Since the time sewing machine was invented, it has been synonymous with survival and liberation of women across cultures. A thread on few powerful images of women around the globe with her humble sewing machine - 1/n
#1 Refugee women in Peshawar carrying her sewing machine - 2/n
#2 A Mahafaly woman carrying a sewing machine on her head. Southern Madagascar - 3/n
#3 A Muslim woman carrying a sewing machine in Kuwait, 1955 - 4/n
#4 Woman with a sewing machine, Bassar, Togo. Remember, a cast iron sewing machine would weigh from anywhere between 20 and 30Lb (By DEA / M. BORCHI) - 5/n
#5 A Woman walking with her Sewing Machine on her head in the 1970s, fearing it might be damaged by potential attacks in Tripoli, Libya (By Keystone-France) - 6/n
#6 A woman makes her way through downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti, carrying her sewing machine on her head, 2003 (By ROBERT SULLIVAN) - 7/n
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The Cathedral of the Sacred Heart near Connaught Place in New Delhi is one of the city's oldest Christian establishments which have a strange connection with your favorite coffee drink, the Cappuccino.
Read on. 1/17
Who would have thought while sipping Cappuccino at a café in Connaught Place that their cup of coffee would have a strange bond with a church just a few miles away at the junction of Bhai Vir Singh Marg Road and Bangla Sahib Road. 2/17
Built in the early 1930s in an Italian style, the cathedral of the Sacred Heart was envisioned by Father Luke, a member of the Franciscan first order founded by the followers of the poor man of Assisi, Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone. 3/17
What connects the American Civil War to Durga Puja in Bengal?
It's the nostalgic toy cap guns. The story of the cap gun is stranger than it looks.
Thread. 1/14
If you didn’t grow up in Kolkata, you might have missed it — the streets during Durga Puja once alive with kids firing toy cap guns, little puffs of smoke and crackles everywhere. A vivid pre-social media ritual of childhood, with a fascinating origin story.
2/14
The Civil War (1861–65) was the first truly industrial war. Soldiers of both the Union and the Confederacy moved away from old flintlock muskets and embraced the percussion cap - a tiny copper or brass cup holding a shock-sensitive explosive. 3/14
Four years ago in Kerala, sixteen strangers walked into the Russian House in Thiruvananthapuram. They were from different districts, different walks of life. But they all carried one name that bound them together.
Gagarin. Yes, Gagarin.
So, What brought them together? 1/16
The name needs no introduction, or does it?
On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into space. For the world, it was history. For a section of Kerala’s left-leaning families, it was inspiration strong enough to echo in their children’s names. 2/16
Take P.D. Gagarin from Cherthala.
According to reports in Hindu and New Indian Express, he was born on that very day in 1961, when the Soviet cosmonaut made his historic flight. His father, a communist and space enthusiast, named him Yuri Gagarin. 3/16
Long before she was a global icon, Mother Teresa walked the streets of Kolkata, and when she had nowhere to go, the city’s iconic Kali Temple opened its doors. On her birthday, we remember the unlikely home that started a journey of compassion that changed the world. Thread 1/19
When Mother Teresa began her work in Calcutta in 1948, she had almost nothing of her own. She wore a plain white cotton sari with a blue border and carried little more than conviction. 2/19
Her belief was simple yet radical: that the poor who lay unwanted on the pavements, the sick abandoned in the streets, and the dying left in filth deserved dignity in their final days. 3/19
Why does sugarcane taste so sweet in India today? India’s sugarcane wasn’t always this sweet. The reason it tastes the way it does today goes back to the stubborn brilliance of one woman who fought prejudice, doubt, and even war. Thread.
1/19
Janaki Ammal was born in 1897 in Kerala. At a time when most girls were expected to marry early, she chose science.
Botany became her world.
2/19
Janaki grew up in a large family with 19 siblings. Her father was not a scientist, but he loved tending gardens and writing about nature. From him, Janaki absorbed a way of looking at plants not just as crops, but as living wonders.
Open a Crayola box today and you’ll find hundreds of shades. But if you grew up in the 80s or 90s using Crayola art supplies, you might remember a crayon called Indian Red. And then, one day, it just disappeared. What exactly happened?
1/14
To answer that, you have to travel way beyond the Crayola factory in Pennsylvania…
all the way to a small town in Kerala, India.
In 1807, a Scottish man named Francis Buchanan was surveying the region for the East India Company.
2/14
So, who was Buchanan-Hamilton? think of him as a one-man research institute on foot: surgeon, botanist, surveyor. after Tipu Sultan’s fall, he was tasked to map and describe the south.
3/14