Given the use of smart phone by nearly 500 million people in the country and making self-portraiture holding the device in one’s hand, the term selfie may not need to be explained to anyone, including the unlettered sections in the population, urban and rural. Long before the Kodak box camera made its debut in 1900,…

The word hospital comes from the Latin hospes, signifying a stranger or foreigner, hence a guest. Another noun derived from this, hospitium came to signify hospitality, that is the relation between guest and shelterer. Hospitals usually are distinguished from other types of medical facilities by their facility to admit and care for inpatients while the…

Presence of elders, honourably perceived as senior citizens, in the country is placed at ten percent of the total population. Assuming that the current population of the land is made up of about 300 million families and every family blessed with an elderly member, the count of senior citizens has to be 300 million. But,…

Choice of doctors and system of medicine as well as hospitals, nowadays is tied to prior knowledge about their name and fame, subject to affordability of treatment. Allopathy, the term attributed to German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) seems to be the first choice of families with one or the other member needing medical attention, particularly…

The fond wish of Mysureans that their beloved city of Palaces, temples, parks, museums, schools that have endured for 100 plus years, centres devoted to yoga, music, dance and so on, not to forget the lakes facing threats to their survival as well as residential areas hosting achievers in many fields, should not go the…

Talking about the time-honoured societal feature of joint family, currently witnessing disfavour among urbanites, may sound like an exercise in the study of the land’s past to the millennials of today. We are in the era favouring nuclear family, in city environment. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term ‘nuclear family’ dates back to…

Chroniclers may have to burn the proverbial midnight oil to work on their narrative about the goings on in the country, which amounts to history in present tense. While more regions across the world, including India, are joining the currently most populous country China in battling the life-threatening virus, most of the regions across India…

Traditionally, an Ashrama was perceived as a spiritual hermitage or monastery in the sub-continent, of which present territory of India is but a part. The now-out-of-favour joint family, comprising at least three generations in such a typical family hosted three ashramas namely Brahmacharya, Grihasta and Vanaprastha. The fourth Ashrama, described by the land’s scholars of…

The fact that three-fourths of earth’s surface is covered by water doesn’t in any way take away the importance bestowed on water, particularly its potable quality. Space exploration reports highlighting the feature of human ingenuity in making the two-way trips to Moon and Mars fail safe and also emphasize the presence of water as well…

Scholars who are credited with writing verses in the distant past have mentioned the term Bharathakhanda, meaning the territory of which present India is only a part. Many explorers, particularly the Italian merchant and explorer Marco Polo (1254-1324), Chinese travellers Fa Hien (337-422) and Hiuen Tsang (602-664) are recollected by many public speakers as having…