A pencil mark from the long tail. Browse the hand-chosen subjects for broader paths through the book.
keep reading — 1 min ↗"To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people." [1, 2]
I often tell my friends that I'm white at heart because I know far more about American and European history than Indian history, and it's a shameful fact that I'm working to fix. One of the books I bought a while ago was Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, which I hadn't got around to reading. I finally picked it…
keep reading — 1 min ↗keep reading — 3 min ↗t the end of the 1980s, a young woman purchased a slightly damaged print by the 19th century painter and printmaker Raja Ravi Varma for Rs 500. “I remember saying ‘this is a very beautiful image’,” she recalled later. “I’d never seen anything like it... I felt like looking out for more.” Given Ravi Varma’s status as a pioneer of mass produced imagery in India, it was a fitting introduction. In the following decades,…
keep reading — 1 min ↗Some months later, I joined a book club. Run by Venkatesh Rao, this year’s edition focuses on a simple idea that goes a long way: Maybe grand historical paradigms like modernity and postmodernity are not suddenly emerging monoliths. Instead we might see them as “history machines” consisting of components that developed on their own for a long time, before all of a sudden, things fall into place together, causing shock and…