The book was very unlike the historical texts produced at the time. Only a few years earlier, the Italian school of historiography—called Microstoria (or microhistory)—had emerged as a counter to the macroscopic and thickly quantitative Annales school, led by Fernand Braudel during the mid-1950s and 1970s.[1] Annales school told big stories, such as how capitalism developed in historical epochs.

Unlike Macrohistory and its long-term social historiography, microhistory focuses on small events—quotidian and banal. Its proponents focused on the minute analysis of documentation tied to historical individuals and shifted their focus from telling big stories to understanding how small things told their own histories.

In this sense, Richard Tristano wrote: Microhistorians focused on the “thick description” of little things of “little people” or “lost people” and sought to interpret them in the context of social discourse. It is, in a sense, close to the subaltern studies that focus on the “history from below".

Against this backdrop, The Cheese and the Worms tells the story of ideas and attitudes of a sixteenth-century miller (among other things he did), Domenico Scandella, or as he was also called, Menocchio, in the Friulian village close to Montereale in Italy. Menocchio was put on trial for heretical ideas (that reject Christian values) by the Italian Inquisition.

In Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliance, the book takes us to Menocchio’s world. His heresy. The rhetorical and often contradictory claims he would make about Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Church. Ginzburg uses inquisition files and documents, meticulously accounting for the arguments the miller made before judges.

Inquisition documents provide us with a sense of the kinds of ideas that floated around, how they were banished, and what punishments were inscribed onto the ordinary people.

Menocchio, in the first inquisition trial, lashed out at priests and monks: “You priests and monks, you too want to know more than God, and you are like the devil, and you want to become gods on earth, and know as much as God, following in the footsteps of the devil. In fact, the more one thinks he knows, the less he knows”.

About marriage: “God did not establish it, men did. Formerly a man and a woman would exchange vows, and this sufficed; later these human inventions followed”.

Menocchio had elsewhere claimed that the Virgin Mary was no virgin, and it was humanly impossible for her to be a virgin. In another encounter, Menocchio spoke of Jesus being a human just like every other human—and that there was no way he could be crucified if he was God.

When pressed about who God is, he pointed at once to something called the Holy Spirit. In another instance, he backtracked, claiming everything as God—the air, water, earth, and fire. And later on, again, he suggested that it is only air, water, and earth—and not fire. But, most of all, he spoke of a certain something called a “new world” and the “new way of life”.

In Menocchio, we see an inordinate individual whose views wholly differ from those of others in Friuli. Importantly, whenever asked where he got these crazy ideas from, Menocchio brandished their originality—as them being made up in his head, or the devil put them in his head. He once declared: “Sir, I have never met anyone who holds these opinions; my opinions came out of my own head”.[5]

But what was Menocchio’s worldview? Menocchio said: “In the beginning this world was nothing, and that it was thrashed by the water of the sea like foam, and it curdled like a cheese, from which later great multitudes of worms were born, and these worms became men, of whom the most powerful and wisest was God, to whom the others rendered obedience…”

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This was pure blasphemy in the world in which Menocchio existed. But he reasoned: “To blaspheme is not sinful ‘because it only hurts oneself and not one’s neighbour, just as if I have a cloak and tear it, I injure only myself and no one else, and I believe that he who does no harm to his neighbour does not commit sin; and because we are all children of God, if we do not hurt one another, as for example, if a father has several children, and one of them says ‘damn my father,’ the father may forgive him, but if this child breaks the head of someone else’s child he cannot pardon him so easily if he does not pay: therefore have I said it is not sinful to blaspheme because it does not hurt anyone”.

After the first trial, Menocchio was clearly found guilty of blasphemy and was imprisoned. But, after two years and after an illustrious mercy letter was dispatched to the Inquisition officers, he was let go. In the letter, he noted that he was poor and weak and could not afford to remain in the dark cell he was put in, and that since he had fully repented, he should be let go.

Ginzburg notes, quite meticulously, all the rambles and all the contradictions that flow from the mouth of Menocchio throughout his life.

His favourite son dies soon after. And very soon, in a few years, Menocchio goes back to his old habits: to blaspheme (with caution). Again, Menocchio was found guilty and imprisoned. But, ultimately, with Pope’s interest in the case, he was put to death later on.

What is interesting in Ginzburg’s account of Menocchio is how the ideas of the Reformation—along with print culture—had enabled the protagonist to create an absurd worldview. Although Menocchio’s ideas were not wholly from one book or many books, they certainly represented the ways in which he selected texts, read them, nitpicked terms, and created coherence in them.

It is this attempt, one of the earliest of its kind, that makes Carlo Ginzburg’s history compelling. Ginzburg’s characters are not elite—but ordinary people—in their everyday lives, thinking, reading, writing, and preaching to each other.

As a personal aside, I began thinking about this book in connection with my own research on postcolonial societies. It gave me things to think about, introduced me to a bit of history (that I was oblivious to), and helped me structure logic for my research.

Ginzburg keeps you engaged all throughout.

Carlo Ginzburg’s lucid writing—in the sense of everyday speech-like English—makes it all the more accessible to those who wish to read it like a text or a storybook. Importantly, he does not assert his claims but rather gently allows us to think with him. So, there are so many ‘maybe’ statements in this text.

In essence, this book is worth reading for anyone who wants to understand how to tell a story that does not put one to sleep. I hope to come back to this book again.

References:

Carlo Ginzburg, John Tedeschi, and Anne C. Tedeschi, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1993): 10–35.

Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Penguin, 1992), 10.

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But the twenty-first century is a strange time for dictators. Unlike in the past century, today’s dictators have ditched their military uniforms for Western suits, seldom use military force, refrain from using violence, do not execute political opponents in football stadiums, and even permit opposition parties and hold regular elections. Most of these dictators today have co-opted democratic structures to establish rule by popularity and pomp. These new dictators are known as “spin dictators”.

In Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21^st Century, Political Scientists Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman outline “spin dictatorship” as the new form of dictatorship that foregoes violence and instead relies on subtle acts of popularity and propaganda as opposed to the classic “fear dictatorships” that relied on violent terror to enforce societal order.

Unlike earlier fear dictators who used rule by fear as a standard for governance, present-day dictators use rule by deception. Unlike the fear dictators who used direct, overt, and violent strategies, spin dictators are indirect, covert, and nonviolent. While propaganda was a tool that effectively instituted fear and repression in the classic dictatorship, spin dictators use propaganda to show their competence and effectiveness in governance. They tell stories of how they have brought prosperity, how their rule has spurred economic growth, and how, without their rule, the country would collapse into oblivion.

In essence, spin dictators deceive people into compliance and support by spinning facts and beliefs about the world. And spin dictatorship builds on the fiction that “the dictator is a competent, benevolent democrat”.

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Political scientists have shown us that most autocracies have held elections in recent years.  Based on a detailed study of over 35 cases across societies in their influential book on competitive authoritarianism, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have further shown that these elections are not wholly unfree and that, sometimes, opposition party candidates win seats. Guriev and Treisman build on these ideas and suggest an overarching logic to the spin dictatorship.

The early manifestations of the spin dictatorship were tried and tested in Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian model did not endorse violent repression. Lee even considered violence as a failure of governance. Rather than relying on violent repression, Lee’s approach placed subtle restrictions. In this instance, a newspaper risked having its circulation capped for offending the government. Protests were allowed only with a license and a police permit. Opposition leaders attended parliaments, but false defamation cases could bankrupt them.

After Lee, his successors, Goh Chok Tong (1981–2003) and Lee Hsien Loong (2004–), embraced the existing spin model. Moreover, Lee’s model had already spread across Asia and Europe, where rulers were already using libel and defamation lawsuits to harass journalists and opposition leaders.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, with ruling elites substituting the old governance model with new ones, Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev embraced Lee’s approach.

In contrast to the Stalinist propaganda of the USSR, Nazarbayev adopted “promise-packed speeches”, much like a national CEO or country manager, introducing new objectives and initiatives like ‘Kazakhstan 2030’, and ‘100 Concrete Steps to Implement Five Institutional Reforms’. Subtle propaganda was used in each case to demonstrate that the leader was making a positive impact on people’s lives and performing well.

For spin dictators to stay in power, popularity is crucial. These autocrats carefully curate approval ratings. To sustain their approval ratings, they buy off media outlets, co-opt critics, encourage self-censorship, and sometimes even rhetorically dismiss the critics as Western agents.

They manufacture indicators of economic performance and claim credit for good growth. And now that everyone has a smartphone and internet access, they even produce a ton of technopop songs that praise them and their macho-man persona. In this context, Guriev and Treisman write: “If Stalin was god, Putin has become a trademark”.

However, all forms of press censorship can turn detrimental. As a result, these leaders occasionally allow criticism to give citizens the impression that the media is generally free. In Venezuela, for instance, Chavez had decided to keep just one opposition TV on air.

Spin dictators pretend to pose as democrats. Once every five years, these dictators hold elections. These elections are curated to demonstrate public approval of their leadership and support for their system. Even though voters and opposition leaders can cast ballots in these elections, the ruling dictator usually wins by a landslide.

Guriev and Treisman add: “These landslides are supported—and magnified—by media manipulation, gerrymandering, and a dose of electoral fraud.” These autocrats use the power of the vote to their advantage by manipulating its outcome.

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In an increasingly globalised world, spin dictators have opened their economy and society to the outside world. These autocrats welcome the flow of people, capital, and data into their countries. They open their borders so that people can travel without fear. They let their citizens travel abroad, work hard, and send remittances home. They even join international political and economic institutions. Importantly, they co-opt Western allies and use lobby groups to secure their interests whenever these things backfire.

In essence, spin dictators tend to disdain violent repression, fix their popularity through ratings, conduct elections by pretending to be democratic, and integrate with the world outside to secure their interests.

Contrary to the view that modernisation would cause the rise of democracies, Guriev and Treisman’s thesis shows that modernisation itself has allowed autocrats to innovate and learn new ways of governing and staying in power. It is a refreshing take.

