Periyar
Periyar was an iconoclast in every sense. The anti-Hindi agitations for which Tamil Nadu is famous even today, the anti-Brahmin polemic in its politics, the quest for caste equality, women’s...
View ArticleOn Apples
I was browsing through Michael Pollan’s ‘The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World’ and the first chapter was on the Apple and its introduction to the New World. The apple originated in...
View ArticleBohemians
The struggling, misunderstood artist, aloof from the petty insecurities of the middle class and disdainful of wealth, is probably one of the most recognisable and done-to-death tropes in art,...
View ArticleWhat I Watched – September 2026
Just Like Heaven: When was the last time I watched a Rom-Com? I should do more of this. Need more of such well-made syrupy stuff in life. Franklin: I began this anticipating it to be an entertaining...
View ArticleKaran Mahajan’s ‘The Complex’
Karan Mahajan’s The Complex was disappointing. It started with a bang. Gita, visiting her husband’s family home in Delhi, is raped by her husband’s uncle during a wedding. The narrative then shifts to...
View ArticleThatcher, Dickens and the French Revolution
The Brits have always been dismissive of the French Revolution. Edmund Burke in his classic ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France‘ correctly called out the eventual outcome of the whole revolution...
View ArticleThe Church and the Brothel: Steinbeck’s American West in ‘East of Eden’
I just finished Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’. The 850-page book is being adapted for the small screen, and the seven-episode series is dropping on Netflix in October. After reading this, I can confirm...
View ArticleGeorge Washington
Ron Chernow’s Pulitzer winning work – ‘Washington: A Life’ was a detailed biography of arguably the greatest American of all time. Unlike Ben Franklin, Jefferson or Hamilton, he was neither...
View ArticleA Critique of the Kerala Model of Development
Over the past few days, I flipped through Tirthankar Roy and K. Ravi Raman’s ‘Kerala, 1956 to the Present: India’s Miracle State’. The book is part of Cambridge University Press’s Economic Histories of...
View ArticleThe Tragedy of the Russian Woman
Through a cracking CWT episode, I discovered Julia Ioffe’s ‘Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy’. The book traces the entire arc of Russian history from the...
View ArticleBenjamin Franklin
In the 84 years that he lived, from 1706-90, the following is a non-exhaustive list of inventions/experiments/topics that Benjamin Franklin dabbled in: And while doing all of this, he also managed to...
View ArticleTwenty People Away from Christ
Last week, I got to hear Umayalpuram Sivaraman playing the mridangam in Delhi. He turns 91 this year. Whenever I see someone in their 90s (doesn’t happen too often with me since I live in India, not...
View ArticleThomas Jefferson’s Legacy (It’s Complicated)
After reading and writing a bit about the American Revolution, I have been tackling the biographies of a few of the Founding Fathers. Jon Meacham’s ‘Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power’ was the first of...
View ArticleWhat I Watched – August 2026
Satluj: Wrote about this here. The Agency (Season 2): Worth watching as it takes off from where it left us in Season 1. Great Expectations (1946): Wrote about this here Great Expectations (1998): Wrote...
View ArticleSikkil Gurucharan at Chinmaya Mission Auditorium, New Delhi
Sikkil was accompanied by the legendary Umayalpuram Sivaraman (going strong at 91) on the mridangam, Delhi Sriram on the violin and B.S Purushotam on the Khanjira. I left after the main piece as I was...
View ArticleThe Remarkable Shivaji
Thanks to being the resident Social Science teacher at home, I got to read the content on Shivaji in the Class VIII NCERT textbook. The chapter made random references to Afzal Khan, Shivaiji’s raid of...
View ArticleGreat Expectations
The Classics bug has taken hold of me and I decided to continue the streak with Dickens. My choice was Great Expectations, based on the feedback from this Reddit thread on Charles Dickens’ ‘best work’....
View Article‘Satluj’
I watched Satluj a few weeks ago and was disappointed by its overall treatment of a complex subject like Punjab’s militancy. Until the movie hit the headlines, I knew next to nothing of Jaswant Singh...
View ArticleEmily Eden’s ‘Ranjit Singh’
Until yesterday, the only Eden that I knew was Antony Eden, the British PM remembered for the disastrous Suez Crisis of 1956. Apparently, Lord Auckland, the Governor General of India from 1836-42 was...
View ArticleBotticelli in Delhi
The Humayun Tomb Museum has a special exhibition called ‘One Mother, Many Mother Tongues’ which explores how the concept of motherhood has been a constant motif in civilizations across millennia both...
View Article
![Suupeas – Fall in Dream (2026-10-09) [Single, FLAC 24bit/48kHz]](http://getimg.link/images/2026/10/17/442240.md.jpg)
