This is the fantastic story of an Indian who started as a "coolie" and later became the first Indian Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1840 a new hire walked into the Madras Observatory to do its lowest job. When he died 40 years later, he was its First Assistant. Chinthamani Ragoonatha Chary came from a family of almanac makers. The director, T.G. Taylor, took him on around 1840. Records call the entry job as a porter. Some say coolie. Anyway, the best part is that he taught himself mathematics on the side. And, then he climbed, grade by grade.... Director W.S. Jacob sent his paper on personal equation to the Monthly Notices in 1859, the first by an Indian in that journal. Under Norman Pogson, the new Government Astronomer, he was 4th native assistant; he took and reduced the 2nd observation of the asteroid Asia in April 1861. By the mid 1860s he was 1st Assistant. In 1867 he proved a faint southern star, R Reticuli, was a variable. Pogson's annual report credits him by name. He made the chief share of the 38,000 transit-circle observations behind the Madras star catalogue. In 1868 he ran his own eclipse camp at Vunparthy; clouds ruined it, but his computed occultation tables still went to the Monthly Notices. At the 1871 eclipse at Avinashi (~25 km west of Coimbatore), he measured the corona's prominences with a micrometer. On 12 January 1872 London elected him FRAS, proposed by Pogson and E.B. Powell, the Director of Public Instruction. Eclipse pamphlets in regional languages followed. Then a Transit of Venus booklet in 1874, printed in English and 6 Indian languages. The Madras govt alone bought 1,100 copies. At Pacheappah's Hall in 1874 he urged Indians to fund their own observatory and offered his own instruments to start it. A society was formed. I found no record that the observatory was ever built My only question is how many in Chennai today have heard his name? Sources: Rao, Vagiswari, Thakur & Birdie, JAHH 12(3) 2009 (arXiv:0908.3081); Monthly Notices of the RAS obituary, 41(4), 1881, p.180; Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900; MNRAS 32(3):69 election record. Photo: Portrait, public domain.

This is the fantastic story of Sun Simiao's 652 exercises labelled "Indian" and "Brahmanic Method"... Remember this before I begin: China's most famous doctor credited India, in writing, in his own book. 🙏🙏 Sun Simiao (581-682) is called the King of Medicine in China. His book, Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold (652 CE), is the most famous medical text of the Tang dynasty. In its chapter on staying healthy, he lists a set of 18 exercises. The heading he writes is: "Indian massage. This is a Brahmin method." Tianzhu was China's old name for India, and "Brahmin" then meant anything Indian, not a caste. The moves have names like drawing a five-stone bow, the tiger gaze, pushing away a mountain. He ends with a promise: even an old man doing these 3x a day will, after one month, shake off a 100 illnesses and run like a galloping horse. The label is certain, it is printed in the book. No Sanskrit original survives. But scholars make a fair point: China already had its own proud exercise tradition, centuries old, so calling a set "foreign" brought no prestige. Sun had no reason to invent the label. He most likely copied it from his source, an older text that most scholars connect to an Indian. Ayurvedic ideas reached China along with Buddhism, and Sun was openly sympathetic to both. The 18 moves did not stop in China. They were copied into the Ishinpo (984), Japan's oldest surviving medical book, a national treasure. There they live on as "Baramon-ho", the Brahmin method, and a few Zen communities still practise them. Sources: Qianjin Yaofang, juan 27. D. Steavu, Journal of Yoga Studies (2023). M. Stanley-Baker in Salguero (ed.), Buddhism and Medicine, Columbia Univ. Press (2017). Ishinpo: National Diet Library. Photo 1: Real woodblock scan, juan 27. Highlight: the heading "天竺國按摩此是婆羅門法" (Indian massage, this is a Brahmin method). Photo 2: Next page, highlighted: the closing promise. "After one month, a 100 illnesses gone, runs like a galloping horse." Image Source: Beiji Qianjin Yaofang, juan 27, Massage Methods section, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Yellow highlight is mine

India was early / first in maps, webmail, search, e-commerce, online office, browser, social, messaging and mobile OS. - 1995. MapmyIndia started digitally mapping India. Google Maps came 10 years later. - 1996. Rediff put up the subcontinent's first web server. By 1999 it was reaching 45% of India's internet users. - 1997. Khoj, an Indian search engine, was live before Google was even a company. - 2000. Baazee became India's first big e-commerce site. eBay bought it in 2004. eBay India shut in 2018. - 2005. Zoho launched Writer, an online word processor. Google Docs arrived a year later. - 2007-08. A dozen Indian social networks: ibibo, BigAdda, Bharatstudent, Yaari. Orkut and Facebook overtook them by 2009. - 2010. Epic, an Indian browser, got 4.5 lakh downloads in its 1st month. - 2012. Hike messenger. 100M users by 2016, valued at $1.4B. Shut in 2021. - 2016. Indus OS became India's 2nd most used smartphone OS, ahead of iOS. PhonePe bought it in 2021. "Almost" nothing is left standing, except MapmyIndia and Zoho. Always remember dependence has a bill. In July 2025, Microsoft cut Indian refiner Nayara Energy off from its own data over EU sanctions. It took a Delhi HC case to get it back. In July 2024, one faulty update from one American firm stopped check-ins at Indian airports. I know that Indigenous Products have to win on merit but again merit needs users. 🙏🙏

