Showing results by narrator "Vijayan Menon" in All Categories

In the context of Christianity in India, few conversations ever invoke Agra; even fewer invoke the Mughals. Yet, one of the oldest churches on the subcontinent not only belongs to this city but only came about with enthusiastic Mughal patronage. Patronage that was neither political, nor...

Today, the American dollar is legal tender in as many as seven sovereign nations besides the United States of America. But there was a time, not too long ago, when another currency enjoyed a similar influence far from home. It was legal tender in half a dozen countries besides its own, all of...

"Open It" is a story about a traumatic father desperately looking for his missing daughter. He describes her features to a group of boys and they find the girl. But the old man only sees his daughter many days later, on a hospital stretcher, having been retrieved from a railway track...

More than two hundred years ago, a Muslim boy from Bihar lost his father, enlisted with the East India Company and set off on a voyage that took him to remote corners of India. By the late 1700s, he arrived in England and floated two business ventures — an Indian restaurant and a bathhouse...

Mahatma Gandhi's assassination was a culmination of many events and many actors that never enjoyed the centerstage in the broader discourse. Yes, Nathuram Godse pulled that trigger, but a lot more went into the project than just that. There was a disgraced barrister, a former Air Force officer...

From his plush hideaway in Bangkok, underworld don Shakti Pillai is wreaking havoc amongst India’s wealthy. He wields modern technology to extract information and extort money from billionaires while continuing to take on contract killings for anyone who can afford his price. Fed up with the police force’s inability to stop the don, some of India’s biggest business magnates pool in their crores and hire a mercenary to get rid of him. They recruit the best in the game, an assassin known only as Venus.

एक हँसती-खेलती लडकी, मोहिनी संदेहास्पद परिस्थितीयों में मारी जाती है. क्या उसने आत्महत्या की है या किसी ने उसका...

Two years after the Nazi and Soviet occupation of Poland, the exiled Polish army put 700 Polish women and children on a ship to virtually nowhere. "If we live, we'll meet again," is the last thing they heard from their families. After being denied by every country it touched, the ship...

What happens when a wait at a bar turns into a blissful union with a stranger. Maya takes a lot of effort to get ready for a blind date on a weekend, but instead gets stood up. Just when she's fretting, a stranger named Dev drops in and gets talking with her. Moments pass by in their easy banter...

Set in the pre-Independence Banaras, where the Viceroy of India is supposed to come, the magistrate is at a loss as to how to make the city clean for the visit. At the same time, the people of Banaras are calling for a strike in protest of the viceroy's arrival. The magistrate gets hold of the...

She was born to a nautch girl from the dingy alleys of Old Delhi, raised in a tiny hamlet in Haryana, abused as a kid, orphaned before she was ten, and bought to be a concubine before entering her teens. And yet, she beat every odd Providence threw her way and went on to become a queen who would...

Mahatma Gandhi sought India's independence, as did B.R. Ambedkar. Gandhi sought the emancipation of the oppressed, Ambedkar wanted that too. And yet, the two keystones of the monument called India couldn't be more antithetical to each other's principles. They held immense respect for each other...

The 17th-century Jagat Seths are often referred to as India's Medicis for their wealth. Rich enough to sponsor the British win at Plassey, they were India's largest moneylenders of their time. The bull run came to an end with the execution of its patriarchs in 1763. With the single largest...

On February 22, 1937, the Time magazine featured him on its cover as the wealthiest individual on the planet, a position he's believed to have held his entire life. At his peak, his net worth was the equivalent of $77 billion in today's money. He used a 184-carat diamond worth over $70 million...

Aksai Chin is a barren wasteland that's disputed between India and China. Having caused at least one full-fledged war between the two nations already, the region continues to claim lives and resources like no other on the planet. This story charts the background to this problem tracing a line...

लगातार होती बर्फ़बारी में आठ दिनों से मोबाइल का सिग्नल गुमशुदा है. और बीएसएनएल द्वारा इस तेरह हज़ार फुट की...

History recorded him as the Butcher of Amritsar. On April 13, 1919, General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to open indiscriminate fire at a crowd of peaceful protesters in Jallianwala Bagh killing over a thousand right away. While this happened in Amritsar, a young Urdu poet in Aligarh dreamed of...

Veer Savarkar was one of the many fascinating characters in the Indian freedom movement. Listen to his story in a fictionalised interview format. This is a work of fiction. This feature doesn't support or oppose any political party. Its purpose is only to entertain...

When it's getting late & Mumbai rains have you stranded, you have no option but to make the most of it! Diya & Amar precisely do that by hanging out at their workplace lobby. Diya hates Mumbai rains while Delhiite Amar loves only the rains of Mumbai. Soon a tussle ensues making the two...

A young photographer goes to the Sunderbans. But that one encounter became memorable in the jungle for the years to come. Was it only the tiger? Or something else haunts the jungle?...