However, as I read through the chapters of this book, I could not help but feel that most of these features applied to the Indian situation. In contemporary India, there exists a pervasive crackdown on journalists and human rights advocates, restrictions on minority rights to facilitate right-wing ascendance, substantial influence of political elites over media establishments, and the targeting of opposition leaders in corruption cases.

Even as Orbán’s Hungary is featured as a spin-off dictatorship, Modi’s India is not mentioned once (and in that context, Kapil Komireddi’s Malevolent Republic offers a fantastic alternative!).

Moreover, has the distinction between democracy and dictatorship become less clear, given the rapid decline in democratic societies and their trend towards authoritarianism? Or does it also mean that, with technological advancements and the state's entrenchment in people's lives, democracies have taken on authoritarian roots, and authoritarian regimes have taken on democratic roots? These questions are left for others to dwell deeply into.

Nonetheless, the book is lucid, immensely readable, and highly recommended.

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Deborah Levy’s 2016 Booker shortlisted novel Hot Milk is about Sofia Papastergiadis, a 25-or-so-year-old anthropologist-cum-barista, and her mother Rose, who travel to Almeria in Spain to attend a clinic in search of a diagnosis and treatment for Rose’s mysterious paralysis of her legs.

To attend this clinic, run by Gomez, a US-trained doctor with extremely unconventional treatment methods, and Julietta, his daughter, the nurse-sunshine, Rose has mortgaged the last of her assets—the small London house—and all of her savings. Upon arriving at the beach-clad town, where jellyfish—“Medusas”—are almost always on a stinging spree, Sofia and Rose rent a house near the beach in Almeria.

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But Levy’s Hot Milk is not just about the diagnosis and treatment. It opens us up to multiple worlds, where Sofia, the protagonist, shows us how her life has been, to say the least, miserable.

She began her PhD in anthropology, only to leave it midway and work as a barista in London. At night, she would use the storeroom as her luxurious apartment. In it, she would scribble Margaret Mead’s sentences.

And soon, she opens us up to the study of anthropology. Everywhere she went, Sofia looked for subjects to study as an anthropologist. And most of all, she still depended on her mother, and her mother on her.

So much so that she would limp just as her mother limped, holding her. But soon, and slowly, Sofia’s disappointments would be supplemented in these pages—and her hope, with it.

Sofia becomes Zoffie when she meets Ingrid, who is dating Matthew. Ingrid worked in a tailor shop close by. And with her thick German accent, calling Sofia Zoffie, Ingrid enters into a steamy affair (?), with every once in a while, kisses on the beach. And, when her boyfriend would call her by phone, she would say, “I’m on the beach, Matty. Can you hear the sea?”

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And, with it, the love and want for Ingrid, who was always toxic—and often always giving mixed signals—and kisses other guys along. In these pages, Sofia spends so much time with Ingrid semi-naked, on the beach, in the kitchen, at cafes, and even around horses, for some reason.

Her father had abandoned her and Rose when Sofia was just 14, for a much younger girl, who is just four years older than Sofia, and with whom he has a baby daughter. And unfortunately, for her, she has always felt like a caregiver of Rose, who has suffered from this mysterious paralysis since she was really young.

Rose, however, has internalised her supposed disease to such an extent that she manifests it. So, Dr Gomez is their final hope of sorts.

This one time, he takes Sofia and Rose on a luncheon and lets stray cats scratch Rose’s foot to see if they are really numb. However, towards the end of this story, Gomez is tired too. He adds: “It’s the vitality she puts into not walking that concerns me”. At last, he is unable to find a cure for Rose, and refunds part of the costs.

*****

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As a PhD student in politics myself, I was left wondering, with no cure for her mother’s legs, will she ever be able to go to the US and complete her anthropology PhD? This is odd, haha. I related so much to Sofia.

It was COVID-19 in 2020. I was almost 25. And no job, and too much dependence on family. Their dependence was on my ability to earn some money and clear out all that unending debt, and I on their generosity in continuing to support me. COVID-19 and a quarterlife crisis—worst of all, I suppose.

And in that, I didn’t even have the skills to be a barista. And, above all, a desire to read and write, once again. And add to this the vulnerability that comes with a certain age. With Sofia, Levy exposes it.

What surprised me the most about Levy’s Hot Milk is just how much has been so meticulously discussed in these few pages. And just how well it is written. From the first page to the end, I felt immense joy while reading this book. Every sentence is crafted to sound clear and coherent. Every paragraph is structured to evoke a range of emotions, including joy, sorrow, and a sense of relatedness.

Deborah Levy’s writing is enviable in its elegance. Just as a Medusa sting, whose physical pain Sofia came to empathise with when compared to Ingrid’s behaviour, Hot Milk is unsettling even as you finish reading the last sentence.

Perhaps, this quote captures the essence the best: “I want to get away from the kinship structures that are supposed to hold me together. To mess up the story I have been told about myself. To hold the story upside down by its tail".

*****

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The term first became popular amid two separate crises: the COVID-19 pandemic since 2020 and the Russian War in Ukraine since 2022.

Writing in the Financial Times in October 2022, noted: “We are in an era of ‘polycrisis’”. A little before that, Tooze elaborated on the phenomenon in his newsletter Chartbook. Tooze explained: “A polycrisis is just a situation where you face multiple crises. It is a situation like that mapped in the risk matrix, where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts”.

In simpler terms, polycrisis refers to multiple crises overlapping, interacting, and compounding to produce an overarching global crisis.

The term itself was not coined by Tooze, and it has been in use for several decades in multiple forms. Take, for example, the 2022 Cascade Institute paper, in which the term “polycrisis” is traced back to the 1999 book Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for a New Millennium by French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin and co-author Anne Brigitte Kern. Morin and Kern describe polycrisis as “interwoven and overlapping crises” affecting human society.

Building on Morin and Kern, the South African environmental theorist Mark Swilling defined polycrisis as “a nested set of globally interactive socio-economic, ecological and cultural-institutional crises that defy reduction to a single cause”. Similarly, in 2016, the then-president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, deployed the term to describe the eurozone-Brexit-climate-refugee crisis.

Even when the term itself lurked in the background, Tooze popularised the term to understand the global crises that encapsulate the present world. Tooze wrote:

Pandemic, drought, floods, mega storms and wildfires, threats of a third world war—how rapidly we have become inured to the list of shocks. So much so that, from time to time, it is worth standing back to consider the sheer strangeness of our situation.

For Tooze, crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the sovereign debt crisis, rising inflation, the worldwide food crisis, the war in Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, Trump tariffs, the US war in Iran, the crisis of the liberal international order, and the climate emergency constitute a polycrisis.

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The Cascade Institute paper has highlighted: “What may appear to be separate crisis in different global systems in fact interact, exacerbate, and reshape one another to form a conjoined ‘polycrisis’ that must be understood and addressed as a whole”. “A global polycrisis”, it has argued, “occurs when crisis in multiple global systems become entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.”

In short, each crisis occurs less and less in isolation.

In their essay on polycrisis, Mathew Davis and Christopher Hobson argue that polycrisis is an enmeshed set of separate crises occurring simultaneously, with each interacting with the others (in both foreseeable and unexpected ways). There are no boundaries to each crisis. One crisis could easily pass over into another. Or that they could interact to produce a greater crisis effect. Or that they could affect one another to deepen the intended outcomes. As a result of such intersections and interferences among crises, there is often a breakdown of shared meaning, creating “layered social problems”. Polycrisis, as a collection of crises, is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Every morning in Sainik (army) school, twelve-year-olds like me were administered a steady dose of nationalism—in how we walked, how we spoke, how we learned. This was hardly unique to army schools in India, but here, it was delivered with a particular discipline. In this everyday regimen of nationalism, figures like Arundhati Roy—who walked with Naxal comrades, sympathised with Kashmir self-determination, protested dams and nuclear weapons (at the supposed cost to the nation)—were cast as enemies. Enemies within. Years of indoctrination made this worldview seem natural and even virtuous. Asking questions at the army school was blasphemy, an act of disobedience.

When I went to college to study politics, I was still sceptical about Arundhati Roy. But I began, slowly, to ask questions. One in particular—long unasked—kept returning: Is the individual an end in itself, or is it the state? Who matters the most? For years, without asking these questions, I had assumed the answer was the state, an ultimate end that ought to be preserved at all costs. Now, equipped with a liberal education, a bit of social contract theory and some Kant and Foucault, I arrived at a different answer. It is the individual—the basic unit of social life—who is the end.

By then, I started reading more. George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 were significantly influential—they had changed the way I thought of the world. I read others too. Sometimes, it was Victor Hugo; other times, it was Dostoevsky; and sometimes, I read Rushdie. Then, one day, I thought I should read Arundhati Roy. After all, she had a new book out at the time: The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. And then, I read it.

Roy wrote: ‘How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.’ By the time I finished reading the book, something in me had changed. My distaste had given way to admiration. I loved the way she wrote and often thought for myself that I should try to write like her someday.

I also read her introductory essay for Ambedkar’s book Annihilation of Caste, where she pits Gandhi—the saint —against Ambedkar—the doctor. Although the text was polemical, it prompted me to ask questions that we often take for granted. It is often understood that Gandhi’s actions were virtuous. And Roy shows us how, upon a closer reading, one could discern a more critical picture of Gandhi.

When I picked up Mother Mary Comes to Me, I did so with admiration already in place. Yet, I still carried a residual suspicion: that Arundhati Roy was a rich elite who spoke the right truths at the right moments because she could afford to. Reading an all-lyrical memoir, so well-done prose-wise, she alters, again, how I read her.

In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy opens her complicated, but honest, relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, or Mrs Roy, who had admirably fought the world for women’s inheritance rights, but at home, with her two children, unleashed the ‘gangster’-like hell. The book straddles between resentment and reverence (much like my relationship with Arundhati Roy). It opens up vulnerabilities: the mother’s vulnerability to losing hold of her power; the daughter’s vulnerability to navigating (some part of her) life without money or a place to stay, straddling train stations and durgahs.

