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" ..