have to admit at the outset that I have a difficult relationship with the label Attention- Deficit-Disorder (ADD). I do not think it is just the problem of attention (or the H for hyperactivity that sits in the middle at times), nor am I comfortable with the deficit lens, and I definitely do not think it can be explained as a disorder. But, for the lack of a better word, I will use ADD.

READ MORE

How Atal Bihari Vajpayee inspired the lives of many, including one to become the President of India

Gandhi Peace Prize for the year 2002 to Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, 18-03-2003. (Source: Rashtrapati Bhavan Archives)

When Atal Bihari Vajpayee was born on December 25, 1924, in Gwalior, the Viceroy House was being built at Raisina Hill, nearly 350 km away. As a young leader keen to see the country free from the shackles of foreign rule, his brush with the imperial seat of power was bound to be antagonistic. Once India attained freedom and the Rashtrapati Bhavan became the highest constitutional seat of the republic, Vajpayee’s unconditional deference to constitutionalism and the resultant respect for the successive occupants of the Rashtrapati Bhavan is an unmatched saga of exemplary public conduct.

READ MORE

Minnal Murali: When a superhero in a mundu and a mask saves the day

Kerala-based actor Tovino Thomas plays the titular superhero in the just-released Malayalam movie Minnal Murali, directed by Basil Joseph.

Now that my daughter Izza believes I’m a superhero, I fear one day she might push me off the balcony to test my superpowers,” says actor Tovino Thomas. Weeks prior to Minnal Murali’s release on Netflix last week, the actor and its director Basil Joseph showed five-year-old Izza the blockbuster film, where Thomas plays Jaison, a bumbling tailor, who acquires superpowers when struck by lightning. With Izza convinced, they knew they had a winner.

READ MORE