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When Arundhati Roy was in her third year at design school, her relationship with her mother had stalled; she had decided not to see her mother again. In the book, Roy writes:

I left my mother not because I didn’t love her, but to be able to continue to love her. Staying back would have made that impossible. Once I left, I didn’t see or speak to her for years. She never looked for me. She never asked me why I left. There was no need for that. We both knew. We settled on a lie. A good one. I crafted it—“She loved me enough to let me go”.

Elsewhere, Roy sums up her relationship with her mother like this: ‘After all these years of thinking about it, I have concluded that I grew up in a cult. A good cult, a fabulous one even, but a cult nevertheless, in which the outside world was a fuzzy entity, and in the inside world, unquestioning obedience and frequently demonstrated adoration of Mother Guru were basic requirements of membership’. Mrs Roy would teach Roy to think and then rage against her thoughts; she would teach her to be free and then rage against her freedom; and she would teach her to write, but resent the author she became.

Mrs Roy’s love for her pet project—the school—further complicated her relationship with her own children. Arundhati Roy writes: ‘Quite often I found myself wishing I was her student and not her daughter’. She adds: ‘It has taken me years to come to terms with the fact that I was a middle child, one of three siblings, not two. My older sibling was a boy, and my younger sibling was the school. There was never any doubt about who our mother’s favourite child was.’ Arundhati struggled against her mother’s dictates ever since, even as an unborn child who was not wanted.

But the book itself is not all about Mrs Roy. In telling the story of her mother, Arundhati Roy opens up to us about her own life. There are also others, like G. Isaac, a Balliol-educated brother of Mrs Roy, who show what it is like to be gracious and funny even in their failures. LKC, her quiet brother. Micky Roy, her estranged, drunkard father.

At sixteen, Roy left for Delhi to first study and later to pursue a career in architecture. Within a few years, Roy married JC—or Jesus—who was her senior at architecture school in Delhi. But it soon came undone when Arundhati and JC moved to Goa, where Roy felt suffocated and longed to return to Delhi to relive it all. Thereafter, a few years in, she became involved with her boss’s husband (Pradip) at the office. She would marry Pradip—the filmmaker, and later, an environmental conservationist—years later.

With Pradip, she would act (as in Massey Sahib), write and direct films (as in In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones), and only later decide to write. Roy first wrote a long essay titled “In a Proper Light” in Sunday, a weekly magazine, by chance. And upon the reception the essay garnered, the editor would call to say that he would consider publishing anything that Roy would write. But her first book was some time ahead. Roy recalls writing The God of Small Things:

The more I wrote, the more it puzzled me. It behaved as though it had a volition of its own. There was a rhythm to it, a sort of backbeat, a formal architecture that I could sense but for a long time couldn’t put my finger on. I had to trust it. Sometimes it felt as though it were writing itself, and that I just happened to be around. I was puzzled because I realised that I wasn’t writing it from beginning to end. I felt as though I were sculpting smoke. Generating it, then organising and disciplining it.

When Roy finally finished the draft of a book, a hardbound copy was first circulated to Pankaj Mishra, who was then heading Harper Collins in India, who would send it to Patrick French, the author of India, who would then send it to his agent, David Godwin, who would, then, call up Roy to request her not to sign anything until he arrived in India in two days.

In 1997, Roy published her Booker-winning novel, The God of Small Things, whose rights were sold in a dozen other languages, and whose advances and sales earned her millions of dollars. The substantial royalties Roy accumulated would then be distributed through the trust (which does not bear her name) to journalists, activists, writers, lawyers, artists, and filmmakers who had the courage to stand up against power.

About fame, Roy wrote gloomily, ‘the feeling that each time I was applauded, someone else, someone quiet, was being beaten in another room’. The feeling of causing the beating of someone else, out of one’s supposed acclaim, is so true in India. Just because your neighbourhood kid did well at school, you would become the object of ridicule—not just at home, but almost everywhere.

With the success of The God of Small Things, Roy wrote a critical essay in Outlook and Frontline titled “The End of Imagination” on India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons after the Pokhran blasts in 1998. And a flurry of insults and outrage followed—“Get out of India”, “Go to Pakistan!”—which continue to dominate public discourse to this day. After Pokhran, Roy engaged in the Narmada Bachao Andolan, then wrote a text titled “Walking With The Comrades,” where she literally walked with Naxals. Thereafter, she travelled to Kashmir, which she recounts would appear in everything she wrote—in its bleakest forms of the human condition.

In her last days, Mary Roy would phone (or dictate a message to her staff, who would then pass it on by phone to) Arundhati to inform, ‘There was no one in the world whom I loved more than you.’ Mrs Roy, in this sense, was her ‘shelter’, her ‘storm’ and most of all, her ‘most enthralling subject’. And in her presence, Roy would become the person she is—defiant.

In Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy steers the flow of rage, defiance, sorrow, joy, and love in the correct portion. Just like her fiction, this memoir reads lyrically.  In this memoir, Roy opens up about almost everything that haunts her with utmost authenticity. It’s a raw, visceral and searing recollection of a life worth living—or a life worth having tried to live so far.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion masking ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered—is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

The Gwangju democratic protests, a series of student-led demonstrations after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee and the subsequent state-capture of Chun Doo-hwan, were suppressed by the South Korean military in a violent massacre in 1980. Following his ascent to power, Chun promptly implemented martial law, arrested opposition leaders, banned political activities, and censored all forms of speech.

In Human Acts, Kang illustrates just how cruel and gruesome those Gwangju days were, and how easy it was to reduce human beings into a ‘lump of meat’.

In the chapter “The Prisoner, 1990”, Kang’s character recollects,

Watering discharge and sticky pus, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left of me. No that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only “me” there was.

Cruelty, as one witnesses in Kang’s narratives, is not limited to Korea under Park or Chun; it has its own history.

It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code.

The story itself begins with a fifteen-year-old boy, Dong-ho, who had witnessed the death of his friend during the Gwangju protests, and has been searching for the body of his friend. His friend’s sister, too, is missing and may likely have been killed. The boy works in the hospital, where bodies arrive and are then identified by their families for the proper funeral.

Dong-ho’s chapter is told in a second-person narrative, the ‘you’ haunt you all the more, even as you read word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraphs by paragraphs, as if to escape, where the ‘you’ escapes and refers to YOU—the reader, or you—the character. Either way, the second-person narration haunts throughout, even as a ghostly voice tells you what you thought, felt, and imagined when the horrors were committed in front of your eyes, on you, and when you read those horrors, as you do in this book.

The chapter after “The Boy. 1980” is the first-person narrative “The Boy’s Friend. 1980,” which shifts to the perspective of his friend’s ghost, who now contemplates what really happened and how he really died. That tense horror, which the second-person narrative had initially evoked, is now transitioned into the first-person narrative.

Other chapters, too, are a mix of second-person and first-person narratives, skipping in time. The reporter who had received seven slaps. The prisoner who had been reduced to a lump of meat. The factory girl, who had been called Red Bitch, had been repeatedly tortured. The mother who cannot reconcile the death of her son, the boy, Dong-ho, even as years go by.

Han Kang’s novel, as her translator, Deborah Smith, writes in the introduction, ‘starts with bodies. Piled up, reeking, unclaimed, and thus unburied, they present both a logistical and an ontological dilemma.’

Despite the sleek stylistic prose laden in those 200-odd pages, Human Acts itself took me several days to read. After every chapter, I would pause, watch a movie, read something else, do some PhD work, and reset. The following day, I would read another chapter, and so on. It was not just reading and writing this review, but it also took me several days.

As with other books, whenever I completed them, I knew exactly what I had to say about them. But with Human Acts, I could not bring myself to sit down and write anything.

That is perhaps because Han Kang is no ordinary storyteller. In Human Acts, Kang does not just tell us how violence was meted out on ordinary people during the Gwangju uprising; she tears you up in pieces, questions your humanity, makes you vulnerable, takes a toll on your body and mind, and demoralises you. And that is the brilliance of an extraordinary writer.

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Since Narendra Modi’s right-wing Hindu nationalist party swept to power in 2014, India has gradually become a minimum democracy. There are regular elections, but democracy seems to have stopped there.

India just witnessed an unprecedented youth-led movement demanding the resignation of a minister in Modi’s cabinet. It began as an online satire, an Instagram account named “Cockroach Janata Party” (CJP) subtly reclaiming the mockery by the Chief Justice of India, who called the country’s unemployed youth “cockroaches” and “parasites”.

What was an insult turned into an overnight sensation, with the Instagram account and its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, amassing more than 22 million followers in just two weeks.

Indian youth have long been dismayed by the employment situation and resentful of corruption and institutional failure. Youth resentment became clearer when the government failed to acknowledge the question paper leaks in India’s largest medical entrance exam, known as NEET. When the exam was cancelled after leaked papers surfaced on Telegram, more than 2 million candidates were affected, and at least twenty of them had died by suicide. The government refused to take proper action, and the minister refused to resign.

The CJP-led student movement began with the demand for the resignation of India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.

After a prolonged hunger protest by several students, along with Sonam Wangchuk, a prominent educationist and social activist from the Indian state of Ladakh, and the government’s eventual failure to address their concerns, on July 20, 2026, students and parents from all over India gathered at Jantar Mantar to march towards the Indian parliament.

Families who had lost their sons and daughters marched holding their photos, demanding justice. Students chanted slogans of “Inquilab Zindabad” (Long Live the Revolution) and “Modi Teri Tanashahi—Nahi Chalegi, Nahi Chalegi” (Modi, Your Dictatorship, Will Not Be Tolerated). And the police—nametags removed, so that no one holds them accountable—charged the protesters, beating them with batons, firing tear gas and using pellet guns.

