Dearest gentle reader,

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.

I hope you like some of these tips, and perhaps you could incorporate some of them into your writing as well, as I hope to do in mine. This article was first published on my blog here, some months ago.

With my very best regards,

Adarsh

If you are someone looking for advice on writing, it is rare that you would point to a computer geek turned entrepreneur for advice. In this essay, I take that plunge. Today, I will write about Paul Graham. Prominently, his writing—and the advice he gives us on how we write, and ought to write.

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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Paul Graham tells us to write as we speak.

Much of academia is all about jargon. I often used a lot of jargon. Therefore, guilty as charged. However, I am trying to improve here. Look at this essay itself, for example. Graham admits that he is not a good speaker. And that he uses a lot of “um” when he speaks. I am not sure about myself. But all of us, consciously or unconsciously, end up using big words to convey simple things. Look at the texts of some subaltern scholars. They write in dense language that the subaltern itself is left out of its discourse and knowledge production.

Paul Graham says there is an interconnection between writing and speaking. In his 2015 article, “Write like you talk”, Graham writes: “Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language”.

To write well is to engage your audience. You speak to them as you speak with your friend. Graham writes: “If you want people to read and understand what you write, [you must learn to write like you speak to them]… Written language is more complex, which makes it more work to read. It’s also more formal and distant, which gives the reader’s attention permission to drift. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you’re saying more than you actually are.”

Sometimes we use big words just to pretend we know stuff. It is easy. Throw a random word around, and act and feel cool. However, it is not easy to write in your own words. Speaking is informal, but writing is seen as formal. Graham notes: “So perhaps the best solution is to write your first draft the way you usually would, then afterwards look at each sentence and ask: ‘Is this the way I’d say this if I were talking to a friend?’ If it isn’t, imagine what you would say, and use that instead.” Therefore, he adds, “Before I publish a new essay, I read it out loud and fix everything that doesn’t sound like conversation. I even fix bits that are phonetically awkward; I don’t know if that’s necessary, but it doesn’t cost much.”

Therefore, if you just write like you speak, “you’ll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it’s easy to do: just don’t let a sentence through unless it’s the way you’d say it to a friend.”

Paul Graham tells us to write simply.

Writing simply just means using simple language, simple words, and simple sentences. Graham writes: “I try to write using ordinary words… [And] that kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.

I write academic journal articles. Barely anyone picks it up or reads it. But my blog—it circulates (unconsciously) across the internet. Why? I don’t say deeply insightful stuff on my blog, but it still circulates, whereas an essay, I would have written, say, for International Affairs, like this one, barely gets read. Simpler things are easier for people to relate to. They can learn through simpler things.

Anything complex is hard work. When you try to act smart (which you clearly aren’t, if you used flowery language), a lot of readers (who, like myself, aren’t native English speakers) get lost. The more complex you write, the less you should expect others to read.

In his 2021 essay: ‘Write Simply’, Paul Graham writes: “Of course, fancy writing doesn’t just conceal ideas. It can also conceal the lack of them. That’s why some people write that way, to conceal the fact that they have nothing to say. Whereas writing simply keeps you honest. If you say nothing simply, it will be obvious to everyone, including you.” Therefore, Graham tells us, “the main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to”. If you write in a complex way, you will definitely seem clumsy. He tells us that he writes the first draft, then spends days and hours editing it, until he really feels confident about it. Much of the editing is simply making the essay simpler.

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So, how does Paul Graham work on an essay?

Graham answers this question in his really old essay, published in 2005. Here it is:

Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can;

rewrite it over and over;

cut out everything unnecessary;

write in a conversational tone;

develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours;

imitate writers you like;

if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said;

expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong;

be confident enough to cut;

have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag;

don’t (always) make detailed outlines;

mull ideas over for a few days before writing;

carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you;

start writing when you think of the first sentence;

if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first;

write about stuff you like;

don’t try to sound impressive;

don’t hesitate to change the topic on the fly;

use footnotes to contain digressions;

use anaphora to knit sentences together;

read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading);

try to tell the reader something new and useful;

work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far;

when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with;

accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file;

don’t feel obliged to cover any of them;

write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios;

if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately;

ask friends which sentence you’ll regret most;

go back and tone down harsh remarks;

publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas;

print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen;

use simple, germanic words;

learn to distinguish surprises from digressions;

learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

This is a really good approach to all writing. I tend to follow a few of these steps. I don’t usually gloss over my draft once after I have written it. Most of the time, what I write the first time is what usually gets published. I spend time on each sentence to make sure it fits. But the point is not to just stick to something that doesn’t work for you, just so it works for someone else. Be open to writing differently. It usually helps to know what works for you.

Now that we have gleaned through how Paul Graham writes, the last aspect of this essay is his opinion about what makes for a good essay. Let’s just jump in.

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Paul Graham on what makes for a good essay.

In today’s world, we work in tandem with artificial intelligence (AI). More often than not, ChatGPT writes better than us. If so, why even try? I think, if one were to treat writing as a vocation (something one ought to do), it would definitely make no sense. AI will do almost all the things we do now better. And, with time, it will only get better. Therefore, it is important for writers to treat their writing as a way of telling something (new) that otherwise does not exist. Tell in ways an open AI cannot do. How do we do that?

Paul tells us that “good writing should be convincing, certainly, but it should be convincing because you got the right answers, not because you did a good job of arguing.” Unlike what we have been trained to write in schools and colleges, an essay is a beast of its own. An essay should not merely ask questions, but also “has to come up with answers”. It should flow like a river, hitting against a wall at times but still flowing. An essay should be interesting. How? Graham writes: “interesting means surprise… [And] surprises are things that you not only didn’t know, but that contradicts things you thought you knew.” To be surprising, you have to be able to use yourself as a proxy for your reader. You should write about things you think of – and all that comes off as surprising for you.

