Books and Authors

Joothan: A Dalit's Life
Joothan by Omprakash Valmiki is a deeply affecting memoir of growing up achoot (‘untouchable’) starting in the 1950s outside a typical village in Uttar Pradesh, India.

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
His travelogues on India brim with curiosity, insight, and humanity. Perhaps he found too little to praise, but much of what he wrote has a ring of truth. If there is loathing, there is also love.

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 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.

Avatar: A Review
Outlandishly expensive, visually stunning, and politically loaded, Cameron took every risk with this film. And what did he give us, after all? A heroic fantasy of White Guilt. The story of Pocahontas, re-imagined.

Slumdog Millionaire: A Review
The film has obvious and broad appeal as the quintessential underdog story [but] the movie on the whole was just downright silly.

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.

A Qawwali Concert
Thoughts on an open-air Qawwali concert by the famous Sabri Brothers, who claim direct descent from Mian Tansen himself, the legendary Hindustani musician in Akbar's court.

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?

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....

History and Culture

On Caste Privilege
Much has been written about the unearned privilege of race and gender. What does the privilege of caste look like in Indian society? How and why has caste been politicized?

The Minangkabau: Mixing Islam and Matriarchy
This matriarchal society of Muslims in Indonesia reminds us that religion and culture are never cut from whole cloth.

The Dance of Indian Democracy
Why did democracy take root in India against all odds? What are its distinguishing features? Six decades later, how close is it to Ambedkar's inspiring vision of democracy?

The Blight of Hindustan
The Indian caste system continues to mystify outsiders. Here is a brisk overview of its origins, spread, and some historical attitudes and debates.

The Other Swastika
Can the symbol ever be redeemed in the eyes of the West? What might be lost and what could be gained in the possibility of doing so?

On Early Islam
This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue.

Part 1: The Rise of Islam
Part 2: The Golden Age
Part 3: The Path of Reason
Part 4: The Mystic Tide
Part 5: Epilogue

In Light of Nalanda
What was ancient Nalanda University like? Here is a portrait based on the accounts of Chinese scholars of 7th century CE and a recent personal visit.

Asian Food for Thought
India and China offer a striking illustration of the vast range and malleability of the human palate, and the power of ideas in shaping it.

Marco Polo's India
Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo spent a few months in India ... his famous book, The Travels, contains a rich social portrait of India that still resonates with us today.

The Eichmann Within
Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem documents the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi nabbed by the Israeli secret police in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem, where he was tried and executed.

What Confucius Said
No person has left a deeper mark on Chinese culture than Confucius, who lived 2500 years ago in an age of social turmoil.

Bindra, the Silent Killer
I can't remember the last time India's Olympic record bothered me. I suspect this is because Olympic medals do not correlate with values I admire in a society.

Homosexuality in India
"We don't have any," is the classic Indian response to homosexuality in India. Curiously, Indians say this even when they know of and tolerate homosexual acts in their communities.

Indigenous Aryans?
Few topics in ancient history are as disputed today as the origins of the Indo-Aryans in ancient India.

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.

On Diversity
Diversity is a formidable bulwark against political and religious fundamentalism. It challenges and inspires, and helps create more vibrant art, music, and literature.

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
There is 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, it's actually not a joke.

Science, Religion, Philosophy

The Dearth of Artificial Intelligence
Despite big advances in computing—for example, today’s supercomputers are ten million times faster than those of the early 90s—AI has fallen woefully short of its ambition and hype.Why is AI in such a braindead state?

Being Liberal in a Plural World
In the absence of a consensus on the ‘truly universal’ values of liberalism, and hence rights—whether on empirical or practical grounds—how is a liberal to act in the world?

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.

Atheistic Materialism in Ancient India
It comes as a surprise to many that in ancient "spiritual" India, atheistic materialism was a major force to reckon with, led by the Carvakas who predate even the Buddhists.

On Knowledge Without Wisdom
Philosophy today is not how the Greeks understood it, as the love of wisdom. It now paves the way for the acquisition of theoretical knowledge as an end in itself.

Candles in the Dark?
Beyond Belief, an annual symposium that seeks to promote the constituency of reason in society, was held this year from 3-6 October 2008 in La Jolla, CA.

The Social Virus of Terrorism
The term "social virus" is often used to describe modern terrorism; it afflicts the social body indiscriminately and arises out of ill-defined or unaddressable grievances.

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".

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. Here are my provisional thoughts on what being spiritual means to me.

A Mousetrap for Metaphysics
Is it possible to reduce the vast range of humankind's metaphysical responses down to a few distilled outlooks that have shaped (and continue to shape) human culture?

Servitors of Divine Consciousness
Auroville aspires to be "a universal town where men and women of all countries are able to live in peace and harmony, above all creeds, all politics, and nationalities."

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 is a mischievous monkey with human traits.

Musings

Reporting from Home
I'm a non-resident Indian (NRI). I recently thought of recording my view of the pros and cons of living in India after 15 years in the West.

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?

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 Transpantaneira.

Signore, Speak English?
In 1995, 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.

Dholavira: A Harappan Metropolis
The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F.

A Day Trip to My Alma Mater
I studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Sixteen years after graduation, I visited it again to confront some awkward truths.

Economics and Geopolitics

America, the Cold War, and the Taliban
The roots of transnational Islamic terrorism lie not so much in culture and the Qur’an as in politics and the conduct of the Cold War in Afghanistan.

On Credit Default Swaps
Warren Buffet has called credit default swaps the "financial weapons of mass destruction", others call them "the dark matter" of the financial universe.

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".

Fiction & Poetry

The Man in the BMW
On their way to China Town, they pass an area with red curtained massage parlors and hookers pacing the streets in tight clothes. They stop at a red light behind a BMW. A hooker approaches its curbside window, talks to the driver, and hops in.

A Sales Conference
On Sunday evening, Ved flies to Palm Springs, California, to represent his product at Omnicon’s annual sales conference. More than a thousand of his coworkers from scores of countries will attend the three-day event.

Putty in Her Hands
Sasha calls on Saturday afternoon, ‘Are you free?’ Sasha is a Russian escort, 28, slim, dark-haired, with dreamy green eyes.

The Death of a Salesman
Yes, I too had a youthful phase—from about 18 to 27—when I wrote poems.