Days after relentless mobilisation across India and the increased youth resentment towards the Modi government, Pradhan, who had dismissed the student movement as “B-team of terrorists”, has since resigned, and within hours, a new minister was appointed in his place.

But the protest mobilisation calling for the resignation of a minister following an institutional failure is a new low for Indian democracy. Not so long ago, during the coalition era of Indian politics, whenever a scandal broke out, independent agencies plunged into action, reports were published, and eventually, the ministers and top-tier bureaucrats resigned. Whenever there was a railway accident, a large-scale policy failure, or a corruption scandal, the ministers would resign on moral grounds.

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In doing so, it seeks to dispel the misconceptions about Islam and Muslims that prevail in our time. As a keen observer of religious history, Armstrong’s book on Islam is concise and easy to understand.

Armstrong’s book consists of five chapters, each chronicling how Islam developed over the years—beginning with the life of Prophet Muhammad (570-632) and the foundational ideas of the Muslim ummah (community of believers).

As a businessman and a family man, Muhammad became a prophet, revealed to him by God in the verses of the Quran, with a universal message of equality and social justice. This book moves back and forth, discussing how ideas of equality and justice are tweaked to accommodate social conditions at different times.

Guided by Allah, the Prophet wanted to bring one true God to the Arabs, who, unlike their predecessors, both Christians and Jews (known as the people of The Book), had believed themselves to have been left out of God’s plans.

Armstrong writes: “The new sect would eventually be called Islam (surrender); a Muslim was a man or a woman, who had made this submission of their entire being to Allah (God) and his demand that human beings behave to one another with justice, equity and compassion” (p. 5).

Further, she adds that giving a proportion of their income to the poor as almsgiving (known as zakat) and fasting during Ramadan are essential to being a Muslim. And that Muslims were commanded as their first duty to build a community (ummah) characterised by “compassion and fair distribution of wealth”.

In 622, Muhammad and his followers set out for Yathrib (Medina) from Mecca. Known as the hijrah, it marks a pivotal event at the start of the Muslim period. After taking over Mecca from Quraysh without shedding a drop of blood, Muhammad established Islam as the essential religion of the region.

From Muhammad, Islam now shifts towards four Rashidun (the four “rightly guided” successors, caliphs, to the Prophet: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali). However, this period is marked by constant tussles over who is the rightful successor of the ummah. Significant feuds were known as the first and second fitnah (the time of temptation).

Armstrong also meticulously documents the intrinsic elements of factions within Islam that would arise over the years. For Shia Muslims, the massacre of the Prophet’s grandson, Husain and his family on the plains of Karbala in 680 marks a point of betrayal and injustice. Whereas, for Sunni Muslims, the community of the believers is paramount to experiencing the divine.

Sunni Muslims revere Muhammad and all four Rashiduns. In contrast, Shiis demote the first three Rashiduns as having caused injustice to Ali, whom they believe to be the lone legitimate imam of the Umma. There are four schools of Sunni Muslims (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafii, and Hanbali Schools). And many Shii Muslims believe in Twelve Imams (all descendants of Ali), known as “Twelver Shiah”.

Armstrong also meticulously documents the distinct characteristics of Sufism, a mystical tradition within Sunni Islam. Sufis, she notes, sought God in the depths of their beings rather than in political and social events. Sufism emerged as a reactionary movement against the growing worldliness and luxury in Muslim society.

Sufis believe that ordinary Muslims could receive Muhammad-like revelations of the Quran. Moreover, Sufis clustered around their pirs, who instructed their disciples. Over the years, as it became increasingly difficult to hold the whole ummah together, these three sects received allegiance from different political dynasties and caliphates.

In addition to the religious developments, Armstrong discusses how Muslim rule, as a political project, took shape over the years. She outlines how Islam has spread significantly worldwide since Mongol rule. Moreover, she examines how political Islam paved the way for absolute monarchy in three Islamic empires: the Safavids (in Iran), the Mughals (in India), and the Ottomans (in Turkey).

Each of these Muslim kingdoms had a different political style. The Safavid Empire sought to convert the whole of Sunni Muslims into Shii Muslims through oppression. The Mughals, however, did not undertake such a task, and Akbar sought to orient his Islam toward Sufi traditions. In Istanbul, Ottomans sought to create a vast ulama bureaucracy and a highly efficient army sanctioned by Shariah.

In the chapter titled “Islam Agonistes”, Armstrong brings Islam into modernity. She takes a cue from Edward Said’s Orientalism to discuss the development of East and Southeast Asia and the narratives of the West and Europe.

Armstrong discusses Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey, Abd al-Nasser's Egypt, and Reza Shah Pahlavi's Iran to examine how each of these regimes sought to reinstitute secularism in ways antithetical to Islam. They reinforced Western clothing, mannerisms, and lifestyles in their people.

Armstrong presents a discussion on fundamentalism as being prominent in all religions, and it is not merely unique to Islam. She looks at how 9/11 reflected a defining moment in discussions on Islam and about the understandings of Islam reconfigured. However, I would have really appreciated a more substantial discussion of how women's clothing has evolved over the years within Islamic traditions.

Throughout the work, Armstrong has corrected several stereotypes surrounding Islam and Muslims. In doing so, she has presented a uniquely comprehensive story of Islam through the ages. The author has shown how tensions between tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, and moderation and extremist tendencies are at the centre of the story of Islam.

The English translation of the book, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, by Ulrich Beck, was published in 1992. The book is centred around two concepts: the notion of “reflexive modernisation” and “the issue of risk” (Beck 1992, 4).

Risks are defined as the probability of harm and not the harm itself. It is the probability that matters. Since risk is seen as the “scientific realism” to be studied in laboratories by scientists with their naïve understanding of lived realities, it has primarily been left to the scientific community to define agendas and impose risk-averse discourses.

However, Beck’s reflexive modernisation attempts to dispute this classification—risk as something professionals can handle. Beck seeks to bridge the gap between the public and the scientific community to address risk in this work.

He describes reflexive modernisation as “accommodating” the innate propensity for “tension between human indeterminacy” and the modernist leaning for “objectification and naturalisation of the institutional and cultural production” (Beck 1992: 5). It is the human’s ability to reflect upon their past experiences and knowledge to deal with the challenges posed by the future.

For Ulrich Beck, a risk society is “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself” (Beck 1992: 13). Anthony Giddens, a fellow sociologist and a contemporary of Ulrich Beck, wrote that a risk society is “a society increasingly preoccupied with the future, which generates the notion of risk” (Pierson and Giddens 1998).

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William Zinsser’s On Writing Well has been on my shelf for more than four years. It was one book that someone asked me to read when I started taking an interest in writing. So, in the last few months, soon after my morning runs, I would open Zinsser and read just one chapter from it. Almost every week, I made just enough progress—one page at a time, one sentence at once. And it was just a few days ago; I completed reading Zinsser in its entirety.

Zinsser always wanted to be a newspaperman. And so, when he finally got a chance to start his career as a journalist for the New York Herald Tribune, he knew that he would write all his life. Over the years, he has had the opportunity not just to write but also to teach writing. He taught writing at Yale and the New School. Zinsser also wrote a book on writing, titled On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, which sold more than a million copies. In selling like hot cakes, the book taught many writers to hone their skills. James Kilpatrick once remarked that if he were to pick just one book on writing, it would no doubt be Zinsser’s On Writing Well.

Zinsser calls his book a ‘craft book’ because the rules of English haven’t changed wholly in a long time. The book is divided into four parts: principles, methods, forms, and attitudes. In discussing some principles of writing, Zinsser gives a masterclass on simplicity. He notes that clutter is a ‘disease’ in most writings. As a society, we use unnecessary words and meaningless jargon.

But the secret to good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already a verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.

For instance, instead of at ‘the present time’ or ‘presently’, one might just write ‘now’. Similarly, ‘assistance’ with ‘help’, or ‘numerous’ with ‘many’, or ‘facilitate’ with ‘ease’, etc. Just as Thoreau would have said, Zinsser notes: ‘Simplify, simplify.’ Clarity is a key to effective writing. It is a way street. Clear writing is clear thinking; clear thinking is clear writing.

For a nonfiction writer, it is always important to ask: ‘What am I trying to say?’ And to one’s surprise, most people aren’t really sure what they want to say. It is not easy to think clearly. It takes patience, discipline, and a lot of practice to think clearly. But once one has honed the skill of clear thinking, one is a step closer to writing well.

Every first draft must be revised. As a writer, you should write what you have written. And rewrite it again and again, just so that it sounds perfect when you read it aloud. And when you encounter words and sentences you could do away with, do yourself a favour and do your reader a favour and cut them out. (I have often struggled to read and revise my writing! Over time, with a little dose of Zinsser, I hope to be able to read, revise, and cut out my writing for clarity.) When editing your text, you could bracket phrases that you think could be replaced or done away with. Remove the adjectives and adverbs. And in essence, try simplifying.

Then, focus on style. Those writers who write in the first-person narrative are natural. Writing’, Zinsser tells us, ‘is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity.’ Therefore, Zinsser adds, writers must learn to write in the first person.

Honing the techniques of style leads us to its consumers: the audience. Sloppy writing tends to lose the audience, while good writing earns more of them. Therefore, a writer must write in a way that their audience does not doze off halfway through the text. Keep writing simple, write short sentences, write them in the first person, and cut out all the excess in your writing.

Writing good prose comes with certain techniques and methods.

Unity is a crucial element to all writing. Are you writing in a first-person narrative throughout? Are you using the past tense throughout? And are you involved with your subject or wholly detached from it? To write is to maintain a coherent structure which is followed throughout. Such a structure not only introduces elegance to writing but also makes the text readable and free from confusion.

The Lead and the Ending are the most important sentences of your text. If the first sentence or the first few sentences do not induce the reader to go on, then the audience will just lose track of your text. The lead in a text should ‘capture the reader immediately and force [them] to keep reading. It must cajole [them] with freshness or novelty, or paradox, or humour, or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a question.’