Graham adds: “If there’s one piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would be: don’t do as you’re told. Don’t believe what you are supposed to. Don’t write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. And don’t write the way they taught you to in school”.

In his recent 2024 essay titled: ‘The Best Essay’, Paul Graham writes: “The best essay now would be one describing a great discovery we didn’t yet know about.” Writing essays is all about discovering ideas through writing. So, for that to happen, you have to find a “sufficiently puzzling” question. And then, try to answer it. And do not be afraid of cutting things out.

Paul writes: “One of the most dangerous temptations in writing (and in software and painting) is to keep something that isn’t right, just because it contains a few bits or cost you a lot of effort”.

I hope you had fun reading this writing advice and that you'll carry a tinge of Paul’s tips with you as you write. I first wrote this essay on my personal blog titled “Notes: Paul Graham’s Tips About Writing”, which I am reposting here.

With my very best regards,

Adarsh

It is that time of the year again, when, like several others I see on Substack, I take stock of the books I read in 2025. (Here is a link to check the books and movies I watched in 2024.)

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.

After a brief stint with philosophy, I read Avinash Paliwal’s India’s Near East: A New History, a book on India’s relationship with countries connected—and sharing borders—with India’s northeastern provinces, such as Bangladesh and Myanmar. Paliwal’s book shows how domestic interests came to interact with foreign policy interests in India’s policy towards the near east, promoting democracy, bolstering autocrats, arming rebels, waging wars, building ports, and granting loans.

About the book, I wrote: ‘Paliwal’s book is an important correction to the omission of the historical study of India’s near east. Paliwal convinces the readers that the history of India’s near east is worth reading, pausing, and introspecting on.’ Click here to read a review of Paliwal’s book.

In April, when I travelled to India to conduct my PhD fieldwork, and while relaxing at home, I read ’s The Burden of Democracy. Mehta’s 2003 book is a provocative essay on India’s democracy. One of the most evocative things Mehta wrote was that India never had ‘unity in diversity’, unlike the general understanding, but what India had for a very long time was that Indians were ‘diverse in their unities’, which enabled ‘each of us to imagine the connection with the others in his/her own way’. Check out my review of Mehta’s book on democracy here.

Next, I picked up Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp. I wish I had read this book in Kannada, a language in which it was first published. Each story in the “Heart Lamp” opens up the life of a Muslim woman. The reader encounters that beneath all their sensible and sartorial characteristics, there is a story of suffering, stigma, patience, and perseverance. Mushtaq’s stories are are vivid, eloquent, illustrative, and at times, witty. To read the review of Mushtaq’s Booker-winning Heart Lamp, click here.

I then read one of Ashis Nandy’s essays on the politics of Gandhi’s assassination. Nandy is an astute observer of the human psyche. 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. To read the notes on Nandy’s essay, click on the link here.

In August, I read ’s Quarterlife, published in 2023, which explores the fraught political realities in India after the emergence of the right-wing nationalist party, which rose to power in 2014. The story follows three people whose lives are deeply intertwined with each other and those around them. Set in Maharashtra — where business capital and Maratha identity collide and shape political tensions — the novel also traces how Hindu nationalist ideologies first took root and came to sustain. About the book, I wrote: ‘Devika Rege’s Quarterlife serves as an ode to the deeply contested political realities in Modi’s India’. To read the review, click here.

In September, I read E.H. Carr’s seminal work What is History?, which discussed and debated history and historical theories of his time. Carr writes at one place: the ‘historian collects [facts], takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to [them]’, but facts, themselves do not tell anything, they only make sense when the historian calls on them. In that sense, all history is selective, and objective history is a ‘preposterous fallacy’. Check out the notes on E.H. Carr’s book on history here.

I also read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian in September. The book begins as follows: ‘Before my wife turned vegetarian, I had always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way’. And I was hooked on this book throughout. I wrote:

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.

Read the full review of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian at this link.

In October, I returned to Brisbane from a long and arduous few months of research and writing in Delhi and India. It was also the time for me to pick up some philosophy. And who better than Amia Srinivasan, a feminist philosopher, who wrote The Right to Sex. In the book, Srinivasan asks: Are men entitled to sex? Srinivasan says: No. In fact, ‘there is no right to sex’, and ‘to think otherwise is to think like a rapist’ (p. 95). Sex is not a sandwich. It cannot be distributed in society. Just like a sandwich, which every child might get in your class, except for you, because of your race or whatever, the distributive nature of sex is itself problematic. What Srinivasan does in The Right to Sex is to turn feminism on its head and ask uncomfortable questions that, even when they animate our present world, are difficult to answer. Click on this link to read the review of the Right to Sex.

Towards the end of October, I read Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills. 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. Read the full review at this link.

In November, I read Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk. 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. I really loved this book. About the book I wrote, ‘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.’ Click here to read the full review of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk.

In December, I read ’s Mother Mary Comes to Me. In the essay where I reviewed her book, I pointed out the deeply troubled relationship I have had with Roy. Growing up in Sainik School, during the early years of my schooling, I was administered a steady dose of nationalism, and Roy-like characters were the real internal enemies that supposedly destabilised the Indian nation. And from there, towards my admiration for Roy, it’s been some journey. 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. Check out the full review of Mother Mary Comes to Me here.

