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 Politics of God
In response to 9/11 and the alarming role of evangelical Christianity in US politics, a host of loud atheistic voices have emerged ...
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...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
On Patriotism
Recent years have seen a surge in “patriotic feeling” across the US. One expression of this
is the flag, which is now routinely seen on cars, shop fronts, ...
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, ...
The Idea of India
A friend of mine recently asked me: How did Indians themselves refer to India during the
Raj? Did they call it "India"? I mean back then, it had ...
Respecting the Holocaust
The UN General Assembly recently adopted by consensus a resolution condemning the denial of
the Holocaust. This US sponsored resolution "urges all member states ...
The True Cost of Our Gadgets
The next time we whip out our Blackberries, cell phones, gaming consoles, iPods, and
laptops, we would do well to remember their true cost, beyond what we paid ...
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" ...
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? ...
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 ...
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,...
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?’...
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, and 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 reduce the ...
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? Who decides what is art and what is only a visually appealing painting, photograph, or sculpture? ...
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 ...
Rediscovering Golem
On the twentieth day of the month of Adar, in the year five thousand three hundred and forty after the creation of the world, ...