Books and Authors
Joothan: A Dalit's Life
Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki is a deeply affecting memoir of growing up achoot (‘untouchable’) starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh, India.
Shantaram: A Review
The story's narrator is not a peaceful man and the book is loaded with enough violence ... Shantaram is the story of a violent man's search for the man of peace within himself.
Marco Polo's India
Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo spent a few months in India ... his famous book, The Travels, contains a rich social portrait of India that still resonates with us today.
This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen
Tadeusz Borowski was 21 years old when he was deported to the cluster of concentration camps in southern Poland, collectively known as Auschwitz, in 1943.
Rereading Naipaul
His travelogues on India brim with curiosity, insight, and humanity. Perhaps he found too little to praise, but much of what he wrote has a ring of truth. If there is loathing, there is also love.
The Reach of Reason
Perceptions of culture, history, and
identity are necessarily subjective and selective. There's no impartial
and omniscient chronicler of events, no 'scientific' history.
America, the Cold War, and the Taliban
The roots of transnational Islamic terrorism lie not so much in culture and the Qur’an as in politics and the conduct of the Cold War in Afghanistan.
In Light of Nalanda
What was ancient Nalanda University like? Here is a portrait based on the accounts of Chinese scholars of 7th century CE and a recent personal visit.
Al-Beruni's India
The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic.
The Tragedy of the Congo
The history of European colonialism is replete with examples of extreme cruelty. The decimation of the American Indians in South America and the United States is but one example. What was done to the natives of Africa is no less barbarous.
The Wonder That Was India
Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing them Golden Ages. Examples include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha.
How Fiction Works
Good critics, it seems to me, are as rare as good artists, and for some reason their skills rarely coincide in a single person. At the very least, a good critic situates the work in a larger context and challenges us to read more closely and to demand more from art.
Of Monks and Ferraris
I recall it now as a struggle on every page and often thinking of Dorothy Parker's words from long ago: this is not a book to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force.
Breaking the Galilean Spell
Emergentism, as this hypothesis is called (or holism), claims that the fundamental laws of nature eventually run out of descriptive and predictive steam.
The Bold and the Beautiful
Teeming with character and incident, the Aeneid is a Latin epic poem of high craft and seductive energy. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan war of Homer's Iliad, ...
The Eichmann Within
Hannah Arendt's landmark Eichmann in Jerusalem documents the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi nabbed by the Israeli secret police in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem, where he was tried and executed.
On Dignity, Rights, Responsibility
In today’s world, we often take for granted ideas like human dignity and human rights. Many of us hold them to be natural, inalienable, or universal.
Democracy in Athens
The liberal-popular and the conservative-aristocratic emerged as the two dominant factions in Athenian democracy . Any resemblance between classical Athens (5th cent. BCE) and a modern nation-state is not purely coincidental.
Omar Khayyam of Persia
In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics.
The Namesake
Mira Nair's movie packs in far more universal appeal than Jhumpa Lahiri's book. My main basis of comparison was: on the whole,
does it tell a deeper, richer story?
Wise Man Socrates
Socrates, like Jesus and the Buddha, never committed his ideas to writing.* Our main sources on him are Plato, his student, and Xenophon, the historian. The picture that emerges from their accounts make him perhaps the greatest man of Classical Greece.