For the last three months, after every morning run, I have been reading William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, a craft book on writing well in the English language. To write well, Zinsser tells us, one must focus on their 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.’ So, 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. Check out my notes on William Zinsser’s tips for writing well.

These are some of the books I had the chance to read, besides the usual set of texts and books one ought to read for their own PhD projects. I have two other Han Kang books lying on my desk, which I will begin reading in the next few days. There is Hideo Yokoyama’s The North Light. Additionally, there are some notable books by authors such as Rachel Cusk, Kiran Desai, and Oliver Sacks, among others, that are worth reading.

I also have a few philosophy and political theory texts, which I will read this year. One being J.S. Mill’s On Liberty. Another is Isaiah Berlin’s Four Essays on Liberty. Then, Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics. And then, Jostein Gardner’s Sophie’s World. And I hope, as the year passes by, there will be some books that come to my attention—and that I will read. So, I am excited for 2026. You, too, dear reader, feel free to write to me about the books I can read based on what I have read this year. For now, I stop here and get back to the usual PhD life.

With my kind regards,

Adarsh

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, something that does not work for you. But a general primer of Woolf’s guides will always help.

Remember, a good reader will always read as the author writes it. And let’s hope to be good readers.

Now, I need to caveat something: I wrote this particular essay on my blog first with the same title. It has been a while since, so I am re-posting it here.

Now, if you enjoyed reading this article, complement it with Orwell’s brilliant guide to writing well.

And if you liked this enough, dearest reader, consider sharing & subscribing :)

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Cover Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash

For most of June and July, I have engaged myself in archival documents. Archival materials contain vignettes of history. These documents open us up to the world that was contained in paper trails, buried in one corner of an archival institution.

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.

For now, dear reader, I let this newsletter slip through my grip and pass on to you. I hope you enjoy reading this one. Feel free to comment below on how your life has been these two months.

Would it be ridiculous to ask, have you come across any memes in the last week or so? Did you find it funny or reminiscent? And have you shared it with someone?

Since you are reading this essay online, there is a high possibility that, consciously or unconsciously, you are a part of the large meme-consuming crowd. According to a report published in Business Standard, Indian smartphone users spend thirty minutes of their day consuming and sharing memes.

Memes have become a regular dose of satire; infotainment, which takes a crisp informational story and transforms it into just an image, a GIF clubbed as a several-second video. Memes are cultural products. They are socially embedded small packets of information.

As consumers of memes on an everyday basis, one can say with certainty that they can be both exhilarating and exhausting simultaneously. Exhilarating because they induce happy feelings in us. Exhausting because of the sheer dump of information shared on social media. And, there is also no doubt that they can be entirely absurd.

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The term ‘meme’ was coined by acclaimed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his famous book The Selfish Gene in 1976. Meme, he claimed, is a social gene that takes part in the imitation and evolution of culture. Dawkins wanted to understand why certain behaviours, unreasonable from a social evolutionary perspective, existed in different human societies. Ideas that seem contradictory to human evolution and survival tend to both survive and thrive.

And for Dawkins, just as Darwinian evolutionary theory, ideas as human genes compete through human interactions. And some ideas emerge victorious, while others are forgotten as quickly as they find their place in history. This process, in ‘Dawkinsean’ sense, is a ‘natural selection’ but for ideas. However, Memetics, as the field came to emerge, has since been refuted as pseudoscience.

Modern Internet memes have become a cognitive sensation. They are now made for entertainment, promotion, and marketing, but also for self-expression, even social and political commentary. They can be made by merging different images and reproducing video content with texts or commentary.

This repackaged information relies on expansion mainly through humour. But it is not just humour. Memes can appeal to people through other emotions, too. People utilise memes to sell their products, to convince others into hating/disliking a certain section of society, to wage wars and bring peace, and even to propagate religious and cultural aspects of a society. But these are all well-known.

However, what is not very well-known is how memes elicit interpersonal intimacy: how memes become the agents of interpersonal intimacy (i.e., love and other drugs!).

Why do people on Instagram or, say, even WhatsApp, share memes with their (prospective) partners? What makes memes so powerful? Why are people so enamoured by memes?

The basic premise of meme circulation is its ability to evoke momentary emotive reactions. People send memes back and forth to elicit such reactions. They are momentary—but memorable.

A caveat: this is not to say that memes are only sent to elicit intimate partnerships, they exist between friends, family, and those-who-are-far-off-and-forgotten-and-want-to-remind-them-that-they-exist-and-you-value-them.

Memes, in general, become agents to connect people living far from each other. They establish a certain familiarity, nostalgia, reminiscence, etc. But they are a quick ice-breaker. If you want to speak with someone on Instagram, you send them a meme. And that is how common they are. With new acquaintances, a meme is a pavement to build ground—or, say, some millennials call it: break the ice.

And therefore, meme intimacy. The term ‘meme intimacy’, for me, refers to the ways in which memes themselves become agents of social relations. Although in a narrower sense of the term, intimacy is about familiarity and close associations, memes shift this intimacy to the unknown at times.

For example, a coworker only known through meetings and sharing a cubicle on the same floor may not seem an intimate acquaintance. But, say, you start talking on Instagram, and you both share memes with one another. And now, a sense of meme intimacy persists.

Intimacy demands a sense of familiarity, and to love and to care requires a sense of self-disclosure about this closeness. Each time we share a meme—assuming it represents what we are feeling right now—we disclose a part of us to them with or without our knowledge.

Intimacy is the conformity about knowing the other, and being known by them. It inhabits a space in our shared understanding about what they mean to us and we to them. It is like Spotify: we predominantly listen to the songs Spotify suggests, and Spotify curates songs for you to listen to based on what you listen to.

