247 items in this section. Displaying page 8 of 25
The Crane's Walk
A family of crabs lived on the shores of a giant blue sea. They frolicked in the sands and ate mussels, clams and other small sea creatures. One day the mother crab saw a beautiful crane walking about in the sand, a straight graceful walk in its long reed-like legs. “How graceful that crane looks,” she thought to herself. Then she caught sight of her son waddling towards her and felt very irritated. “And how clumsy my son is....
Assam's Boys Shine in Asian Cricket
July 22: Two young boys have done the impossible in Assam. They have pushed politicians and the continuing violence, out of the media spotlight. Both boys are stars of the Indian under-15 cricket team. One of them, Palash Jyot Das, is the son of a bank employee. The other, Mrigen Talukdar comes from a poor family. There’s nothing remarkable about their backgrounds. Much is remarkable about their achievements, though. While Palash is Asia’s best batsman, Mrigen is Asia’s best bowler....
Peru's Barefoot Librarians
Twelve year-old Leonardo Herrera had never seen a book in his life although he knew how to read. He and his friends used to carve letters and numbers on cactus leaves after seeing their teacher do the same on small blackboards. He belongs to poor peasant family in Bambamarca in Peru. His family grows maize and potatoes in a place which is 12,000 feet above sea-level. But Leonardo wanted to see what a book looks like....
Man Who Could Make The Taj Disappear
August 12: Franz Harary is the magician. He has a simple wish: he wants to make the Taj Mahal disappear. Nothing doing, says the Indian government. Harary is an American magician. His specialty is making huge monuments disappear. In ten years, he has done things no other magician has dared do before. In Hawaii he moved a volcano two miles out to sea. In Japan, he made the Tokyo Bay Bridge vanish. At Cape Kennedy in the USA, he made the NASA space shuttle vanish....
Language Split
Language Split [Illustration by Anup Singh] November 18: The English language is believed to have caused one of Sri Lanka’s leading political parties to split. How? Well, the party’s leader, being a member of the upper class, spoke in English during press conferences, a language his local language-speaking cadre or party members could not fathom. This double talk of the politician caused the party members to do a double take and they went ahead and split into two....
The Beggar who is a Money Lender
August 5: A beggar is someone who is so poor that she has to beg people for money. For, she generally has little that belongs to her. No money to buy food, no proper shelter to live in, not even perhaps, two sets of clothes to wear. Or, at least that’s what we’re told to believe. But Bhanwari Sethani forces us to take a new look at the tired, old pictures of the beggar that we have in our mind....
The Quake that rocked Gujarat
Where: Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India February 5, 2001 : It was 8.45 am on January 26, 2001. A day when the country was celebrating Republic Day. Like their counterparts across India, the people of Ahmedabad, in the western state of Gujarat, were settling down to watch the Republic Day Parade on television. Basant Rawat was one of them. Suddenly the earth began to shake under his feet. Basant ran out of his house. And, the sight that greeted him seemed to be straight out of an action film – Tagore apartments, a five-storeyed building, 400 yards from his house, collapsed like a pack of cards, says a report in ‘The Telegraph’....
Was Christmas Celebrated Thousands of Years before Christ's Birth?
Did you know that the celebrations at Christmas might have nothing to do with the birth of Christ? In fact they may well lie in a feast called Sacaea that was celebrated thousands of years before Christ’s birth. Over 4000 years ago, in the region that is now Iraq, a five-day festival with the exchanges of gifts, the staging of plays, accompanied by merry making and processions, marked the end of winter and ushered in the New Year....
The Donkey monkeys Around
Gopu the donkey was happily going munch munch on an extremely green patch of grass right in the heart of the meadow. So intent was Gopu on eating, that he did not hear anyone approaching until he looked up and gave an involuntary shiver. For standing right in front of him, was Shikari, the wolf. Gopu began to limp and make a lot of ooh aah noises while doing so. Shikari watched him in silence for a while and then asked what was wrong....
The Kiwi is Australian!
The Kiwi is Australian! [Illustration by Shinod AP] March 14: The kiwi bird is one of the most common symbols of New Zealand. It is also the country’s national bird. And that’s not all. It features as an insignia on New Zealand’s coat of arms as well. New Zealanders consider the kiwi their most enduring national symbol and until now, they believed that the bird did not even exist outside New Zealand....