I was fortunate enough, a week ago, to moderate two discussions that dealt with works of journalism. The first, one-on-one with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, focused on his book The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, in a session titled (much to Remnick’s dismay) “The Disappointment of Obama.” The second, featuring [...]
I have been writing a series of columns, titled The Long View, for the New York Times’ India Ink blog. The Long View examines Indian current events through the telephoto lens of history, relying on primary sources to establish context and precedent for many of today’s news. (This would be a good place to say: [...]
For Caravan, I tracked down real-estate SMSes for the better part of a month, discovering the odd, odd properties that lay at the other end of the trail of spam: It would have been sheer cussedness to not be entranced by the Golf Estate sample unit. A scale model of the entire layout showed clumps [...]
In the New York Times, my review of Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: Shrewdly, Siddhartha Deb’s “The Beautiful and the Damned” avoids reaching for this category altogether and is very much the finer book for it. Deb, the author of two novels and an associate professor at the New School, borrows his title [...]
A modified version of this appeared in the August-September issue of Conde Nast Traveller India To be a really good angler, one must tell really good stories about angling. Sunny Jind is among the best. Witness, for instance, his story of how an ex-girlfriend from America tracked him down online after 38 years, and flew [...]
To bring this blog up to speed, links to a few pieces I’ve written over the past couple of months: In Mint Lounge, thoughts on the wonderful Aaranya Kaandam and its neo-noir. In The National, an elegy to the departed — and not terribly missed! — safari suit. On FirstPost.com, trying to figure out why [...]
More than a month ago, Sunil Sethi interviewed me for his NDTV show “Just Books,” but I understand the episode aired only last weekend. As is usually the case with most things on television, I missed the actual broadcast. Here, though, is the episode of “Just Books” where Following Fish was featured. My segment starts [...]
A year or so ago, I wrote a feature for Mint on a Mumbai-based firm of behaviour architects who were starting to use the lessons of cognitive neuroscience to bring down the number of track-trespassing deaths in the city. They now have many months’ worth of data, and I wrote about the success of this [...]
In Open this week, a review of Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects — a book that is exactly what its title promises: There’s no better way to illustrate MacGregor’s approach than with the example of the Rosetta Stone, object number 33 on his list of 100. The Rosetta Stone is [...]