Author: manuscrypts

  • The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

    Orlando Figes

    In The Europeans, a cultural snapshot of nineteenth-century Europe serves as the backdrop for the intertwined lives of three differently remarkable people – Pauline Viardot, her husband Louis, and the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The result is the origin story of what is called ‘European culture’. During their lifetime and immediately after, the continent, for long fractured by language, politics, and geography, slowly began to imagine itself as a shared cultural space with a taste graph that extended across music, literature, art, travel, and performance.

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  • Baan Phad Thai

    Once all the FOMO rush had piped down, Baan Phad Thai proved to be fairly easy to reserve. Judging from the crowd, it’d be a good idea not to attempt a casual walk-in on weekend nights.

    Baan Phad Thai

    Yep, we arrived early! The ambience somehow manages to be just the right amount of buzzy while retaining a calm even when the place is full. If there’s wood and wicker, I’m already sold!

    Baan Phad Thai
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  • Mother Mary Comes to Me

    Arundhati Roy

    I have been an unabashed fan of whatever Arundhati Roy writes, and Mother Mary Comes to Me is no exception. This is a memoir, but I’d say it’s her love letter to her mother, and to some extent, others whom she loves, including characters in her works of fiction. It is also very Arundhati Roy – poignant and visceral to the point of tear-jerking, and yet funny – sometimes with wit – both the scathing and irreverent as well as the loving kind, and sometimes with the inherent hilarity of situations.

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  • Uncertainty’s Principles

    Though I have approached the subject in many ways, the immediate inspiration was the title of this post – The Allergy to Uncertainty. As is my wont, I projected it onto myself, and began (over?)analysing. 😀

    Reasons & Seasons

    Why do I have the allergy? At one level, I could answer that I am (at least partly) a product of my past. I think I had a lot of uncertainty in my formative years – change of schools and friends, change of homes, change of what I’d call a security system. And as a child, I think certainty in the context of academic/ singing/ quizzing results brought validation and less punishment. It created the “false self” constructed to survive childhood – something I learned from this excellent book.

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  • The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

    by Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber

    ‘The Case Against Reality’ was among my favourite books last year. As almost an aside somewhere, it goes, ‘we did not evolve our ability to reason in order to pursue the truth. We evolved it as a tool of social persuasion.‘ Quite a statement to make, and I was intrigued. The Enigma of Reason expands on this, and with the rigour of scientific reasoning (no pun intended) has me quite convinced.

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