Chennai Times

Earlier I had forwarded an invitation for the lecture of Dr. Claude Alvares with this group. It was good to see a full room for the meeting and the lecture was well received looking at the student response after the lecture was over. The response was even better from the young professors. Here is an initial report / summary thanks to Mrs. Chitra Nagesh. Report on Dr. Claude Alvares’ lecture on Multiversity given at the Humanities Department, IIT-M on the 18th March 2008 From the minute, he walked in; Dr. Claude had set the mood for his talk – informal and refreshing but never missing a chance to add a sharp and earthy remark at times. He kept a hot afternoon session lively. (No mean feat, certainly!) . He reminisced about his earlier visit to the city and mentioned about his work on Shri. C. V. Seshadri. He expressed his admiration and respect for the scholar’s work at the grassroot among the local people. Dr. Claude shared his experiences of his work in the various committees ...

Thanks to a friend from the Goethe Institute, visited the Science Train in Egmore today. This train a joint Indi-German work has been designed with the purpose of spreading the message of pure sciences and encourage people to learn the same. In all about 12 bogies (10 actually considering one was fully for advertisement of sponsorers and one was an 'activity' area) of the exhibits (consisting of about 10 panels in each compartment with about two video based communication and one interactive gizmos in each) consisting of the following topics exhibited major achievements of Germany in these spheres along side with information on education and research organizations on those subjects: Nuclear Science, Nano-science, Biotechnology related (2 bogies), neuro-sciences and understanding biological sensory behaviour, one on astronomy (well the first one on energy starts with the big bang, but largely to do with nuclear energy), one on sustainable development, one on integrated systems ...

Found this massive Kalamkari painting at the artisans exhibition at Kalakshetra. No more words, look at the two photos, they don't do any justice to seeing this painting live.