With a strong lead, the writer must continue to build their story. Add more details. Tell things that the reader does not already know. Tell them well. Collect more materials on a story than you could ever use. And look for materials everywhere. Try to write your essay like a story.

Narratives tend to hold one’s attention, and ‘everybody wants to be told a story’. Always write your stories in narrative style. Look, for instance, at the Holy Bible, which opens up like this: ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth.’ It makes the reader curious to read the next sentence.

And just like a good lead, the writer must learn to know where to end the essay. Most often, the stories we tell have their own ending. At other times, we would just have to know where to stop. But one way to think of the ending to an essay is to see if it has reached its finality. Use quotes from your notes to circle back to your story, and find something funny, something unexpected, and something curious to reach an end to your essay. In sum, surprise your readers.

One of the chapters I liked most in Zinsser’s On Writing Well is ‘Bits & Pieces’, which contains a great deal of advice on how to write well. Here, Zinsser tells us to use active verbs instead of passive verbs. Say, ‘Joe saw him’, instead of ‘he was seen by Joe’. Cut almost all adverbs. Cut also all adjectives. Prune out as many qualifiers as you can. They dilute your style. Use proper punctuation. The Period, reach it as early as you can. The exclamation point, don’t use it unless you must.

Use a semicolon when you think you can. Use Em Dashes and En Dashes as well as you can. But use them to either amplify something in the sentence or justify something based on the first sentence. Use mood changers—but, however, yet, now, later, instead, therefore, etc.—to alert the reader of the change in mood. Know where to use ‘that’ and where to use ‘which’. Which always follows after a comma. Keep sentences short. Paragraphs shorter. Review your text—read it aloud and rewrite.

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In the third part on writing forms, Zinsser introduces us to various forms of writing, including travel writing, business writing, science writing, sports writing, memoirs, and writing about family.

In his advice for people writing about places, Zinsser tells us that one must always look for things that others may not have experienced. At times, it is helpful for writers to observe their surroundings. How the space is organised, who inhabits it, and what it represents. Isolate qualities that make the place distinctive. Contrast what we know about a place with what might be the reality.

For those writing a memoir, Zinsser tells, ‘Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction.

Thoreau wrote seven different drafts of Walden in eight years; no American memoir was more painstakingly pieced together. To write a good memoir, you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organising idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth’.

To write well, Zinsser tells us, one must focus on one’s voice. There is no such thing as an effortless style. So, read good books. And always imitate another writer. ‘Imitation is part of the creative process for anyone learning an art or a craft.’

Find the best writers you can copy. Get their voice and taste in your ear, and very soon, your voice and your identity hone out of it. Enjoy the process of writing. If writing is all that you hope to do, then learn to enjoy it as well as you can.

Listen to your editors. But learn to differentiate between good advice and bad advice. And experiment.

Paul is a prominent figure in the tech world. He is known for his startup accelerator, Y Combinator, which has successfully funded Airbnb and Reddit, among others. However, a lesser-known aspect of Paul is his essays. He writes on a wide range of topics: tech, philosophy, writing, and startup culture, to name a few. Even several entrepreneurs have come to think of his essays as essential for anyone considering startups.

I came across Graham’s writings relatively late. When I read some of his essays, I found them intriguing. For he is not merely thinking about thinking, but advises everyone to think through writing. He says, in multiple essays, that writing makes one’s thinking clearer than when one first starts out.

In this newsletter, I compile and try to make sense of Graham’s advice to writers (written through the early 2000s until recently). In reading all these essays, I have come to understand what it means to write an essay as Paul Graham (somewhat obscurely, if I may say so). To begin writing, one needs to read; through reading, one gets ideas; then, writing as a process; and finally, what makes for a good essay.

Paul Graham tells us to read first.

Often, we assume we are great writers. I, for one, try to think of myself as somewhat okayish to put it crudely) writer. That also comes from a certain inability to read enough and think broadly. I will work on this. So, Paul tells us, if you have to be a good writer, you have to read first. Read widely. Don’t hook yourself up to an audiobook. That is not reading. It is consuming information—like a robot.

Graham writes: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will always discover new things in the process of writing. And there is, as far as I know, no substitute for this kind of discovery.”

And to get good ideas, one needs to first read others—and then follow and understand how they write. Think of ways to figure out what and how others write. What works for them? What did you enjoy the most about this essay? All this helps. Therefore, one must read thoroughly and deeply to be able to think about things in the world.

Paul Graham on how to get good ideas.

Say, you have read others—and followed how they write, and what works for them. What next? You may now be intrigued about what they are saying, how they are saying it, and if it really made any sense.

In another essay, Paul Graham tells us: “The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge”.

Graham adds: “Knowledge grows fractally. From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough to get close to one, you’ll notice it’s full of gaps. These gaps will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried x or wondered about y.” Therefore, to be able to think of ideas is to think of anomalies in what you have read. Intrigue. That is the way out of being stuck. As students and academics, we are always stuck.

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2026 is upon us. And like how. The world seems to have gone mad. As it turned out, 2025 was already a challenging year. 2024, before that. And 2023. And 2022. And COVID-19 before that.

Come 2026, and Trump, the US leader, has already struck Venezuela, gotten hold of the dictator, Nicolas Maduro, and brought him to the United States on the pretext of involvement with drug supply. But, as Trump himself has made it clear, it is all about oil. With Venezuela out of the way, Trump’s focus has already shifted towards Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Denmark.

Besides that, the Russian war in Ukraine continues to rage on. Genocide in Gaza continues, albeit with a brief hiatus. Against this backdrop of geopolitical turmoil, there is also an onslaught of AI capitalism. AI companies are out to transform our world almost entirely, both literally and metaphorically.

Witnessing such socio-political upheavals and transformations, and pursuing a PhD simultaneously, is a considerable amount of work. In such circumstances, even as the world begins to fall apart, one brick at a time, I take refuge in books.

I started 2025 reading ’s Herald of a Restless World, a book about the life, times, and philosophy of Henry Bergson. Sometime in the mid-1910s, when a woman walked up to him after his class and asked him what his philosophy was, Bergson replied: “I simply argue, Madam, that time is not space”. What did it mean? When philosophers theorised time, they treated it as something stable—frozen in symbolic representations of a clock, calendar, or the points on the graph. Bergson’s conceptualisation of durée refutes this. I write about the book as follows:

Herring tells Bergson’s story with sheer brilliance. In tracing his life, Herring creatively draws on the lives and stories of people around him to portray the life of the philosopher. By opening each chapter with engaging anecdotes about Bergson, Herring places him in the limelight and foreshadows him, just as his conception of durée would inform us about time. By doing so, Herring brings Bergson—the man and the philosopher—to the people.

Click here to read the full review of Emily Herring’s Herald of a Restless World.

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So, when I was browsing through fiction in my University Library, I found a book titled A Pale View of Hills, with a misty yellow cover and a hazy backdrop of a girl running and a woman chasing after her. I picked it up. I read its blurb, which cautioned that, in the story, both past and present converge in a haunting way. I was hooked.

So, I grabbed a few other books, along with this one, just in case I were to be disappointed with this one, there would be others to fall back on. And instantly, I scanned through the books in the library, and stuffed them into my tote, and marched, I did, to my apartment unit. The following two days, I read through Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills with care, amidst so much chaos unleashed by a 5-minute storm, a “fire weather” (the term I was oblivious to until then) of sorts in Brisbane.

A Pale View of Hills was Ishiguro’s first book. It is a story narrated by Etsuko, a Japanese woman who had moved to rural England with her second husband. The story begins with an unexpected visit from her daughter, Niki. And in the next few pages, there is a sense of confusion: Niki’s elder sister, Keiko, had died by suicide years earlier in Manchester, and Niki did not go to her funeral. Treat this as a hook. I wanted to know so much about why she would die, what happened to her, and how Etsuko ended up with a second husband.

But the story would soon shift between two instances, just at the time when Etsuko was still pregnant with Keiko and living in Nagasaki. It was a time when the Second World War had caused so much havoc in Japanese society. It was also a time when tradition and modernity were constantly at odds with each other. There were subtle patriarchal norms at play, and within them, the violence that structured Japanese society.

The two instances I referred to earlier were, one, Ogata-San, the father-in-law of Etsuko, and the father of Jiro, Etsuko’s first husband, who had come to stay with them in Nagasaki, and second, an unexpected short-lived friendship with an older woman, Sachiko, who lived with her daughter Mariko, in a cottage close to Etsuko’s apartment. Sachiko was dating an American guy, Frank, who drinks and spends time lazing around.

Both Etsuko and Sachiko are different. Etsuko seems to be a caring, selfless, and gentle person. And Sachiko, in contrast, was carefree, selfish, and gullible. Mariko, Sachiko’s daughter, has befriended cats, named them, and plays with a kitten most days, as some of us would have done in our childhood. Sachiko believes that, if she were to go to America with Frank, all her problems would be solved. And that she could start anew. However, Mariko is extremely unhappy about the prospect of going with Frank, whom she would say smells like a pig.   

However, as one continues reading this book, with more threads being unfurled, one begins to wonder whether Etsuko and Sachiko were the same person. And Mariko, her daughter, Keiko, who ends up dying by suicide. The similarities become uncanny: just as Sachiko, who wanted to go to America, Etsuko actually went to England and took a new husband. Just as Mariko’s reluctance to go to America, Keiko may not have been really excited to go to England. Much like Mariko, Keiko seemed to be extremely reserved and would keep herself locked in her room for days. At once, Etsuko even admits that her memory has become unreliable and fragmented. Perhaps that could be the reason for these distinct narrations.

In between, there are other characters. Jiro, for instance. He spoke less. But, through his subtle actions, his stare, his rage, he would get things done at home. For instance, when Jiro’s office-colleagues visit their house, and when they insist on not drinking tea, Jiro stares at Etsuko, hinting to her to make them tea. So, when he received appreciation at his office for his work, Jiro asked his father to join him to drink sake to celebrate. “Jiro nodded to me. I went to the cupboard and brought out a bottle and two cups.” He was a traditional, patriarchal man.

