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.

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.

If you are feeling low in life right now, read this. Ramanujan was seriously ill in England, far from his wife and home, spending long stretches in nursing homes. In early 1918 Hardy wrote that the continual illness and solitude were affecting his mind. Later that year he wrote that Ramanujan had been subject to fits of depression. Around then, Ramanujan tried to end his life at a London Underground station. Biographers say the exact trigger is not known. A few months later, on 2 May 1918, the Royal Society elected him a Fellow.

Heartbreaking news from Chorbagan. Prayers for the families and the injured. No organiser wants a tragedy, and on most days our big temples and pandals handle huge crowds without incident. That is why this looks like a rare combination: a peak Saptami crowd + sudden rain. Early reports suggest people inside stayed put for shelter while people outside pushed in, creating crush pressure at a bottleneck. In that situation individuals have almost no control, so this is not about anyone’s civic sense. We do not know the full cause yet. Let the inquiry find the facts, and let us not forward unverified videos / numbers. What we can say already is that rare days need a plan: capped entry, one-way flow, separate exits and covered holding areas for rain. Om Shanti. 🙏🙏

This is a fantastic story about an East India Company mathematician claiming the Hindus understood the Binomial theorem in whole numbers. Unfortunately, we hardly were taught all of this... Year was 1790 and the city was Calcutta. Reuben Burrow, a Company surveyor, dropped a Sanskrit puzzle into Asiatic Researches. The puzzle goes like this: A raja's palace has 8 doors. Open them one at a time, two at a time, three, on up to all eight together. How many ways are possible? The Sanskrit rule goes 8, 28, 56, 70, 56, 28, 8, 1. Add it up, and we get 255. Look closely and you find those are binomial coefficients. Europe called the same pattern Pascal's triangle. Burrow was a tenant farmer's son from Leeds. Walked four days to London at 18, taught himself Sanskrit once he got to India. He worked the rule through and wrote that the Hindoos (his words) understood it in whole numbers "to the full as well as Briggs, and much better than Pascal". The paper never named the book but the puzzle matches Bhaskara's Lilavati, written around 1150 CE. Source: Asiatic Researches vol 2, Calcutta 1790, pp 487-497. Photo 1: p 494, the "much better than Pascal" line.. Photo 2: p 495, the palace puzzle and the rule setup Photo 2: p 496, the total 255 and Burrow's proof. All are 1790 print, public domain.

1819. The Quarterly Journal of Science carries an unusual paper: An Analysis of Wootz, or Indian Steel. The author is a young lab assistant, Michael Faraday. The electricity work that makes him famous is years away. Wootz from South India is then the finest steel in the world. Britain wants to know why. Faraday teams up with James Stodart, an instrument maker. The furnaces run so hot that even three crucibles nested together could not stand the heat. They mix steel with silver, platinum, rhodium, chromium. Nickel they try because everyone believed meteoric iron never rusts. Trying to add titanium, they make wootz by accident. Faraday admits it: "we had formed artificial wootz." Stodart declares it equal to the best Bombay wootz (but was it really, wootz?). In 1823 Stodart dies. Faraday stops the work within a year, packs the samples in a wooden box, never writes about steel again. That box sits in the Science Museum, London. It was not wootz. Their theory of what made it special was wrong. A sample survives, labelled "Attempt to Imitate Damask Steel". Analysed in 1931: pattern-welded strips, ordinary slag, no titanium. Real wootz was reproduced only in the 1990s. The key was a trace of vanadium. Sources: Stodart & Faraday, "Experiments on the Alloys of Steel", Journal of Science and the Arts (1820) and Phil. Trans. Royal Society (1822); R. Hadfield, "Faraday and his Metallurgical Researches" (1931); J.D. Verhoeven, Indian Journal of History of Science 42.4 (2007). Photo: The actual first page of Faraday's 1819 wootz paper, title and byline "M. Faraday, Chemical Assistant to the Royal Institution" highlighted yellow. Public domain (1819).