2 and 2 are five

“Inkless Republic”   I’ve met gods in secondhand bookstores, watched their sermons drown in footnotes and dew. V.S. Naipaul whispered, “Ruins aren’t history, they’re warnings.” Salman Rushdie lit incense over graveyards of exiled truths. Charles Dickens drank tea with beggars and barons, while Edward Gibbon muttered, “Empires rot from the spine.” Barack Obama, tired but intact, said, “Hope’s a quiet protest, not a campaign.” Friedrich Nietzsche screamed: “Live first. Then dare to think.” Oscar Wilde smirked: “But dress your wounds in wit.” Bertolt Brecht painted famine in shadows and bread, and P.G. Wodehouse wrote laughter like rebellion in bed. Bertrand Russell sat cross-legged, scribbling doubt like scripture. Christopher Hitchens flung gin at God and Oxford. Winston Churchill smoked history into speeches, Shashi Tharoor rewrote it in postcolonial rhythm. Edward Said hummed exile into every verse. Michel Foucault traced power through veins of silence. William Shakespeare stared ...

A Journey through Modern Historical Non-Fiction: Four Perspectives on India and the World. In the past four months, my intellectual journey has been profoundly enriched by four seminal works of historical non-fiction. Each book, in its own distinctive way, engages with the long arc of India’s history, culture, politics, and place in the global order. Though they differ in style, scope, and sensibility, together they form a powerful mosaic of India’s past, present, and future. Here is a reflection on each. 1 . The Golden Road by William Dalrymple William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road is an exemplary work of historical non-fiction, combining the rigour of archival research with the narrative elegance of a master storyteller. To borrow Maya Jasanoff’s apt description:   Dalrymple researches like a historian, thinks like an anthropologist, and writes like a novelist. In The Golden Road, Dalrymple explores the intricate web of connections that linked India to the wider world...

MIYAZAKI, SATIRE, AND THE DEATH OF THE ARTIST. Congratulations, humanity! we have finally outdone ourselves. progress! That magnificent locomotive of human ingenuity, now barrelling toward a future where art is no longer a labor of love, but a neatly arranged sequence of algorithmic probabilities. What a relief! No more agonizing over composition, no more excruciating brushstrokes just cold, unfeeling computation assembling pixels in a manner that pleases the untrained eye . The very essence of efficiency, some might say. But efficiency has never been the bedfellow of beauty. For centuries, art was a dialogue between the creator and the medium, between the work and the world, between the audience and the ineffable. It was an act of defiance against time itself, a refusal to let fleeting moments slip into oblivion without first being rendered in pigment or prose. And now? Now it is a product of mathematical convenience, a lifeless simulacrum that mimics aesthetic grandeur while posses...

 The River That Remembers: Ganga and the Theatre of Civilization. Somewhere in the cold Himalayan heights, where glaciers sigh and time slows to the sound of melting ice, the Ganga is born. But to call it a river would be an injustice, a modern triviality. The Ganga is not water; it is a witness. It has seen emperors and ascetics, revolutionaries and romantics, sinners and saints, all gathered at its banks, washing their pasts away, praying for futures that may never come. The Ganga is the ultimate paradox—a river and a goddess, a lifeline and a destroyer, a sacred entity and an ecological disaster. It carries the weight of civilizations, but not without sarcasm. If rivers had a sense of humor, the Ganga would smirk at the audacity of those who believe they can control it. A River, A Mother, A Historian. In India, the Ganga is not just a river; it is a mother. Ganga Maiya, they call her—a phrase that rolls off tongues from the ghats of Banaras to the deltas of Bengal. But what kin...

God was once an architect, then a legislator, then a poet. Now, perhaps, a malfunctioning algorithm. Or maybe, as Terry Eagleton once said, “God does not exist, but He is no mere fiction.” Maybe God is a draft, constantly revised, never quite finished. Or maybe He is a revolution, not a ruler. For centuries, God was sovereignty a king in the sky, a divine right to rule, the scaffolding for power structures that held civilization together. From Augustine’s City of God to Hobbes’ Leviathan, belief was order, and order was control. But then came the cracks Nietzsche’s hammer, Marx’s dialectic, Freud’s subconscious. God fell, or rather, was dethroned. The churches stood, but the world turned secular, modern, digital, postmodern. Yet, even in His absence, He evolved. Now, we no longer argue whether He exists. We argue over His function. If capitalism had a God, it would be a stock market ticker divine providence reduced to profit margins. If democracy had a God, it would be the ballot box a...

 I’m 20. The Algorithm is Still Loading. I am 20. Suspended between past and future, a half-formed hypothesis waiting for proof. In another decade, I might be a father—wild, isn’t it? The idea that in ten years, I might be the one answering questions instead of asking them. But what do I know? I still haven’t figured out whether I want to be the father or the child. At 10, I had no such existential dilemmas. I was reckless in the best way possible—curious, honest, mischievous. I wasn’t weighed down by overanalysis, responsibility, or the slow realization that time is running out. Fear, then, was simple: the dark corner of my room, the possibility of losing a Pokémon battle, or the thought that the ice cream truck might run out before I got there. Now, fear is abstract, omnipresent. It’s the economy, it’s the job market, it’s am I making the right choices? At 10, I used to sit with my father, running my fingers over geography maps, lost in the wonder of places I had never seen. We t...

  Anthem for the Silent Savior If you think They cannot save themselves, Then save them Without saying so. And as you save them, You may find It was never them That needed saving. Without saying so. -V.U