Jiro’s father, Ogata-San, although a very caring and fun person, was stuck in a time warp. He could not reflect on the changing nature of Japanese society with enthusiasm. He found it deeply disturbing that husband and wife could vote for two different people in elections. He firmly believes that women should take their husbands’ views on politics into consideration. And he also wants to reprimand Shigeo Matsuda, a student of his and a childhood friend of Jiro’s, who had written an article in an education journal condemning the old-style of teaching, and even directly attacking Ogata-San.

So, finally, when Ogata meets Shigeo, he derides how much the newer generation has lost patience and has lost any value to the older generation, teaching and teachers. However, he is keen to learn new things; he wants Etsuko to teach him cooking and music.

Each instance in A Pale View of Hills reads like a confusion. And in confusion, Ishiguro presents us with multiple impossibilities. He does not tell us a straight-jacketed story—there was a king, and he had five daughters. Instead, he draws us into things that we least expect, and in them, he brings his characters alive.

So, when you begin reading this text, you would want to know what happened to Kieko—and why she would die by suicide. Likewise, there is a great deal of subtle violence, and one wonders what role it may have played in Etsuko’s decision to move to England. However, Ishiguro never tells you that. A Pale View of Hills, in this sense, is a haunt-induced blur.  

I will now trudge upon a subject that I struggle with enormously. I am no good at reading. I find it excruciatingly hard these days to hold my concentration in one place for too long—and all the more with books. With Instagram and YouTube, and those unending streams of short videos, one after another, hours long, it has gotten all the more difficult to keep one’s concentration tight.

But, importantly, I don’t think I know any better how to read books. In a dire situation, such as the one that has just befallen me, I considered Virginia Woolf.

Reading a book Virginia Woolf-style is not all that difficult. Reading—if one enjoys that chore, as I suppose you would be if you are reading this essay—like everything else, is a banal activity.

It certainly comes with its techniques and rules. It requires knowing how to internalise what you have just read as much as enjoying the process of reading. But there is more to reading than just sitting in one corner of a room and reading.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), an English novelist and essayist, in the essay “How should one read a book?” tells us the art of reading books.

Regretfully, I have never had a passionate liking for literature for long, and when I did, in my bachelor’s, I came across Woolf through her book A Room of One’s Own. In the book, Woolf writes: “A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction”.

Imagine yourself in a room full of books. Fiction, prose, poetry, biographies, and other such books exist. Some discuss history, and there are those that tell you a story—all sorts of books. If you are in a library, you will encounter such spectacles.

As a reader, you may wonder: Where do I begin? How should I start reading a book? What should I do while reading one? These are the questions Woolf sets out to answer in this beautiful essay.

Woolf sets out with a caveat:

She adds:

Woolf admits that reading is a pleasurable activity—and we cannot even describe that pleasure. This mysteriously enjoyable activity should be approached as such.

If you pick up a book and look for facts to remember, as some of us do, the whole activity of reading becomes a monotonous venture of fact-keeping and fact-archiving in the brain.

Therefore, despite reading seeming so simple— “a mere matter of knowing the alphabet”—it is difficult to tell if anyone knows how to read a book.

Don’t start reading by judging—instead, know how the author writes. Each writer follows a method, a technique, and a flair that is unique to them. Some writers play with commas in every sentence, like in The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid; others write very short sentences (see The New Yorker essays).

There are those of us who like to do both. “Even if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this certainly is true—one cannot write a most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event—meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face.”

How would a writer think of describing meeting a beggar on the street? Woolf picks up three writers—Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy—and juxtaposes them.

Defoe, a masterful narrator, would focus on perfect order and simplicity. One thing follows another. One event led to the other without confusing the reader.

On the other hand, Austen would focus her attention on the characters rather than the buzzing background (streets, wide alleys, etc.). She would describe the beggar through three lenses: his own reflection of his life, how his daughter looks at his life, and how Austen herself sees him.

Unlike Defoe and Austen, Hardy would do something very different with the beggar. He would transform the street into a “sombre heath”—relationships are not between people but between person and nature.

In essence, Woolf’s point is simple: know how a writer writes their prose—and you will enjoy reading the book. You should not be judgmental at once and be more open to experimentation.

Every writer has their own approach—and their aims are different too. They write differently. And they should be read as such—differently. But reading differently is just one part of the puzzle. There are several genres of writing. They serve different purposes.

All biographies and memoirs—filled with facts—push our reading boundaries, allowing us to read works of “pure imagination further”. Biographies and memoirs are not meant to induce pleasure, as we would expect from a novelist. Their purpose is different.

Similarly, poetry is different from fiction. Reading poetry requires a different thinking than reading both biography and fiction.

Did you get lost there for a second? Poetry doesn’t require you to use your mind, but your heart to action. It does not seek out logic but humanly affective aspects. Say you read the book like it is supposed to be read—like how its writer wrote it. Now, you have turned the last of its pages.

Once, after finishing a book, Woolf notes, the reader “must cease to be the friend; [and] must become the judge”. For her, reading is not merely “sympathising and understanding; it is also criticising and judging”.

Judgements are essential. And we provide them all the time. But, this time (perhaps after reading this essay and perhaps after finishing another book), you will know that you are judging it consciously.

We should judge each book from what our impression of it is, rather than what others tell us its impression is (but this is difficult to achieve, as our impressions are always mediated by what others tell us is good and bad).

However, as Woolf prefaces this text, always mend the rules as you read. Don’t follow someone or something that doesn't work for you. But a general primer of Woolf’s guides will always help.

However, despite its closeness and proximity, it had never interested me in grabbing a half-dollar (50 Rupees) ticket and visiting this archaic structure. Every day, for the last two years or so, I would hop onto the auto rickshaw every morning with friends and head straight to the library. So very unlike the curious researcher in me.

But, this last week, before leaving for Brisbane, Australia, I wanted to do something extraordinary and go see Pradhanmatri Sangrahalaya. And see for myself what I was missing out on for all these days. And feel what it was like to be inside Nehru’s house. And be fascinated by the extravagant gifts showered on Indian Prime Ministers as they went on foreign trips, which they tend to take many.

Topping the list with the greatest number of souvenirs is the present Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. For someone—a fakir who would travel with a jhola in his hand—it was surprising how Modi amassed gifts and souvenirs from all across the world. But let’s delve into this a little later.

Well, what was it like, you may ask? And I would say, if someone wants to understand how India progressed from 1947 to today, the Pradhanmatri Sangrahalaya in Delhi is a must-visit. But, if you really want to understand what happened to India since 1947, you might as well pick up a book and read, for there are many.

The Pradhanmatri Sangrahalya is a museum designed to tell an elite history—in elite voices—in terms of how India was seemingly built from scratch since Independence. Historians used to do this work. And now, curators, be it in art museums or in propaganda spaces, tend to outdo historians in some sense. The museum symbolises such a historical narration from a presentist viewpoint.

Prior to the establishment of the Pradhanmatri Sangrahalaya, this estate was called Teen Murthi Bhavan, where the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, lived for 16 years until his death.

So, in some sense, as one enters the Sangrahalya, one tends to notice the life Nehru led—including the display of the books he read, the letters he wrote, the place he slept in, the rooms he chaired his meetings in, and the things that were deemed Nehruvian. These are an astonishing set of things. And one is left wondering what it was like to be Nehru—and do things he did.

Then, as one exits from the Nehru’s house, they enter into the humongous alien spaceship-like structure called the Pradhanmatri Sangrahalaya. Here, there are sections dedicated to each Prime Minister, with some including Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Rajiv Gandhi, Chandra Shekar, V.P. Singh, Atal Behari Vajpayee, Narendra Modi, and others.

And, of all the Prime Ministers’ displays, the present Prime Minister Modi’s display looks the most fabulous. A hall full of technological advancements, cricketing victories, Chandrayana mission and all other things that happened—and continue to happen—in Modi’s time are displayed.

There is also a subtle propaganda at play in these displays. Curiously, in every other Prime Minister’s display, there are a few photographs added with the TV celebrities of the time. But a large chunk of poor labourers, peasants, caste and class-deprived people barely find any place in these halls. And communal tensions? And all-increasing inequality?

The limelight of the displays is distributed between two BJP leaders, Vajpayee and Modi, who would go on to become India’s Prime Ministers. Moreover, as one enters through the main hall of the Pradhanmantri Sangrahalaya, a loud voice is played out on the telescreen with the Statue of Unity in the background, and a question in English is spelt out in bold: How different would India have been had Sardar Patel, Nehru’s deputy, become the first Prime Minister as the Congress wanted?

So, even when you enter the Pradhanmatri Sangrahalaya, be mindful of what information to take as facts for the civil services exam and as propaganda for the next general election.

But, despite such subtle propaganda at play, which governments often do even in democracies, there is a lot of history laid out in these walls. As one goes through the displays, one can only embrace a lot of what it was like to see the first telephones in India, how Chandra Shekhar carried on with his Bharat Yatra, how the 1965 war was won, and what it was like to be a political prisoner during the Emergency in 1975.

It is refreshing to see India as it has progressed through time, and at least through the eyes of the Prime Ministers who made it all possible.

And if you are in Delhi, and if you have time, it is not all that bad to hop onto your nearest metro towards Central Secretariat, and on an auto, then to Pradhanmatri Sangrahalaya. And please be mindful: It is closed on Mondays.

Sure, there have been several books that captivate us in their opening sentences. But this one, in particular, was so remarkable that with every word, I felt more enchanted and disturbed at the same time. In every sense, Han Kang’s storytelling and Deborah Smith’s translation are brilliant. True to its literary marvel, the book has won the international Booker prize, and the author a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024. And several other accolades along the way.

