I spent a week in Jakarta last month. The short ride from the airport to the hotel was enough to understand how broken and shambolic Indiaâs urban infrastructure systems are. Not a single Indian city can match up to the quality of built infrastructure that was visible in the city. Drivers there, also know the … Continue reading Jakarta Notes
My last stop was Switzerland. Traveling through the country, one canât be faulted for imagining this to be paradise. Panoramic views, lakes that stretch for miles, looming mountains, cows with bells and a train network that is truly an engineering and management marvel can mesmerize anyone. It was only in 1863, when Thomas Cook organized … Continue reading Switzerland Notes
In his memoirs, Obama writes about the time when his friends confronted him when they saw him reading Joseph Conradâs âHeart of Darknessâ. I tossed the book into my backpack. âActually, heâs right,â I said. âIt is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africaâs the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, … Continue reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
Writing about happiness is probably one of the hardest things to do. Writing about trauma is far easier and also cathartic. For Rushdie: Happiness writes in white ink on white pages. In other words, you canât make it appear on the page. Itâs invisible. It doesnât show up. Twenty-three years after the Fatwa, Rushdie was … Continue reading Rushdie’s ‘Knife’
When le CarrĂ© died in 2020, he was believed to have been the greatest spy novelist of all time. Writing in the heydays of the Cold War, realism was his forte and all his works were marked by a sense of pathos and tragedy. Over the past few years, the British writer Mick Herron has … Continue reading Herronâs Slough House
I started collecting comics sometime in 2018, got slightly serious in 2019 and then got stonewalled by the pandemic. Thankfully, in 2023, I managed to be more disciplined. (The plan is to begin a lending library dedicated to comics. So if youâre in Delhi and interested in exploring comics and graphic novels , do get … Continue reading Best Comics of 2023
Some of the best Non-Fiction (in no particular order) I read this year: The Moral Case of Fossil Fuels (blogged earlier) A Conflict of Visions- Thomas Sowell (blogged earlier) The Untethered Soul - Michael Singer. I've read a lot of books on zen/spirituality/meditation/CBT. But Singer's book still made me nod my head in agreement. The … Continue reading Best Non Fiction of 2023
I havenât been reading much fiction since the pandemic and this is something that I should remedy in 2024. Most of what I picked this year was good. The ones that stood out for me (in no particular order): Age of Vice by - Deepti Kapur (blogged earlier) I'm a Fan - Sheena Patel (blogged … Continue reading Best fiction books of 2023
