Book review: Amitav Ghosh's latest, 'Gun Island'
The master does it again: but this time, it is not only a story of migration, it is a story of why and how there are migrations.
Read MoreTag: History
No one in the world is illegal
The past can be truly seductive, despite all the evidence to the contrary and the fact that no one has ever returned from it. That is why I have always been suspicious of nostalgia: it always sprouts in the present, no matter when it was sown from the seeds of what people prefer to remember, and never from the dead seeds of what they prefer to forget.
Read MoreBook review: “The Maze” by Panos Karnezis
More than its reviews, it was the novel’s setting just after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) — in which a remaining and lost Greek regiment wandered the deserts of Anatolia to find the sea — that sparked my curiosity to read Panos Karnezis’s, The Maze. Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong and A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Story are […]
Read MoreGentrification: problem or progress?
I suspect that whomever can answer that question of whether gentrification is progress or problem shall answer all questions, because it reverts to a much more profound human challenge.
Read MoreThe Portals of Chandni Chowk
According to the Law that goes by many names, including Ganesha, every doorway requires something to be left behind and something new to be accepted. This is the human dilemma, and it is one that is not getting any easier as there are ever more of us in this world, all unsatisfied, desiring progress and […]
Read MoreLooking through the Chagall Windows
Properly called the America Windows, they are what everyone in Chicago has called the Chagall Windows for as long as I can remember, and I was born some years before they were installed in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977. A tribute to a city and a nation from the great Russian-French-Jewish artist and […]
Read MoreChicago stories
The skyline might have changed. Millennium Park certainly had not existed. But there still so many things I remember about my hometown, even after more than twenty years abroad. Returning awakens the memories of how the summertime smells of cut grass and coming rain. Pizza. Those cement sidewalk stamps at the corners just before the […]
Read MoreBook review: “Ema, the Captive” by César Aira
Argentina, 1800s. A nubile captive, together with her infant child, are government prisoners, taken on long caravan as part of the supplies needed at the military outpost of a sinister colonial world deprived of women. It is just the beginning of the adventurous captivity of Ema, a “white” woman of unknown origins who is bartered […]
Read MoreCooking Mexican in India
The games continued, unfolding the birth of a new cuisine, in much the same way our ancestors had done on different continents.
Read Morethe 4th of July
Since I do not think there is anything to be gained by believing in mere coincidence, this book cover staring at me from my shelf this morning of the 4th of July was all the more startling. The words of Swami’s intro to the classic Ātmabodha by Śri Śankara reminded me that democracy isn’t just […]
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