Last week, I attended a heritage walk in Old Delhi exploring the Thugs of India, organized by Gaurav Sharma from India Heritage Trails. After the walk, I picked up Mike Dash’s ‘Thug: The True Story Of India's Murderous Cult’ and learnt quite a bit about this lesser known period of our history. Bandits and highway … Continue reading The Thugs of Hindustan
Coriolanus - a historical figure of Ancient Rome who lived four centuries before Julius Caesar, has a play on his life written by the Bard. Despite it being one of his lesser-known works, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of reading it. In a nutshell, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a killing machine, who after winning many a … Continue reading Coriolanus
In 1971, during the height of the East Pakistan refugee crisis, the philosopher Peter Singer published an essay called Famine, Affluence, and Morality in which the ‘Shallow Pond’ thought experiment - one of philosophy’s most profound thought experiments - made its appearance. On your way to work, you pass a small pond. Children sometimes play … Continue reading The Shallow Pond and the Life You Can Save
Cleopatra was not the exotic, scheming, and lustful queen of legend who ensnared Rome’s greatest men. Her affairs with Pompey, Caesar, and Antony were historic realities, but these were driven by realpolitik. As Adrian Goldsworthy writes: Cleopatra was not another Helen of Troy, a mythical figure about whom the most important thing was her beauty. … Continue reading Antony and Cleopatra
In the early aughts, when I was in college, Roy’s long-form essays were a frequent feature in the Outlook magazine. Vinod Mehta’s trust in her made her a household name, and he, too, fondly wrote about this association in his memoir. Sometime in 2015, her introduction to Navayana's edition of Ambedkar's 'Annihilation of Caste' again … Continue reading Roy’s Memoir
Last evening, I attended the book launch of the Shillong-based journalist Patricia Mukhim’s ‘From Isolation to Integration: Navigating the Geopolitics of India's Northeast (1990-2023)'. (Her daughter is also my colleague at UNDP). The launch included a discussion on the Northeast by a stellar panel – Vrinda Grover, Shyam Saran, GK Pillai, Shekhar Gupta, and Tiplut … Continue reading A Discussion on the Northeast
Cats evolved sometime in 7000 BC in the Fertile Crescent. But unlike dogs, they never really caught the imagination of the earliest humans. The transition of the cat from a scavenger to a cultural object began sometime in the late part of the 19th century and a lot of it was due to the art … Continue reading Louis Wain and his Cats
