The Bhagavad Gita Revisited
Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. Part 1 is on the Gita’s historical and literary context. Part 2 is the textual critique.

   Part 1 (The Appetizer)

   Part 2 (The Main Course)

Four Excerpts from a Novel

- Trying is All We Have
It has been a month since they first slept together. He wondered why their verbal sparring had increased in recent days. Just this morning at her place, Liz set off on the youth-obsessed American culture ...

- The Man in the BMW
On their way to China Town, they pass an area with red curtained massage parlors and hookers pacing the streets in tight clothes. They stop at a red light behind a BMW. A hooker approaches its curbside window, talks to the driver, and hops in.

- A Sales Conference
On Sunday evening, Ved flies to Palm Springs, California, to represent his product at Omnicon’s annual sales conference. More than a thousand of his coworkers from scores of countries will attend the three-day event.

- Putty in Her Hands
Sasha calls on Saturday afternoon, ‘Are you free?’ Sasha is a Russian escort, 28, slim, dark-haired, with dreamy green eyes

Herodotus, the Iliad, and 9/11
A look at some curious parallels between the wars of the post-9/11 decade and the Trojan War as Herodotus saw it.

Decolonizing My Mind
On the politics surrounding the arrival and the spread of English in the colonies and the peculiar world of the Indian writer in English.

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.

The Death of a Salesman
Yes, I too had a youthful phase—from about 18 to 27—when I wrote poems: imaginary heartbreak poems, gooey lovesick poems, metaphysical angst poems, faux disenchanted poems, pseudo-sophisticated poems, woo-the-maiden poems, voluptuous sorrow poems.

Peter Brook's Mahabharata
Earlier this year I saw Peter Brook's Mahabharata for the third time in fifteen years. Each time my admiration for it has grown. I consider it one of the greatest dramatic productions of all time. Its notable lack of appeal to Indians, except to a sliver, may be because ...

On Telling Stories
We often ask what it is that makes us human, and much has been written about the unique (or not) gifts of humankind: our fully opposable thumbs, in-line toes, upright stance, tool use, large brains, reason, language, self-awareness.

Advice to a Young Artist
The idea for writing this came to me from an interview in which an author was reverentially asked, ‘Sir, what would be your advice to a young artist?’  The author turned his nose up and gave a pat, patronizing answer but the question stayed with me. How would I answer it?