| Thinking out of the cage | 21-NOV-09 |
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| Admittedly, Nehru was there at the start of things, the end of an age, the awakening of a nation, that tryst with destiny. So he and others of his generation were better placed than we are to think laterally, to explore all of history for models towards which to incline the path of our future. He also spent years in prison, an enforced separation from the bustle and fire of the freedom movement which enabled him to look beyond the constrained present to the past and future, all in the service of his country. In other words, he used his time in prison to think big for India. |
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| Epis-too-late | 14-NOV-09 |
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| When was the last time you wrote a letter? A real letter, in your own hand? Not since boarding school, in my case — although there was one, just for fun, sent to a friend last year. It took 10 days to reach Mumbai. If I become famous in my declining years, even if only by mistake, that friend will have a sample of my mind circa 2008 to offer my biographers. |
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| Comic history | 31-OCT-09 |
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| I think of Asterix as a comic version of wily Odysseus,” says the brilliant translator Anthea Bell of the subject of her best-known work, the Gaulish warrior whose village, forever frozen in 50 BCE, still holds out against Julius Caesar’s Roman legions. Frankly JC doesn’t have a chance of completing his conquest of Gaul so long as Asterix and the rest of the villagers can count on the magic potion brewed by the druid Getafix, which gives them supernatural strength. |
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| Vidal, withal | 24-OCT-09 |
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| A year or two ago Gore Vidal was expected at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and was scheduled to make one appearance in Delhi. I was all ready to arrive early and stick my hand out to have it shaken by the master. There must have been many others with similar aspirations. But in the event Gore cancelled his trip to India. |
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| Energy sleuth | 17-OCT-09 |
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| The scene is New York City in 2025. Henry Poiret, a former FBI scientist, is a specialist in environmental balance sheets who tracks down energy wasters of all kinds for his clients. For the very first time, he allows a journalist to watch him at work — and to get an inside glimpse of his new lab. |
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| Pulp fiction | 10-OCT-09 |
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| Above the pulp-line — but the exact boundaries are impossible to draw — lies the world of erotica, of sexual writing with literary pretensions or genuine claims,” writes George Steiner in Language and Silence, a collection of his essays dating from the 1950s and 1960s. “This world is much larger than is commonly realized.” (Below the pulp-line, of course, is plain pornography. |
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| Hello, China | 03-OCT-09 |
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| The People’s Republic of China marked its 60th birthday with a show of manpower. It was as spectacular and heartless as the opening ceremony of the last Olympics. These extravaganzas may be doing the nation a disservice abroad, by reinforcing stereotypes of the Chinese as obedient, mass-produced, and invisible as individuals; collectively, able to achieve feats of engineering and display; separately, merely well trained. What an appalling public relations burden to carry! At least India and Indians are defined in the foreign imagination by chaos, layers and infinite variety, which seems somehow more human and forgivable. |
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| Kabir says | 26-SEP-09 |
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| So the SMSes have started again: 2/3/4 bedroom apartments 10 minutes from here or there, from this or that reputed builder, booking amount 10 per cent, call this number. Last chance, don’t miss, book now. Also the full-page ads: nondescript apartment towers rooted in a positively Middle Eastern abundance of palm trees, paths and waterways, all surrounded by improbable oceans of virgin green. And on the TV: ads for the flat-screen TV that will turn your house into a home. |
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| Mountain lines | 19-SEP-09 |
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| Denied the chance, by a beady-eyed weight-watching travel friend, to carry with me into the heights of Uttarakhand Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, I revenged myself by purchasing, at the highest (and wettest) place on our itinerary, a copy of Bill Aitken’s Touching upon the Himalaya: Excursions and Enquiries (Indus, 2004). Now that I am back at sweat level in Delhi and have actually read the Goethe, I realise that Young Werther would have made poor company. |
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| Prefaces | 12-SEP-09 |
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| My fellow citizens! Lend me your ears. Of course, you have been doing that for years, but indulge me a little longer. I may have retired after serving as Chief Minister for two terms, but my political life, as is well known, started far from the capital. I owe my initiation into politics, as well as my writing life, to my mentor, M--------ji, a humble but public-spirited man. Few of you, dear readers, will know that I kept a journal throughout my career in public life. I recorded in it some of the innumerable amusing, enlightening, shocking and also routine events and situations in which I and my colleagues found ourselves. Fear not, dear colleagues, I have not selected stories to cause scandals or dismay friends, but to entertain and, I hope, educate ordinary readers. Each anecdote stands alone, but together I believe they convey a picture of the great excitements and responsibilities of a political life...
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| Endless freedom | 29-AUG-09 |
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| The latest Granta (#107) contains a terrifying essay by the writer Rana Dasgupta (of Tokyo Cancelled and Solo). It’s title is “Capital Gains”, and it is about Delhi’s new moneyed elite. |
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| Seeing Suu Kyi | 22-AUG-09 |
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| Amitav Ghosh met Aung San Suu Kyi twice in 1995-96, while he was “At Large in Burma” researching the essay of that title he wrote for the New Yorker. (It later became part of his excellent book of narrative reportage, Dancing in Cambodia, At Large in Burma.) About seven months elapsed between the two meetings. Ghosh spent that time meeting dissidents; he also travelled to the Thai border in the east, to visit the Karenni, a minority ethnic group fighting a guerrilla war in its native forests against the Burmese army. |
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| High drama | 15-AUG-09 |
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| Flying home to Delhi this week from the north-east, the window next my seat revealed a tremendous drama being staged against the backdrop of the Himalayas. The mountains, from Bagdogra to Guwahati, were invisible behind the cluster of actors — that is, the clouds, from low, cottony stratus to high, wispy cirrus, all overshadowed by the towering few cumulonimbi. They put up an awe-inspiring show, these monsoon clouds piled up and up against the slopes, and scattered about on the floor of the atmosphere far below. |
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| Urban legends | 08-AUG-09 |
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| No matter how much our cities have changed in the last two decades, we haven’t yet had more than the faintest foretaste of the revolution to come. I don’t mean mass social unrest; rather, a significant reshaping of our view of the urban environment. |
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| Being sea-sure | 01-AUG-09 |
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| Three things that happened recently are a reminder of how much we still are a land-bound civilisation. The Indian navy floated its first nuclear sub. Lionel Casson, a well-known historian who wrote books on ancient mariners, shipping and sea warfare, died in New York. And I read a not very good adventure novel called The Tiger Warrior, by a Canadian marine archaeologist named David Gibbins. |
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Content Guide