Memes, then, are like favourite songs or lyrics of a song that quiet you down when you deeply desire something that is unfamiliar or intensely meaningful in its bullshitness. Please see that it is not a surrender of the self to something else. It is just something that exists, and what we need at that moment. It is rather a quiet moment of holding a hand and feeling accepted.

Since humans are social animals. Aristotle, remember? Humans depend on each other for social existence. They fall in love, fall out of it, fall in love again, and fall out of it again, and so on. But, in these every-once-in-a-while happenings, memes tend to draw us close to others. Memes reduce a certain sense of loneliness and isolation that has emerged even more with social media.

I share memes with my brothers, sisters, girlfriends, boyfriends and with many more. I have friends who share memes with me on the roll. It is those memes that keep me connected to and with them.

Memes touch people in a strange way. It is not that we sit and think too much about what effect a meme has on us. And that is perhaps why, dear reader, you have me writing this essay. Because I sat through and thought about what effects the meme has on us. I am guilty of sending memes and receiving memes.

It is possible, after a long day of work, that you just want to chuckle at something. And you wish someone sent you a funny video or something. And there you go, you open your social media, and there is a barrage of memes. One after another—all funny, and some not-so-funny. It is also possible that you are out of words to express something, dear reader, so memes come to your rescue.

Memes make it easier for introverts to connect with others at a different level (and this can work only until they ask you out for a coffee!). And, on the go, you can send them while on a train, or as you read a book, or as you stand in a queue, or as you sip your coffee.

In a strange way, meme intimacy has allowed us to discover people for who they are and what they tend to become. And just as I finished writing this essay, a meme drops in on my dashboard, stating: ‘this reminds me of you’.

Has it ever occurred to you what it feels like—or even means—to live freely? Despite all our personal privileges, are we truly free? Is anyone really free?

These are the kinds of questions I thought through today as I traversed through the wide alleys of Central Delhi, getting drenched in the rain, escaping getting hit by ever-speeding cars, and slowing down to think if my friction-less chappals would slip and the white pants would get muddy. Upon reaching the metro station, I was in a long queue of passengers huddling through the security maze.

After all this, I am left wondering, are we truly free? Perhaps this is a question of privilege—a privilege I may have struggled to ask all my life. But, a privilege nonetheless…

When I was young, my parents told me to study well, or else there was no option except to graze the buffaloes like my village peers. Boy, a study I did. I joined a school where I could grab a full scholarship to study. Since my parents could not educate themselves enough, they wanted me to study hard. That is all the desires they had. Ah, a little more than that!

They wanted me to become a civil servant. An (Indian Administrative Service) IAS officer, so to speak, or as they colloquially termed it, a district collector. However, I dreamt of being one until I really did not. I did not know what it meant to start with when I wanted to be that. And I very well knew what it meant when I didn’t want to be that.

Every once in a while, my father eloquently puts it, despite all his failed persuasions to get me to prepare for the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) Exam, “We gave you all this education so that you travel in a government car, with laal batti (loosely translated as read beacon)”. (Trust me, I have often told him that these vehicles no longer carry a red beacon.)

Beneath all these desires lie a certain notion of power, prestige, and respect. Why, I often ask myself! Is this desire something society created for us? Is it a failure of our society that perpetually wants to maintain a system of hierarchy (where bureaucracy is the state, the state is the god-like, and citizenry is just subjects)?

Millions of children are put through a system of education, a system of examination, overtly telling them that they are not good enough until they really make it. Millions more are in a coaching system that suck their life out every day. Why does our education system not allow us all to be individually self-sustaining? Why does it compel us to chase a certain system of examinations? Are we all just in a maze through which the Government finds excuses to create jobs?

Or are we all just so enamoured by the state that our sense of citizenship arises from our own escape from thinking like a subject? Are we merely trying to escape subjecthood through our becoming a state, through IAS?

Is it an aspirational element of trying to escape poverty, the life we are living, and practising a sense of belief that IAS alone is a respectable job? Or is it just an amalgamation of all this?

As I grew through my bachelor’s and entered my master’s at Delhi University, I sensed a quiet discomfort in the thought that I could study for UPSC. Part of the blame must go to the kinds of things I read at the University. I sensed the kinds of structures that existed and realised that I would not want to get entangled in the maze of the desire machine that is IAS.

Reading Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, and Foucault, I sensed that the world could be different. And the world we live in is our own making.

If we have already created a world like this, can we make it differently by asking different questions? This is something I began grappling with.

Thanks to the environment I was brought up in, with barely anyone asking questions, it always put an onus upon me to read more. But my environment is also not very conducive to everything I am discussing.

I doubt if my parents fully understand—and appreciate (for I thoroughly appreciate their concerns that they cannot afford their 27-year-old son to speak philosophically about transcending worldly mimetic desires)—what it means to do a PhD. But somehow, I have made my peace with it.

Even if I were to win a Nobel Prize, my father would be dismayed that his well-educated son (who studied God-knows-what) did not even bother to write this UPSC exam even once. So, to his friends, my father would begrudgingly complain: “Look, if he had written the exam once, he would have surely cleared it.”

Why is there a constant urge to do UPSC in our societies? What does it say about our societies, in general?

Since our independence, bureaucracy has remained a system that is aloof from social realities in a manner of living through social realities. What do I mean by it?

Even as an IAS officer administers Indian societal units, they have often looked at society as consisting of subjects—of beings that need to be controlled. One part of the problem is thanks to colonial subjecthood (a kind of Foucauldian governmentality). And another is our inability to ask questions. Our inability as a society to encourage a thriving environment is doing so. How do I justify this?

