A 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 ArticleWhat I Watched – July 2026
The Fabelmans: I wasn’t too keen to watch it but am happy that I did. Spielberg based it on his own childhood and had to wait for his parents’ death to finally make it. It’s not easy to make a movie in...
View ArticleForster’s ‘Howards End’ and the Intellectual Life
Forster should be more widely read. After having finished ‘A Passage to India’, ‘A Room with a View’ and now ‘Howards End’, I can confidently say that he’s one of the sharpest chroniclers of social...
View ArticleProject Sunrise
Earlier this week, an Airbus 350-1000ULR set the world record for the longest ever flight by a commercial aircraft by being airborne for 24 hours and 24 minutes and covering a distance of 23,075 kms,...
View ArticleIsabel Archer in ‘The Portrait of a Lady’
In 1881, America was a relatively young country while Europe was associated with grandeur, heritage and an aristocratic culture shaped by centuries of history. The psychological complexity of America’s...
View ArticleT.M. Krishna at O.P Jindal Auditorium, New Delhi
He was in top form and accompanied by two other Sangita Kalanidhis – RK Shriramkumar on the violin and Thiruvarur Bhaktavalsalam on the mridangam. In the background of the ongoing Gen-Z protests, I...
View ArticleNolan’s Odyssey
Since PVR Priya had the only decent IMAX screen nearby, I had to book a 1145 pm show on a weekday for the ‘Odyssey’. The movie was disappointing and failed to move me. Nolan just kept moving from...
View ArticleThe American Revolution
I thought that the 250th anniversary celebrations may be a good time to read up on the Revolution and get a better handle on the event. Gordon S. Wood’s ‘The American Revolution: A History’ and the...
View ArticleRomeo and Juliet
Juliet was 14 and Romeo probably just a few years older! Little wonder that both of them ended up dead by the end of the play. The political violence of Verona – the feuding clans, a weak ruler and the...
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