Samanth Subramanian We visited Lanka in 2010, just after the war had ended. Reading this book, and on hindsight, I think we underestimated the seriousness of what the country had gone through. I remember the undercurrent of bitterness in a conversation I overheard while sitting in a Colombo cafe. Directed at Rajapaksa, whose smiles beamed […]
David Brooks The concept of the book is something I could easily relate to. In fact, it reminded me of a favourite concept from the Mahabharata – Jaya and Vijaya. Vijaya is victory over others, and Jaya is victory over self. In this book, the author writes about two sides of our nature – one […]
Alain de Botton “Helping us live our lives” is the purpose of philosophy, says the blurb on the book cover, attributed to Independent. I vaguely remember Plato saying that the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die, but let’s assume that Independent is talking about the purpose of philosophy in the context […]
Rana Dasgupta Much has been written about the Maximum City – fiction and non fiction – and it continues to be the muse of many authors. But other than Dalrymple’s City of Djinns, I have not really read a book on Delhi. Add to that Rana Dasgupta’s superb play on the title itself – Capital […]
David Passiak I came across this book thanks to an article on the web that quoted a paragraph from this book. The paragraph comes pretty late in the book and deals with the ‘cycles of birth and death’ tenet in Hinduism. It is indeed one of the several bright sparks in the book. Let’s start […]