Go to a local police station and see what the village households think of police stations. In many Indian households, going to a police station or a court meeting would be seen as succumbing to their honour. The police are not just a representation of power, but their reinforcer. The stick-carrying police (as often portrayed in Indian movies) or a recurring innuendo of a bureaucratic clerk swamped with paperwork are all products of the state machinery. State power hangs on its postcolonial subjects.

While there is a discomfort about the state power, there is also a great deal of desire to get hold of that power. The state, through the mechanism of conducting UPSC and bureaucracy exams each year, has created a machinery of desires. Since there is an overlaying structure of ruler and subject, the social classes (both rich and poor) attach bureaucracy to a supreme value.

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The Neta-Babu (politician-bureaucrat) nexus of the elitism of class hierarchy has created mimetic desires among Indian social classes. It is a mechanism for the people living in poverty and the middle classes to escape their subjecthood and establish their citizenry. It is a mechanism through which they attain importance, and their lives are worth living. Therefore, becoming an IAS officer becomes a mimetic desire.

As French philosopher René Girard puts it, one desires something because somebody else desires it. But I go a little further and argue that one desires something because society desires that thing. Elsewhere, Girard writes:

Man is a creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.

I would also invoke Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze to make a case that desire itself is a product of capitalism. But that would drag me to write another essay like this one. Also, I have forgotten what they had to say about desire anyway. So, let’s stick to Rene Girard!

There is another twist to this tale. Perhaps, we are also always driven by what others think of our decisions. For my father: “What would I tell others that my son/daughter is doing?” “Humanities?” “At 27?” “That thing isn’t going to get them a job!” “Ah, they are working?” “Nah, that isn’t good enough.” “That isn’t a government job, right?” “You aren’t too sure how long your fortunes will last.”

For the society: “More importantly, doing a Humanities—and not doing an IAS.” “That is quite a bummer!” “What would other people think?” “That they are not simply good enough?” “Maybe they are not particularly smart enough to crack the exam!” “Oh, maybe they are too lazy!”

What others (in society at large) expect us to do—and our ability to achieve them—determines our self-worth. Becoming an IAS brings social prestige and surplus to an Indian community. A community desires that someone in their community become an IAS. It brings with it a sense of self-worth. But why?

Was the sense of self-worth ever lost in the first place? I don’t know. It may just be that we are fed to be worthy members of society by our social circles. Being an IAS, I suggest here, is the highest level of one’s ascribed worthiness in the Indian society as we live it.

If our worth is attained through what becomes of you, are you really free? We are always chasing what others want us to do. We often want to do something because others have done so. And we may also often do something because we must do something.

Doing something is a part of the puzzle. It is a mechanism that holds societies in a fix. Doing something also intuitively controls us, in ways we don’t yet know and fully appreciate. What we do defines us. What we do allows us to feel free. But are we really truly free? I don’t know!

NOTE: I first published this essay on my blog almost two years ago on August 13, 2023. However, this essay has stayed with me, so I'm posting it here for you to read, if you haven’t already.

I have just edited this for clarity. And if you resonate with any of this, feel free to share it with others :)

I am in India’s capital city, New Delhi, where I am scouring through archival materials these days. Archives are the places where governments and private individuals (possibly of importance) share their documents, papers, and other materials, for whoever wishes to access them.

There are two main archival sites in New Delhi—the Prime Ministers Museum and Library (PMML) and the National Archives of India (NAI).

At the moment, I am in PMML, which houses a trove of private papers and newspapers in physical and microfilm formats. PMML, previously known as the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), houses a great deal of private papers (both institutional and individual) and a great set of books accessible for scholars to read through.

For instance, if you wish to research India’s foreign policy, you could access a great deal of private papers (from secretaries of Prime Ministers to Prime Ministers’ correspondences, secret files, and minutes of meetings, among others). For my research, I am required to access a large chunk of newspapers, which are mainly available in microfilm format. And in this one month, I have made substantial progress in terms of my archival work.

Archives tend to contain information. But, as a researcher, it is important to understand what the archives contain and what is usually left out of them. Politics is usually related to what is left out of archives, and what has been less documented, whose works are neglected in archival materials, and what it tells us about the politics of archives.

In a postcolonial Indian context, politics and history sat in relation to one another. Just as the Indian state began its project of sovereignty, it was deeply involved in its historical narration. Even some of the nationalist historians have come to admit that history was meticulously mediated by the state in the nation-making processes.

But, more starkly, in telling the story of the birth of the nation-state, Indian historians wrote praises for Gandhi and the Congress, at times, delineating other figures like Ambedkar, Savarkar, and Jinnah, as doing petty politics and obstructing the ways in which India could secure its independence. And its effects are seen in how we are taught history in school days.

But, more starkly, archives are the sites where history is written. Archives maintain what is known as “official memory”. And as a historian, it is critical to not just document what exists in the archive, for these archives also serve the statist goal, but what they leave out of them.

Archives are also about interpretations. One historian may come to appreciate something, while the other could disdain the very existence of that fact. Given that the individuals encountered in archives are no longer alive to tell their own story, it is important to be mindful of what we tend to write—and how to consciously understand what they meant to convey.

Moreover, archives are just a fragment of the past—and not the full story in itself—told through interlocutors who may have had their own reasons to understand things in the way they did.

In this one month of sitting and reading through the four historical individuals I seek to study, I have come to interpose each of their points of view in relation to each other. Understand what they thought and why they did so. What they feared the most (for this shaped how they negotiated those fears in terms of what they thought about the world and their relations in it). And what values they came to appreciate and accept.

Share fuzzy notes

Each morning, I, along with my peers, head to the archive.

