Thirty letters in my name

The debate about religion and its role in society is a contentious one these days with theories about clashing civilizations flying thick an...

I am currently in Bangalore for two weeks with my parents, and am lazing around and enjoying the food, the cricket, the excellent weather in...

The landscape of the Great Plains , the swathe of prairie that runs through the middle of the United States, is quite special. While traveli...

The Ishango bone was found in the 1950s, in a fishing village on the Congo-Uganda border and dates to around 20,000-30,000 BC. It is an exh...

Last year, when I first went to the international foods store here in Rochester , I spotted, at the end of the main aisle, an array of glas...

I am fascinated by the beautiful terracotta sculptures of the Nigerian Nok culture , which date back to 500 B.C. These sculptures were unea...

I am currently reading Martin Meredith’s The fate of Africa , and the first chapter, The Gold Coast Experiment, is about how Ghana became th...

This is my second post on Fyodor Dostoevsky ; the first one is here . One of the striking features of Dostoevsky’s work is how passionate an...

From the top of Fourviere hill of the French city of Lyon - the second largest metropolitan area in the country - it is possible see the s...

Throughout his massive, extensively researched historical work, India after Gandhi , Ramachandra Guha quotes Western doomsayers, who, befor...

in the next few weeks: a review of Ramachandra Guha ’s India after Gandhi: The history of the world’s largest democracy ; a note about the h...

Just over five hundred years ago, before the European colonization of the Americas, tomatoes , potatoes and chilies , the widely used veget...

The Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie writes of how her urge tell the truth through fiction developed while living under Zia Ul-Haq ’s dicta...

My blog turns two this July – July 21st to be exact (here’s my first post ), but since I won’t be around then, I’ve decided to celebrate ear...

In the last few years, I’ve been fascinated by how ideas that originate in one place diffuse and reach other cultures, and how these receivi...

I recently finished writing a fairly long travel essay (8000 words) about the Navajos of the southwestern United States. It is based mostly...

While traveling in Washington DC for a few days last week, I attended an event at the National Archives , where short clips from different d...

I’ve been reading Dostoevsky for the last month and a half. I finished Crime and Punishment , and am currently reading The Idiot . This post...

Via an old post of Jai Arjun ’s (I can’t locate it now), I came across this link that lists some of the great first lines of novels - you...

Here’s something old from my attic -- one of my many attempts at fiction that I never thought would see the light of day. Perhaps it still s...