A US berry company taught China to grow blueberries, and China ate its market. Everyone is sharing that story this week. Here is the original version of that story and the teacher was us (We Indians). 🙏🙏 I really wonder why we do not make it a part of our curriculum...Anyway..Let us hear this story.. On Christmas Day in 1722, it became a crime to wear one fabric in Britain. Printed cotton from India.... The cloth was chintz. Hand-painted and block-printed cotton from Masulipatnam, Ahmedabad, Sironj, Burhanpur. Wash it, and the colours came out brighter than before. European dyers simply could not do this. Their reds ran. Their blues faded. English wool and silk weavers panicked. In June 1719, mobs of weavers roamed London streets, tore calico gowns off women, threw ink and acid at others. "Down with the callicoes," they shouted. Parliament listened.... 1st, in 1700: every piece of printed or dyed calico from India had to be locked in a customs warehouse for re-export. Sell it in England and pay a 200 pound fine. Then, on 23 March 1721, a harder law. From 25 December 1722, anyone caught wearing printed, painted, stained / dyed calico paid 5 pounds per offence. A curtain / a cushion cover in the same cloth cost 20. The fine money went to whoever informed on you. Now the interesting part... While England banned the cloth, France sent men to learn how it was made. Georges Roques, a French East India Company agent, reached Surat in 1676. He wrote a 333 page manual (1678) recording, step by step, how the printers of Ahmedabad worked. 3 wooden blocks: one for the outline, one for the ground, one for the details. A sesame oil bath for the cloth. And the full shopping list of an Indian dye-house: a root for the red, alum, iron rust, gall-nuts, pomegranate rind, turmeric, indigo, sour wheat flour, tree gum, wax. His own opening line is honest: it can only be a good thing to know how these people apply colours that do not fade in the wash, but come out more beautiful than before. Then Antoine de Beaulieu, a Company lieutenant at Pondicherry. Around 1734 he wrote a 2nd manual, and pinned an actual sample of cloth at every stage of the process. French printers used it as a recipe book. Then a Jesuit, Pere Coeurdoux, also in Pondicherry. He watched the dyers, took lessons from 2 Indian craftsmen, and mailed the whole process home in letters (1742 and 1747) that were printed and passed around in France. Step by step, Europe learnt the Indian method. Then it mechanized it. What happened to the teacher? India exported about 4.5M pieces of cotton cloth a year in the 1790s. By the 1830s, under half a million. Around 1830 India became a net importer of cloth. By 1880-81, by one estimate, ~58% of the cloth worn in India was made in Britain. Roques' manual sat forgotten in a Paris archive until 1966. Even today, almost everything we know of how our own dyers worked comes from what the Frenchmen wrote down. The dyers left no book of their own. How much else did we know, and never write down? P.S. The real secret was the mordant: a chemical fixer (alum, iron) applied to the cloth before dyeing, so the dye bites into the fibre and never washes out. The words still carry the address: chintz comes from the Hindi chheent (spotted), calico from Calicut. Sources: Giorgio Riello, "Asian knowledge and the development of calico printing in Europe", Journal of Global History (2010); G.B. Souza, in "How India Clothed the World" (Brill, 2009); B. Gupta, "Cotton Textiles and the Great Divergence" (Univ. of Warwick); Old Bailey trial record, July 1719; London Gazette, April 1721. Photo: Coromandel Coast palampore, painted resist and mordant, the exact technique in the post.

ISRO quietly lit something big on Oct 9. At IPRC, the full-scale gas generator of the LME1100, India's 1,100 kN LOX-methane engine, fired for the 1st time. A gas generator is the engine's engine. It burns a small stream of propellant to drive the turbopumps, which then force fuel and oxidiser into the main chamber. Light this, and you have lit the heart of the rocket. The build is as interesting as the test. 70%+ of the engine's components are 3D printed, realized with industry partners across the country. The gas generator itself is printed. 3 igniter designs are already proven: spark torch, a semiconductor spark plug built with VSSC and IIST, and a laser system. Methane is where the whole industry is heading. It burns clean, so engines can be reused. ISRO targets the integrated engine by mid of next year. Design is also complete for a 2,400 kN methane engine on full-flow staged combustion, the cycle only SpaceX's Raptor has flown so far. That one is meant for the human-rated heavy-lift vehicle for crewed lunar landings. Bharat is rising. 🙏🙏 Source: @isro Video: ISRO's own video of the full-scale gas generator hot test