Books and Authors

Shantaram: A Review NEW!
Shantaram is the story of a violent man's search for the man of peace within himself ...

Rereading Naipaul
I first read Naipaul in the mid-90s: India: A Million Mutinies, The Enigma of Arrival, and A Way in the World. They resonated with me well enough. But ...

The Reach of Reason
Perceptions of culture, history, and identity are necessarily subjective and selective. There's no impartial and omniscient chronicler of events, no 'scientific' history...

Al-Beruni's India
The first significant intrusion of Islam into India was led by Mahmud of Ghazni who, quite justifiably, lives in Indian history as a cruel and bloodthirsty fanatic, ...

The Tragedy of the Congo
The history of European colonialism is replete with examples of extreme cruelty. The decimation of the American Indians in South America ...

The Wonder That Was India
Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians [call] them Golden Ages ...

Art, Music, Cinema

On Photography
If a picture says a thousand words, which thousand words does it say to whom? If we all wrote down what we hear, no two accounts would be the same...

A Qawwali Concert
A year or so ago, I attended an open-air Qawwali concert by the famous Sabri Brothers, who claim direct descent from Mian Tansen himself, ...

Peter Brook's Mahabharata
Earlier this year I saw Peter Brook's Mahabharata for the third time in fifteen years. Each time my admiration for it has grown ...

Jack the Dripper
Does art lie entirely in the eye of the beholder, or should it have minimal standards? ...

Economics and Geopolitics

The Last Empire NEW!
Much has been written about China's environmental crisis in recent years...

Beyond Hope and Change NEW!
Two eager contestants, tooting their horns and dissing each other. The media readying us for fireworks, sharp attacks, a "do or die" fight...

Free Market News
The newspaper business has changed radically in recent decades. Most newspapers are now owned by a handful of large corporations, ...

America and the Cold War
The US pulled out of Vietnam in 1975 after more than a decade and a humiliating defeat. The war had been expensive, the draft unpopular, ...

 

Musings and Humor

Reporting from Home
I'm a non-resident Indian (NRI). I left India in 1989 for a masters degree in the US. I then lived in N. California and W. Europe and had traveled to 50+ countries by ...

Advice to a Young Artist
The idea for writing this came to me from an interview in which an author was reverentially asked, ‘Sir, what would be your advice to a young artist?’...

Size Matters!
For ages now, men have made women feel self-conscious, nay worthless, making them obsess over the size of their, er ... various body parts...

History and Culture

Just Not Cricket NEW!
In a recent cricket match played between India and Australia in Sydney, the Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh was accused of hurling a racist insult ...

Chinese Food for Thought
In gastronomic matters, I am squarely among the less intrepid of men. Raised by a vegetarian mother who wouldn't allow meat in her kitchen ...

On Telling Stories
We often ask what it is that makes us human ... I’d have to say it’s our penchant and need for story-telling: human beings are the story-telling species ...

Forbidden City
Surrounded by moat and high walls, the fabled Forbidden City earned its name by being closed to everyone outside the Chinese royal family and their eunuchs and maidservants ...

On Diversity
Last October, I went sightseeing in Calcutta with a friend. We began with a short cycle rickshaw ride, took a local train to Sealdah, wandered near College St ...

On History and Historians
'To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born,' Cicero declared, 'is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is ...

John Frum
... a village on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, where the people believe Prince Philip of England is a god. Though it might sound preposterous ...

Swastika
When I visited India the summer I turned 9 years old, my grandmother took my siblings and me to a jeweler so we could each select a pendant to bring back with us to the US ...

 

Travel

An Indian-American in China
Arriving at the mausoleum of Mao Zedong on Tian'anmen Square, I looked expectantly to join a long line of Chinese tourists awaiting their moment to view Mao's body, ...

Divinity is Here
I am in the village of Rum in south Jordan, all signed-up for two days in the desert. The clincher was the Bedouin honcho's sell job:  "I have open jeep, ...

The Lost City of Ugarit
The road to Lattakia goes over the Anti-Lebanon Range. I had left Aleppo under a blue sky at noon; now a thick fog rolls in, tall conifers appear in the valleys, visibility drops ...

Nobody's Land
"Cuiabá is the city of mangoes. We don't buy them, just pluck and eat," says Rizardo, our wildlife guide. Riding in the bed of a pickup truck, we are going down the ...

Signore, Speak English?
Many years later, last October, after completing a short assignment in Paris, I went to Italy for a three-week vacation. I took an overnight train to Rome ...

At the Foot of Mount Yasur
I am six hundred miles east of the Great Barrier Reef in the archipelago of Vanuatu-or, as they say in Vanuatu, the "ni-Vanuatu" archipelago -- home to nine active volcanoes ...

Notes from Cuzco
It was six a.m. when the AeroPeru jet arrived in Lima. The night had seemed real long partly because an elderly senora let her head collapse on my shoulder every few minutes...

Science, Religion, Philosophy

How Terrorism Works NEW!
Experts on Islamic terrorism are now everywhere, spouting wisdom on countless media outlets and blogs [on] what turns Muslims into terrorists...

Pinker, the Storyteller NEW!
Many evolutionary psychologists, including Steven Pinker, professor at Harvard, claim that ... evolution has endowed humans with a "moral instinct"...

From the Outside, Looking In NEW!
... speaking of Muslims as fanatics and terrorists is not even considered bad manners; it’s seen as a comic expression of the truth ...

The Politics of God NEW!
In response to 9/11 and the alarming role of evangelical Christianity in US politics, a host of loud atheistic voices have emerged. Most belong to concerned citizens ...

The Basis of Belief
Do we arrive at our beliefs in a systematic manner or through an intuitive process? Are we predisposed towards some beliefs while being skeptical about others? ...

Rediscovering Golem
What is life anyway, and how did it really happen upon this world? As a physical phenomenon, is life an accidental and rare occurrence?

On Being Spiritual
Spirituality is cool these days. Its warm and fuzzy aura now appeals to more and more people in the West. Online dating sites abound with claims of being ...

On Dignity, Rights, Responsibility
In today’s world, we often take for granted ideas like human dignity and human rights. Many of us hold them to be natural, inalienable, or universal ...

The Carvakas
It comes as a surprise to many that in ancient "spiritual" India, atheistic materialism was a major force to reckon with ...

A Mousetrap for Metaphysics
About six years ago, after an obsessive, multi-year engagement with history and philosophy, I struggled with the following question: Is it possible to ...

Servitors of Divine Consciousness
In Jan '06, I visited Auroville for the second time (first in '96), but my interest was still purely anthropological....

On Early Islam
Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who ultimately assimilated it. Why? ...

Eugenics Record Office
James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, is in trouble again, this time for a racist remark that has led to wide criticism and his firing ...

Biography

Percy Julian, Chemist Extraordinaire
Percy Lavon Julian, born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1899, the grandson of slaves, was one of the most accomplished chemists of the 20th century...

Omar Khayyam of Persia
In his lifetime, Omar Khayyam (1048-1131) achieved great fame as a master of philosophy, jurisprudence, history, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics ...

Al-Farabi, Medieval Islamic Philosopher
During the so-called golden age of Islam in tenth-century Baghdad, ... The man ... held second only to Aristotle was called Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE)...