Yeong-hye, the protagonist of The Vegetarian, is a young woman living an unremarkable life in Seoul with Mr. Choong, her office-going husband. They are both ordinary people. He wakes up every morning to go to the office, just as his wife cooks, cleans and takes care of the household—day in, day out.

But, on one not-so-usual day, Yeong-hye suffers from a disturbing dream of the death of animals. In the morning, she declares that from now on, she will not eat any meat, which was unheard of in Korean culture. Mr. Cheong, the narrator of the book's first section, begins to be repulsed by his wife’s behaviour. And thereby, punish her: physically, mentally, and sexually.

What Yeong-hye considers a choice—not to eat meat—her husband and father come to see as disobedience and an embarrassment. Her sister considers this choice an illness, and her mother thinks the choice is the cause of her bodily weakness. As a remedy, the father slaps Yeong-hye twice and forces a piece of meat into her mouth. In disgust, Yeong-hye grabs the fruit knife and cuts her hand.

After her stint at the hospital, Yeong-hye continues to choose things she considers natural: avoiding sex, walking bare skin, letting an artist paint flowers over her body, and, thereafter, slowly descending into chaos and horror.

For instance, even though Yeong-hye has stopped wearing a bra, there is always a certain lump in her chest. No matter how deeply she inhales, it doesn’t go away.

She adds, “Yells and howls, threaded together layer upon layer, are enmeshed to form that lump. Because of meat. I ate too much meat. The lives of the animals I ate have all lodged there. Blood and flesh, all those butchered bodies are scattered in every nook and cranny, and though the physical remnants were excreted, their lives still stick stubbornly to my insides.”

In the second section, which follows the narration from the viewpoint of the brother-in-law. Yeong-hye’s older sister, In-hye, is married to a video artist (whose name is a mystery in the novel) with a peculiar interest in painting bodies with flowers.

The second section deals with his oddly erotic obsession with Yeong-hye, who seems to have a Mongolian mark (very unusual for her age) on her, and which appeared to have been the cause of his attraction for her. Everywhere, and every time he thinks of her, he wants to engulf that Mongolian mark—and with it, her, who holds it. So, he seeks Yeong-hye as a model for his project, wherein he would get to paint flowers on her.

When In-hye’s husband starts to paint Yeong-hye, he thinks: “This was the body of a beautiful young woman, conventionally an object of desire, and yet it was a body from which all desire had been eliminated. But this was nothing so crass as carnal desire, not for her—rather, or so it seemed, what she had renounced was that very life that her body represented.” This section is the most sexually perverse and disturbing of all the novel. Towards the end of this session, Yeong-hye is admitted to a mental asylum.

The story's third section is a narration from the viewpoint of the sister, In-hye, whose husband, she believes, had scandalised the whole family. In-hye, since her childhood, has been a responsible child. She worked hard. She managed the household. And even when her artist husband, good-for-nothing and penniless, roamed around with his infatuations, In-hye took care of everything—the kid, the house, the shop, and everything in between.

But the third section is about In-hye’s encounter with Yeong-hye in the depression ward at the mental hospital. Yeong-hye has now tried to run away in the forest once. She has even stopped declaring that she would no longer eat food, and all she needs is water. And mindlessly, for half an hour, she would do headstands. When In-hye asked her to eat, she said she no longer needed food; she is a plant. And she loves to be around plants. And that she no longer wants anything to do with human-like food.

As In-hye sits staring at Yeong-hye lying on the bed after she reveals her desire to become a tree, she thinks:

“Had Yeong-hye mistaken the hospital’s concrete floor for the soft earth of the woods? Had her body metamorphosed into a sturdy trunk, with white roots sprouting from her hands and clutching the black soil? Had her legs stretched high up in the air while her arms extended all the way down to the earth’s very core, her back stretched taut to support this two-pronged spurt of growth? As the sun’s rays soaked down through Yeong-hye’s body, had the water that was saturating the soil been drawn up through her cells, eventually to bloom from her crotch as flowers? When Yeong-hye had balanced up-side down and stretched up every fibre in her body, had these things been awakened in her soul?”

Simultaneously, the story goes back and forth in the part, trying to pity Yeong-hye and understand what caused all this chaos, what may have spiralled out of control, and what would have otherwise been done differently. Each word in this novel is woven together so meticulously as to articulate discomfort, defiance, suffering, resistance and desire on every page.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a novel that defies all forms of social taboos. In doing so, Han Kang’s novel easily complicates and tackles social realities, expectations, and choices, opening us up to a new future. No doubt the story is bleak and gloomy. There are also things that cause so much discomfort as one reads them. But for what it is worth, The Vegetarian is too brilliant.

In these lectures, E.H. Carr asked his listeners what constitutes history. To understand what constitutes history, it is essential to examine how “facts” emerge—and become established—in history, and how they shape historians and their history.

Nineteenth-century historians, such as Ranke in the 1830s, suggest that a historian must “simply show how it really was”—that is, to treat facts as they are, as objects separate from the subject. This view of history was known as the commonsense view of history. Here, the “historian collects [facts], takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to [them]”. But such objectivist history-writing is fundamentally problematic.

The Historian and His Facts

E.H. Carr suggests that “facts speak only when the historian calls on them: he decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context” (pp. 10-11). And in fact, all historians are selective, and all suggestions of historical facts existing objectively, independently of interpretations, are a “preposterous fallacy” (p. 12). There are two ways in which this selection of facts is fundamentally biased.

Say, someone who writes in 18^th-century Europe, only writes of things about the French Revolution that he can see, understand, interpret, and deem fit for himself and his audience. Here, there is already a particular selection bias. Now, say a historian picks up this text and wants to write their history of the French Revolution, they again do their own filters with facts—they select and choose, and sometimes even introduce new facts.

Therefore, E.H. Carr writes: “Of course, facts and documents are essential to the historian. But do not make a fetish of them. They do not constitute history by themselves; they provide no ready-made answer to this tiresome question: What is history?” (p. 19).

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And others include Karuna Mantena, Uday Mehta, Ashis Nandy, Gene Sharp, Shahid Amin, David Hardiman, and Ajay Skaria, who have all discussed an aspect of Gandhian thought which constitutes his logic of worldmaking after empire.

In his essay, “Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi”, published in 1980, Nandy argues that Gandhian thought and ideas posed a threat to the traditional society that persisted in India. Nandy suggests that Gandhi was ‘neither a conservative nor a progressive’: neither did he seek to preserve the past nor to protect the new.

Nandy would effortlessly transcend between the two—and in doing so, he ‘simply reconciled the common essence of the old and the new’. However, despite the synthesising act, Gandhian thought was highly subversive of the Indian, or the Hindu, culture.

Gandhian thought had two intrinsic aspects that posed a threat to the traditional authority of the Hindu society.

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During the period between 1991 and 2020, the US attempted over 188 military interventions globally, whereas between 1948 and 1991, it had only intervened in about 46 conflicts. Subsequent US administrations since the 1990s have intervened in Somalia, Namibia, Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, to name just a few.

Scholars and policy practitioners have since referred to America as either a “global hegemon” or an “empire.” As an empire, some scholars argue, America has sought to shape the world in its image. And depending on whether you ask a realist or a liberal, American hegemony scholars tend to think of the US as a “global policeman”: a power-seeking, profit-maximising hegemon or a democracy promoting, rules-based order-maintaining hegemon. Both these conceptions tend to provide analytical explanations for US foreign policy behaviour.

However, these explanations are insufficient to understand what ideological and rhetorical content spearheaded the American interventionist mindset. In other words, what did US foreign policy makers articulate, in both speeches and writings, about their intentions in undertaking interventionist policies?

America as a Messianic state

Between 1991 and 2021, America had emerged as a messianic state—a nation-state that assumes a global responsibility to save other societies from an impending threat. These states constitute three interrelated features: first, they assume their relative superiority as opposed to others; second, they sustain an altruistic vision for the world; and third, they tend to use the rhetoric of benevolence to justify their actions.

For a time, for European colonial powers, it was the “white man’s burden” to uplift societies from the savagery and barbarism of native societies. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union, as the leader of the communist bloc, similarly used state-led propaganda to propagate global Marxist-Leninist proletarian revolution.

Building on the rhetoric that capitalist state systems were exploitative, the Soviet Union pushed forth the Communist International as a form of classless and stateless society. And for the United States, it was the democratic decline and the subsequent rise of autocratic governments worldwide.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became the sole superpower with the power to wage wars and stop them anywhere in the world. Subsequently, scholars began articulating America as “the last hope on earth,” “the leader of the free world,” and “an empire of liberty.”

These articulations suggested that America played a unique role in the world and that it is an exception. Although the roots of exceptionalism go back to the founding moment (for instance, Thomas Jefferson remarked upon America as an “Empire of Liberty”), American exceptionalism began to animate political discourse more clearly after the end of the Cold War.

Equipped now with the notions of exceptionalism, American leadership began envisioning “democracy promotion” as their altruistic vision for the world. Francis Fukuyama had, by then, in 1989, declared “The End of History” with “the universalisation of liberal democracy as the final form of human Government.” Fukuyama’s thesis—and the subsequent formulations of democratic peace—enabled US foreign policy practitioners to adopt democracy promotion worldwide.

Between 1991 and 2021, various American administrations meticulously adopted the discursive practices of benevolence. Every US administration since President George H. W. Bush in the 1990s spoke of how “with the help of America, all [countries] are on the road to peace,” and how “the impoverished, the oppressed, the weak have looked to the United States to be strong, to be capable and to care.” And “perhaps more than anything else,” how “they have depended on the [United States] to lead.”

Let me illustrate this with an example. In the wake of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which began in the aftermath of the 11 September terror attacks, President George W. Bush said: “Our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” Subsequently, the administration’s National Security Strategy document declared that Afghans and Iraqis have “replaced tyrannies with democracies.”

In most instances of American intervention, the narrative of benevolence animated the public discourse.

