When we think of Nelson Mandela, we have this statesmanesque vision in our minds. A man who suffered incarceration for 27years and then emerged to lead and heal a country torn by Apartheid is always bound to evoke such imagery. Jonny Steinberg’s ‘Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage’ gave me a reality check of … Continue reading Winnie and Nelson
Last night, just after publishing the post on theContemporary Art Market, I got to know about the passing away of Frank Gehry – an architect and personality with a close connect to the contemporary art market. In the early 1990s, the Guggenheim Museum in NY decided to lend its name and collection to an outpost … Continue reading Frank Gehry’s Iconic Masterpiece
Errol Morris’ documentary on the life of John le Carre – The Pigeon Tunnel was a peek into the life of the probably the greatest spy novelist of all time. After watching it, I revisited my notes from his 2016 memoir of the same name, which I read three years back. The title refers to … Continue reading The Pigeon Tunnel
When Joel Mokyr won the Economics Nobel this year, the chorus of appreciation for his work on Economic History was too loud to be ignored. So I picked up his ‘The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress’ which was published three and half decades ago. Mokyr’s core argument is that economic growth is … Continue reading Mokyr’s ‘The Lever of Riches’
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
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
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
Steve Brusatte’s “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World” was a quick and engaging read about the fascinating field of palaeontology, and, of course, dinosaurs. A new species of dinosaur is currently being discovered, on average, once a week. (I took time to wrap my head around this … Continue reading Some Dino Facts
