Books and Authors

Shantaram: A Review
The story's narrator is not a peaceful man and the book is loaded with enough violence ... 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 in the ensuing ...

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, ...

How Fiction Works
Good critics, it seems to me, are as rare as good artists, and for some reason their skills rarely coincide in a single person. At the very least, a good critic ....

The Bold and the Beautiful
Teeming with character and incident, the Aeneid is a Latin epic poem of high craft and seductive energy. Set in the aftermath of the Trojan war of Homer's Iliad ...

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 and the US is but one example ...

The Wonder That Was India
Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing them Golden Ages...

Of Monks and Ferraris
I recall it now as a struggle on every page and often thinking of Dorothy Parker's words from long ago: this is not a book to be tossed aside lightly; it should be thrown with great force ...

Art, Music, and Cinema

On Photography: Truth, Lies, and Photos
Many urban middleclass Indians I know are peeved by what they see as a staple of photography on India: squalor, poverty, lepers, fakirs, the deformed. Their India ...

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, the legendary ...

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. I consider it one of the greatest dramatic productions of all time ...

Jack the Dripper
Does art lie entirely in the eye of the beholder, or should it have minimal standards? Who decides what is art and what is only a visually appealing painting, photograph, or sculpture? ...

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?’  ... the question stayed with me. How would I answer it?

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...

 

Economics and Geopolitic

Beyond Hope and Change
Two eager contestants, tooting their horns and dissing each other. The media readying us for fireworks, sharp attacks, a "do or die" fight. Showdown in Texas is how CNN bills the live event...

The Last Empire
Much has been written about China's environmental crisis in recent years: vanishing forests, encroaching desert, depleting ground water, acid rain, toxic chemicals in polluted rivers...

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

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, and too many white boys had come home in body bags ...

Gandhi's 'Inconsistent Pacifism'
Last week the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee made a rare and candid admission: "Our record is far from perfect … not giving Mahatma Gandhi the Nobel Prize was the biggest omission" ..

History and Culture

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

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. The largest surviving palace ....

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 and a near-vegetarian father, I only had chicken and ...

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, boarded another train ...

Land of the Free
Which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world? The US of course. The prison population in the US has more than quadrupled in the last quarter century...

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 woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?' ...

On Herodotus' Histories
What in his outlook and judgment is still noteworthy nearly 2,500 years later? ... In other words, how should we evaluate Herodotus as a historian?

John Frum
Some time ago, [I read] an article about 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
Have Bedouin, will travel. 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. The pop Arabic music ...

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 Transpantaneira, a dirt road that ...

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 ... the eternal city...

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...

A Hammam in Damascus
Traveling in India, for all the personal growth it brings, is a dust, soot, and sweat laden experience. Even after a bath, rubbing a random spot on my arm produces little black streaks of muck. One gets used to it but ...

Science, Religion, Philosophy

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

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

From the Outside, Looking In
... speaking of Muslims as fanatics and terrorists is not even considered bad manners; it’s seen as a comic expression of the truth. Suggesting that it might be a bit more complicated—...

The Politics of God
In response to 9/11 and the role of evangelical Christianity in US politics, a host of loud atheistic voices have emerged. Most belong to concerned citizens driven by their secular ideals...

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?

Breaking the Galilean Spell
Emergentism, as this hypothesis is called (or holism), claims that the fundamental laws of nature eventually run out of descriptive and predictive steam...

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. But we would do well to ask: ...

The Carvakas
It comes as a surprise to many that in ancient "spiritual" India, atheistic materialism was a major force to reckon with. Predating even the Buddhists, the Carvaka is one of the earliest ...

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. Yet again, Auroville-a township in Tamil Nadu founded in 1968 by the Mother...

On Early Islam
Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who ultimately assimilated it. Why did the reverse not happen? ...

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 ...

A Journey to the West
Journey to the West, "China's most beloved novel of religious quest and picaresque adventure," was published in the 1590s in the waning years of the Ming dynasty. The novel's hero, "a mischievous monkey with human traits ...

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....

Wise Man Socrates
Socrates, like Jesus and the Buddha, never committed his ideas to writing.* Our main sources on him are Plato, his student, and Xenophon, the historian. The picture that emerges from their accounts make him perhaps the greatest....

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 a tenth-century Muslim thinker called Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE).