Some Recent Reading Recommendations
ChrestomatherElena Ferrante: The Days of Abandonment (Penguin, 2005): A novel of extraordinary power, written in a voice that is at once lucid and half-crazed with rage; the words explode…
Yangon’s ‘Kachin Land Traditional Restaurant’
The Jing Hpaw Myay Restaurant (or Kachin Land Traditional Restaurant) is in Sanchaung Township, close to the Myay Ni Ghone neighbourhood of…
Gandhi urged to make common cause with China on opium
My old friend, Ramachandra Guha, was kind enough to send me a copy of a letter that he found in Correspondence File No. 19 of the Gandhi Papers in…
Sleepwalking towards Disaster
Over the last couple of decades, largely because of changes in technologies of communication, the political sphere has become larger and more intrusive than ever before. The digital media…
Fractal buckwheat
As I've written elsewhere, what daffodils were to V.S. Naipaul, frangipanis were to me: As a child, while reading 'The Mutiny on the Bounty' I'd been fascinated by the…
Kolkata’s Once and Future Chinatown
Breakfast at the Sunday morning market in Chinatown is an old tradition in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Visitors have to be up early because the market's hours…
Flood of Fire cover
. . It is 1839 and tension has been rapidly mounting between China and British India following the crackdown on opium smuggling by Beijing. With no resolution in sight, the…
Two responses to ‘Parallel Journeys’
I received many interesting responses to my post on Turkey's experience of AKP rule and its portents for India under the BJP. Two that were particularly instructive came…
Parallel Journeys? Turkey’s experience of AKP rule and its portents for India under the BJP
1. Back in March 2013, when I received and accepted an invitation to visit Bogazici University, I did not for a moment imagine that my arrival in Turkey would…
Remembering the past: an unfinished conversation
Last week my Twitter feed led me to a thought-provoking piece by Raghu Karnad on Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.…