1. In the mornings, I read or write something.

2. I have a notebook where I explicitly write a few points about what I may have read in archives, and what feelings I encountered in them.

3. I then sit and write on my laptop, the very same points as fieldwork notes (every fortnight) and send them to my advisor for his comments.

4. In the afternoon, I am back scrolling through microfilms (At times, it seems very boring—but when you find something interesting, it feels so good to read! Eureka moment, perhaps!)

5. And by the time it is evening, eyes begin to wear out.

6. Head back home – and then, watch a movie, in the end.

This routine goes from one day to another, and to the next, and so on. And once you are in the groove of it, you begin to enjoy it. And as you begin missing writing, on a fine Sunday, you sit in front of a laptop and start jotting down points for this newsletter.

This, dear reader, has been life lately. You might even dread this, and be like, damn, how boring! But that is alright, we need people to tell us boring stories.

I have slowed down on my writing lately, but there are some new writings to share:

• I wrote a new article titled: "Culture Machine: How MetaCLIP Codifies Culture", published with colleague Luke Munn in New Media and Society. This article moves beyond the literature on AI bias and seeks to examine how AI systems come to understand and grasp culture.

• Besides this, I watched a few movies and wrote their reviews too: Sookshmadarshini and Kishkindha Kaandam, two exceptionally written Malayalam movies of 2024.

This is everything I have for now—but, again, another month, another newsletter. Adios.

Greetings,

Adarsh

It’s that time of the month when I provide an update on life and PhD. It’s been over a year since I started my PhD in IR in Brisbane, Australia. But, after a year of stay in Brisbane, and towards the end of March, I moved to India to visit family and friends.

My family lives in a remote village in the northern part of the Karnataka state. It is a fully-fledged farming household. Early morning, one wakes up to irrigate the land, feed the cattle, milk the buffaloes, and stroll through narrow alleys between crops. If you were to ask me, I am not good at farming, and do not desire it either. But that’s what our household looks like.

Waking up to the rooster crowing, if you have already slept through the Azaan in the nearby village. And then, a bright red sun beams at you, which you can enjoy—but cannot capture on camera, no matter how expensive the phone you hold. And this goes on.

During my one-month stay at home, I ate a lot of home-cooked food, which I had missed for so long when I was in Brisbane. There were occasions when I visited relatives. Friends, briefly. And then, in between, I attended a wedding. All this, I did without really caring much about what my PhD fieldwork would look like.

Earlier, when I left Brisbane for my hometown in India, I thought this one month would be a break. But, I have not been meaningfully taking breaks. It happens with those who know nothing except how to read and write.

After a few days at home, I got excessively bored. I grabbed a book every once in a while. Try to read. Try to make notes in the margins. Try to write something. And then, back to reading. And so on.

• For one, I re-read Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s Burden of Democracy, which interrogates the progress and pitfalls of Indian democracy since independence.

• Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s 2003 book The Burden of Democracy is a short but extraordinarily evocative essay on the Indian democracy in the making. In these 120-odd pages, Mehta engages with two pertinent questions on democracy: Is exercising political choice meaningful or an illusion? And if it is meaningful, has the exercise led to creating a better social world?

• Mehta argues: “Our choices have come to bear the imprint of the social inequality on the one hand and overbearing statism on the other. It argues that the texture of social relations in Indian society deforms its politics and that the organization of the state impedes it from serving us well.” (p. 7).

• Do check out my review of this book if you want to get a sense of what Mehta has to say about Indian democracy.

Apart from this one book, I have not meaningfully read any other book. Even when I tried to read a few pages from Ram Guha’s Gandhi Before India to make sense of how Gandhi’s life was and what influenced Gandhi to lead his life the way he did, I could not successfully finish the book.

Perhaps, this is because, I thought to myself, if I am reading Gandhi, I might as well read those archival documents I have on Gandhi. So, I began reading up Harijan, a Gandhi-led newspaper that discussed issues of social and national importance. In the next few days of April, I read through a few editions of Gandhi’s Harijan. Made notes. Collected snippets. Scribbled a few pointers in my diary. And all this, I hope, I can use to tell good stories.

This part of the break has been meaningful. If you were a sceptic, you might as well say that it does not look like a break at once.

Now, some part which seems like a break. During this one month, I watched a lot of Malayalam movies. Here are some of them.

• For instance, Manjummel Boys was a beautiful movie about friendship. The movie follows a group of eleven friends from Manjummel, Kerala, who embark on a trip to Kodaikanal. The trip soon takes a tragic turn when one of the friends, Subhash (Sreenath Bhasi), plunges into a hole in Guna Caves. Read the full review here.

• Kishkindha Kaandam is a suspense thriller movie dealing with how past traumas come to shape present lives in their intricate personal relations.

• The story begins with Ajayan (Asif Ali), who, a forest officer himself, brings his new wife, Aparna (Aparna Balamurali), herself an IT professional in Bengaluru, after a quiet registered marriage, to his ancestral home set close to a dense forest. And soon after, we are introduced to Ajayan’s father, Appu Pillai (Vijaya Raghavan), who is a reclusive, easily angered, and stern military man.

• We learn soon after that Ajayan’s wife had died of a disease earlier, and their son had gone missing. And that their son’s mysterious disappearance could possibly be linked to Appu Pillai. Read the full review of Kishkindha Kaandam.

• Sookshmadarshini, similarly, is another Malayalam suspense thriller which moves away from the conventional police procedural, which begins with police chasing a crime or a criminal. In this one, it is your everyday neighbours. It is refreshingly new.

