One’s wealth is inherited while riches are earned according to a seasoned speaker on various aspects of our society. Taking a leaf out of his perception of the subtle difference between wealthy persons and the rich, one is prompted to remark that vast knowledge relating to healthy life without using or depending on modern medicines,…

Roads have come on centre-stage in public domain, particularly in Karnataka, for all bad reasons. Sources in the Government often make it a point to inform the people, mostly through print media, about roads across the State, dwelling on length in kilometres added to the existing network, widening some stretches, both intra-city and inter-city, raising…

The means of preserving literary works of ancient authors, many of them unknown to later generations, by memorising and word of mouth as it were along with etching on stone slabs and inking on palm leaves, compared to modern means of storing and conveying information, literary works and graphics using paper, printing, digitisation and wireless…

We don’t get an insight from the pages of history or narratives in the land’s epics to infer that invariably a war of words precedes wars with weapons, although incidents of wars in all past having taken place without words being exchanged between the warring parties cannot be excluded as we look back. The virtual…

Money and food are commodities together in a special league with the feature of a smaller section in the population having them in surplus quantities and the rest left craving to get at them in the face of hardship and disappointment. Is that why a flurry of idioms and proverbs have emerged in most, if…

The monetary measure of the market value of all final goods and services produced in a specified period (quarterly or yearly), commonly used to determine the economic performance of a whole country (or a region such as a State) and to make international comparisons being expressed as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the share of services…

A verse sourced to the ancient widely translated Sanskrit text Panchatantra, a collection of stories featuring animals, dating back to about 300 BC and attributed to Vishnu Sharma reads Vidya Dadaathi Vinayam… (Education makes one humble…). In the context of visualising education as going to school, college and obtaining certificates as proof of being educated,…

The expression sons of the soil, used by some speakers influencing societal outlook towards sections in the local population identified as outsiders is often meant to make an impressive impression on lay people, particularly on eve of polls, as in Karnataka’s political world. Many regions of the world, particularly in the West, have witnessed the…

Likening any complex or unsolvable problem used to be expressed metaphorically as the Gordian Knot by writers in English during the days gone by. The legend on dismantling an ‘impossible’ knot dates back to the times of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC). The phrase Cutting the Gordian Knot has come to assume the proverb form…

Not many will believe that evolving letters for writing is traced to Ethiopia, currently rated as a country with the lowest per capita income in the world. The practice of writing on stones and subsequently on palm leaves dates back to a period as far back as one can imagine, apart from estimating. Now-all-too-familiar the…