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, ...
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 United States is but one example. What was done to the natives of Africa is no less barbarous. The British, the French and the Germans...
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. Examples include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha. But though India ...
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 situates the work in a larger context and challenges us to read more closely and to demand more from art....
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 ...
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...
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, ...
Al-Farabi, Medieval Islamic Philosopher
During the so-called golden age of Islam in tenth-century Baghdad, Muslim intellectuals widely referred to Aristotle as the "First Teacher". The man they held second only....
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 ....
Democracy in Athens
The liberal-popular and the conservative-aristocratic emerged as the two dominant factions in Athenian democracy . The spirit of the agon (competition), fame, glory.....
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. The Great....
On Personal Responsibility
The modern age has overseen a great expansion of our rights. Global disparities remain but there is no dearth of people who believe that rights are a good thing.....
The Namesake
Mira Nair's movie packs in far more universal appeal than Jhumpa Lahiri's book. Rather than the movie's fidelity
to the book, my main basis of comparison ...
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....
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 ...
The Oldest Conflict of All
Here is a debate between Professor Mansfield, author of the recent controversial study, Manliness, and Professor Kipnis, author of a similarly controversial new book, The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability.
The Romance of the Nation-State
A thought-provoking and often amusing lecture by Ashis Nandy, prominent Indian political psychologist and social philosopher.