• The story begins with Manuel (Basil Joseph) returning to his ancestral home with his ailing mother, in the neighbourhood where Priyadarshini (Nazriya Nazim) stays with her husband and daughter. Priya is an inquisitive neighbour whose curiosity leads to a web of mystery.

• They say curiosity is the mother of invention, but in this movie, this adage takes a new form: curiosity is the mother of interrogation. Read here for the full review of Sookshmadarshini.

• Besides these, I also watch Santosh, a Hindi-language police procedural drama that deals with how caste, crime, and corruption come to interact and sustain social inequalities. Here is the review of Santosh.

Well, that’s about movie-watching.

Movie-watching has been a catharsis from PhD. It gives you a break from thinking. These breaks, when taken in moderation, tend to reenergise your thinking for some of us. I am not sure if this really helps everyone. But, for someone like me, movies are cathartic.

However, I have been thinking of changing this. I want to replace movies with something like books. Fiction, perhaps. I should read more about how to write well. Those books, perhaps. I am not sure yet.

Now that my time at home is over, and I am back in Delhi to start my PhD fieldwork, I will be once again back with a routine. Waking up early. Eating my overnight oats. And doing some exercises before that. And then, the library. This will be a change that will take some time for me to get used to. I hope that these next few months will be productive. I hope that I am able to collect the data for my research. And that I am able to tell a good story by the end of my PhD.

But, for now, I leave you to whatever you, dearest gentle reader, are up to. And I will make it a point to pick up a book and read it the following week. For now, I take leave of you, and adios until we meet again.

Warmest greetings,

Adarsh

The start of March has been spectacularly ominous. At the start of the month, Brisbane witnessed something unusual, even by the standards of Brisbane weather.

Cyclone Alfred—Alfie, as some Aussies would call it—hit Queensland shore. Some 50 years ago, Cyclone Althea, a category three cyclone, hit Queensland and almost flattened much of the Townsville area. But that is now a memory—and most of the Queenslanders were not even privy to it.

March 5, Wednesday.

Soon after the news of Cyclone Alfred’s landing on the shores of Brisbane was made known, the panic had set in across the city.

Young and old people huddled through alleys of supermarket lanes to purchase water bottles, canned food, beer bottles, and other essential stuff. Within hours, the shelves in Coles and Woolies were empty. I and my other flatmates hopped onto a bus three times just to buy water bottles, milk, and other survival things.

Soon that evening, we filled all empty water bottles and other kitchen utensils with water; buckets and bowls were filled with water, too. We also cleaned our balconies. The chairs and tables were moved to the garage. Garbage bins were cleared out and put in the garage. And, at the end of the day, we declared our flat to be cyclone-ready. I have never witnessed a cyclone myself. I have not had much information about what a cyclone feels like.

My Chinese flatmate, however, was left undeterred. Her province, she declared, witnesses typhoons year-long, so this cyclone is not a big deal. I have only fleetingly heard and read about the effects of the 2004 cyclone throughout the Indian Ocean.

But personally, I have never come across a cyclone. So, I was in panic mode, too. My place of stay has a history of flash flooding and riverine flooding because I stay very close to the Brisbane River. So, there was definitely the scare of floods and the water seeping inside our flat.

Roland (my PhD advisor) and Ollie (a PhD friend) asked me to go to their place in case things turn out bad. But I wanted to take a chance with this cyclone. I never faced something like this and wanted to wade through this crisis.

March 6, Thursday.

Today, we stayed locked in our rooms. There was some rain all day. But there were not many storm-like effects.

There was some wind, too. The weather has gotten humid, too. So, it is just too confusing as the weather. It might perhaps be the calm before the storm. The news says that the effect of the cyclone on the Gold Coast is already brutal. Power lines are gone. There is widespread destruction. No loss of lives as such. But storms seem to be hitting the shores of Gold Coast. In Brisbane, however, the cyclone is still category two—and its effects still to be seen.

Cyclone is expected to hit tonight. It has been too boring to stay in a room all day. You open the phone. Watch the news. See where the cyclone is at. And then, read some news. And then, sleep. And wake up and watch the news. And watch some movies. And keep your laptop and phone in charge while the power lasts. And sleep.

March 7, Friday.

Alfie is now expected to hit in the early mornings of Saturday. It is the same as usual. Breakfast seems to be just overnight oats, and dinner is some eggs. Scrambled and boiled.

Besides that, life has gotten even more boring. Nothing new to do. I could not read anything without Cyclone's panic. I sit on my chair for a while. Then, I will be on the sofa for another hour and on the bed for the rest of the day. So, now, onto Saturday.

Thankfully, despite the incessant rain tonight, no flooding in my area.

March 8, Saturday.

I woke up today with a funny feeling. The first thing I checked was the news. Cyclone Alfred had already become an ex-cyclone by the time it hit Brisbane's shores. By morning, the cyclone was downgraded from Category 2 to Category 1 and, later, to Tropical Low.

Wow, I am amazed at how much I have learned about cyclones in these last few days. How they work, what to do when they hit, and what their intensities are, among other things. Now, just as I wake up, I go to the Kitchen and look at the number of water bottles we hoarded just in case.

There is some rain, however.

March 9, Sunday.

Well, it looks like I was wrong yesterday about the Cyclone. Today, it rained heavily. Incessantly. It poured like cats and dogs. Even as I write, I hear the downpours. It feels really bad suddenly. It might flood tonight. But I will be fine since we are on the second floor.

My friend’s place is already flooded in St. Lucia. The water had seeped through from the floors. And they had to stay up briefly to sweep their floors. I watched this lovely movie: The Boys on the Boat. I also did some reading now today.

