The first test tube baby was born in India, 7,600 years ago, and he was called Dronacharya. Ancient sages divined a long time back the leaps in technology we see today, such as stem cell research. Perplexed? This is part of school curricula in India; the first a gem from a Class IX science textbook; the second from Dinanath Batra’s Tejomay Bharat, now supplementary reading in Gujarat. A Hindi textbook for Class VIII students in Karnataka twists a Kannada folktale to have a tiger sermonise beatifically on how eating beef is sinful (see box).