The notion of American exceptionalism and its vision for making the world safe for democracy, now equipped with the rhetoric of benevolence that informed its intervention practice—as saving societies from their decline—in the name of democracy promotion.

Donald Trump and the decline of American Messianism

However, American messianism has been in decline since the inauguration of the first Donald Trump Presidency in 2017. Trump has been an outlier in US political orthodoxy. He is a businessman-turned-politician, and notably a self-professed “deal maker.”

Unlike his predecessors, Trump spoke of “America first,” of how the US had been victimised in the world, and of how America should step back from its role in the world and look inwards. This rhetoric of “inwardness,” first evidenced in the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) rallies, has come to dominate US foreign policy since 2017.

After the brief hiatus forced by Joe Biden’s presidential election victory in 2020, Trump is once again back in office—and this time, with a renewed passion for “America first.” And his policies have already rocked the world.

With “reciprocal tariffs” imposed (often non-reciprocally) on friends and foes alike, Trump has signalled that his America does not harbour any altruistic visions of making the world safe for democracy or keeping a check on rising autocratic regimes globally. Instead, Trump’s administration has signalled (at least rhetorically) that it means business, and whichever way and at whatever cost it comes, America is ready to make deals.

There are instances when, in the name of democracy, America propped up military rulers and dictators in Latin America and Africa. And messianism, as a rhetorical tool, sometimes acts as a façade to hide actual intentions. However, messianic rhetoric continues to wane in Trump’s America.

Trump is clear about his intentions and matches them with the rhetoric of “intimidation.” You either do it my way or the highway. Recall, for instance, how Trump intimidated Volodymyr Zelensky at the Oval Office to agree on a peace deal with Russia, without any security guarantees for Ukraine.

NOTE: This article was first published in the Australian Outlook.

Reading

Archives often bear the most intimate imprints of history. Sometimes, it is a letter written on parched paper tucked away in a police file. And other times, it is Ghalib’s poetry scratched on the walls of a jail cell. Or it might be a report on a hallucinating Satyagrahi who deluded himself of meeting national leaders just as he counted days in prison.

Or a letter—a deeply personal one—that finds itself in a private file, written by a wife who awaits her husband’s return from jail cells. Or even worse, scribbled footnotes of bureaucratic files that decide the fate of thousands. Each vignette tells you something about history—not just what happened, but also what caused it, and what that event meant for history itself.

The last two months were marked by a certain sense of joy, when I found something interesting about the times I was reading about; anxiety, and a deep sense of frustration, when I realised that it was not all that easy to do archival work—to dig up materials that might only exist in your imagination.

On a good day, I would sit with friends in the library and tell them the stories from the texts I just discovered in archives—about how some ordinary people faced the British Empire. On a bad day, I would juggle between looking for new avenues for research and new ways to make sense of what I already have in the archives. And, even newer ways of coming to terms with—and telling yourself—that this should be enough. You can tell a good story with this information. There is sufficient data for you to build your argument. And other such excuses.

But finally, that is done now. I have convinced myself enough that I have sufficient data to start working on my PhD chapters. Having done what seemed almost undoable in three months, I now look to working on chapters. I feel confident, at least until another roadblock hits me. No matter how prepared you are with your data, your interpretations, it is never easy.

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There are things you do not have so much control over. Family, for instance, is one. This last month has been anxiety-inducing to say the least. Family situation back home often kept me from reading and thinking so much. Perhaps, things that are too personal to write for this audience, at least for now. But let’s just call this a family situation. There were times I felt helpless. There were also other times I came to terms with feeling helpless. Between sitting and reading in archives, attending calls, and then getting back to reading and thinking, it takes a toll on you. Things have improved a bit on this front now and are likely to continue, so I hope.

In between all this, I fell off in the bathroom and got stitches on my hand. The witnesses, my friends, can attest to the severity. Just a few stitches on the right arm. It took ten days for it to heal, and fifteen for the stitches to come off my arm. Now, almost a month after the incident, just a mark remains.

Thinking

I got a few articles published in the last two months. This is always refreshing. I wrote this journal article with a colleague, Luke Munn, on how AI codifies cultures for the New Media and Society. The abstract reads as follows:

How is the cultural made computational? CLIP models are a recent artificial intelligence (AI) innovation which train on massive amounts of Internet data in order to align language and image, deploying this ‘grasp’ of cultural concepts to understand prompts, classify images and carry out tasks. To critically investigate this cultural codification, we explore MetaCLIP, a recent variation developed by Meta. We analyse the model’s metadata, a single file of 500,000 terms that aims to achieve a ‘balanced distribution’ or sufficiently broad understanding of concepts. We show how this model assembles histories, languages, ideologies and media artefacts into a kind of cultural knowledge. We argue this codification fuses the ancient technique of the list with a more recent technique of latent space. We conclude by framing these technologies as cultural machines that exert power in defining and operationalising a particular understanding of ‘culture’ invisibly and at scale.

In writing this paper, I learnt a lot myself about how AI interprets cultural data to understand culture. And in the process, I also learn what CLIP models do in how AI interprets data.

Read the full article here if you find this intriguing.

Earlier, I had written this journal article for the Australian Journal of International Affairs, titled: “The United States is a Messianic State”, where I argue that between 1991 and 2020, the US foreign policy rhetoric is shaped by the self-image of the United States as a global messiah.

In an invited essay for the Australian Outlook, I reflect further on my formulation:

Between 1991 and 2021, America had emerged as a messianic state—a nation-state that assumes a global responsibility to save other societies from an impending threat. These states constitute three interrelated features: first, they assume their relative superiority as opposed to others; second, they sustain an altruistic vision for the world; and third, they tend to use the rhetoric of benevolence to justify their actions. For a time, for European colonial powers, it was the “white man’s burden” to uplift societies from the savagery and barbarism of native societies. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union, as leader of the communist bloc, similarly used state-led propaganda to propagate global Marxist-Leninist proletarian revolution. Building on the rhetoric that capitalist state systems were exploitative, the Soviet Union pushed forth Communist International as a form of classless and stateless society. And for the United States, it was the democratic decline and the subsequent rise of autocratic governments worldwide.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became the sole superpower with the power to wage wars and stop them anywhere in the world. Subsequently, scholars began articulating America as “the last hope on earth,” “the leader of the free world,” and “an empire of liberty.” These articulations suggested that America played a unique role in the world and that it is an exception. Although the roots of exceptionalism go back to the founding moment (for instance, Thomas Jefferson remarked upon America as an “Empire of Liberty”), American exceptionalism began to animate political discourse more clearly after the end of the Cold War.

Equipped now with the notions of exceptionalism, American leadership began envisioning “democracy promotion” as their altruistic vision for the world. Francis Fukuyama had, by then, in 1989, declared “The End of History” with “the universalisation of liberal democracy as the final form of human Government.” Fukuyama’s thesis—and the subsequent formulations of democratic peace—enabled US foreign policy practitioners to adopt democracy promotion worldwide.

Between 1991 and 2021, various American administrations meticulously adopted the discursive practices of benevolence. Every US administration since President George H. W. Bush in the 1990s spoke of how “with the help of America, all [countries] are on the road to peace,” and how “the impoverished, the oppressed, the weak have looked to the United States to be strong, to be capable and to care.” And “perhaps more than anything else,” how “they have depended on the [United States] to lead.”

Let me illustrate this with an example. In the wake of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which began in the aftermath of the 11 September terror attacks, President George W. Bush said: “Our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” Subsequently, the administration’s National Security Strategy document declared that Afghans and Iraqis have “replaced tyrannies with democracies.” In most instances of American intervention, the narrative of benevolence animated the public discourse.

The notion of American exceptionalism and its vision for making the world safe for democracy, now equipped with the rhetoric of benevolence that informed its interventions practice—as saving societies from their decline—in the name of democracy promotion.

Click on this link to read the full essay.

And finally, I got myself published in the World Politics Review, a political science and IR website read by thousands of dedicated readers on geopolitics. The title of my reflective essay is as follows: “To Lead the Global South, India Must Get Its Own House in Order”.

India has long aspired to be a mouthpiece for the Global South, but those aspirations have grown since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. In recent years especially, India has hosted and convened multiple high-level global summits, proclaimed and defended its strategic autonomy and spoken the language of democratic values and global solidarity. And in doing so, India has sought to position itself as a bridge between Western societies and the developing world—one that is postcolonial, powerful and poised to lead.

But despite Modi’s rhetoric of Vishwa Mitra, or friend of the world, and Vishwa Guru, or teacher of the world, India has struggled to match its foreign policy ambition with achievements. Even as Modi seeks to portray India as the leader of the Global South, its domestic conditions—including socio-economic inequality, religious intolerance, curbs on free speech and democratic decline—suggest it actually lacks the capacity to lead. Instead, India’s foreign policy today increasingly resembles that of what economist Lant Pritchett has called a “flailing state”—the head makes plans, but the limbs don’t follow them.

The article is paywalled, and therefore, if you would like to read this essay, just comment below and share your email. I will share it with you.

And finally, I also read Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, which won the International Booker Prize for 2025. This collection of short stories contains heartwarming stories of Muslim women navigating and challenging the patriarchal and religious norms shaping their everyday lives.

Take, for instance, the heartwarming narration of Shaista’s life, a Muslim woman married to Iftikhar Bhai, who loves Shaista unconditionally and wants to build her a Mahal as beautiful as the Taj Mahal. Soon, Shaista dies while birthing yet another child for Iftikhar Bhai, just as she had birthed several earlier. Thereafter, Iftikhar marries again to another young woman, and the circle would continue–reproduce and die in the process, perhaps. In Iftikhar’s declarations of love for Shaista, which sustained until her death, Mushtaq shows us what love meant and how fleeting it turns out to be.

Click on this link to read the full review of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp.

This is all I did in the last two months. August is likely to be busier than July. I will be travelling back home for a bit. I will also go around the countryside for a bit. I haven’t taken a train journey since coming back from Brisbane. So, doing that, I think, will be fun.