I read Zachary Schag’s The Princeton Guide to Historical Research. I should read some chapters again while organising my chapters later on :)

Well, now, it’s been two days since Sunday. Today, I went to see if there was any water in and around my area. Some 500 meters from my place, a tall tree had fallen to the ground—and besides that, there was not much impact in my area. Thankfully!

This is, perhaps, everything I wanted to write in this newsletter, dearest gentle reader. I will write again with something interesting over the period.

My kindest regards,

Adarsh.

I am writing another newsletter within a week. Things like this happen but rarely have even written newsletters regularly. So, in any case, it is new.

Today has been good so far. I did the Parkrun today.

In South Bank Parkrun, where I usually—religiously for a while now—run, about 800 runners (young and the old alike, with their dogs, with their babies in baby carriages, with their smartwatches and sunscreens) huddle through the wide lanes of the Brisbane pathways.

Even though today was exceptionally hot in the mornings, I did fairly well with the run. In the last few runs, I have been running 5k in 25 mins.

Just a year ago, when I first started running sometime now, I would run the 5k in an hour or so. I had never run over 5 kilometres in a long time now. But running itself was unnatural to me. When I was in Sainik School (military school), I ran across the country every Saturday. I did so for seven years. And then, one fine day, after I had graduated from the school, I stopped.

There was no motivation, after all. No one was there to care if I actually ran or not. I went to college and completed my graduation without ever hitting the ground for a run.

Then, the COVID-19 came. I bulged up—and there was no stopping the bulging. With no exercise and quarantine, I gained about 20 kgs in a short span of time. The weight suddenly went up from 65 to 85 kgs. And with this, my confidence was gone for a toss. All the youthful bravado had suddenly disappeared.

The year was 2022, and COVID-19 was still looming around the corner. But I decided to mask up and start running. I would run about 2 kilometres—feel tired, and walk back. It did not help.

So, just as any uninformed person would do, I stopped eating. I thought, if I gained with eating, I should stop eating—and all the fat would just disappear. After six months of running clumsily and eating less, I lost about 10 kgs. But, it did not help much. I felt lazy and tired all the time.

When I went to the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, in 2023, I was able to maintain the same weight more or so. Somewhere, about 75 kgs, fluctuating nonetheless. I started running irregularly. But, it did not help. Even when I was able to run, I couldn’t control my food: all too savoury and sweet Indian food. The hostel food seemed too good to give up on. So, while I had control over the weight, I still did not feel physically fit. By the end of my two years at JNU, I had lost just about a few kgs and reached 72 kgs.

In 2024, when I first began running on the Brisbane riverside, it was not surprising that I could not run 5 kilometres in an hour. Many times, 5k seemed just too hard. So, I first made it a habit to run just about 3 kilometres in half an hour, or a little over that. Most times, these runs were just walks. But, steadily, just as the tortoise in the story of the rabbit-tortoise race, I have been able to make some progress.

Every few days in a week, I run. I run about 5 kilometres in 30 minutes with ease. And, then, I need to push myself a bit too hard to complete this in 25 minutes. But I see a lot of young and elderly people who run regularly run better than I do. Despite the run, I haven’t made much progress in the weight loss—it had remained about 69-68kgs for a while.

However, recently, I have made some tweaks to my diet. Eat healthy. Be boring, in terms of the food choices. Cut down on sugar as much as you can. Drink coffee—but sugarless. These things, in the last month or so, have made me lose some weight. I now weigh about 65 kg. And it feels so good to be back to what I had weighed when I was 20.

These were some things I wanted to achieve when I first started running, and now I need newer and more challenging goals.

1. Perhaps I should run a 5k in 20 minutes.

2. Run a marathon, too, someday!

3. Maybe, even weigh about 60 kgs over this year.

4. Learn things to keep me healthy—and perhaps, even share some of the tips with others.

For now, I take a leave of you, dear reader, and come back to you with another set of stories about the world I live in and understand as it exists.

Warm regards,

Adarsh

Every once in a while, I put my head down and write the most boring things in the world. That seems like a good catharsis away from all PhD work. And today is one such.

Just some time ago, a little before starting to write this, I wrote an essay for my blog: “To Brush or Not to Brush Your Teeth”, a satirical take on how invested people are in the knowledge/myth surrounding the act of brushing their teeth in the mornings. Well, I have had enough of writing about teeth for the day.

I will instead put the rest of my energy into writing my newsletter. I now feel that I have a purpose for setting out to do this newsletter—that is, keeping in mind that I regularly blog.

I hope this newsletter serves two purposes:

1. I write this once every month, linking my other essays from the blog to this for readers to check out.

2. I hope to keep this as a cathartic process to keep making sense of my own PhD—the travels and travails of it.

Recap of my PhD:

I’m writing a thesis on how emotions play a role in nationalist movements across colonised societies. I’ve already completed a year into my PhD and, in the process, have written bits and pieces of my chapters. For these last few months, I have been trying to read and write about emotions—in terms of how they are understood and studied in social sciences. I will keep working on this task for another month or so. So, wish me luck :)

Meanwhile, I have watched enough movies for the month. I went out with a friend to see ‘The Conclave’ at the theatre recently. Even though I write reviews of the things I watch, I haven’t been able to do so for this one. I hope I do that sometime soon. Besides that, I have watched a few more movies on Netflix and Prime.

In some sense, half the time, I watch movies; the other half, I keep writing. There is barely anything in between for me. From morning to evening, I read books and stuff related to my PhD and others, and in the evening, I watch movies. This has been a case for me for a long time now. And I cannot even remember when exactly I started doing this. PhD students: do you do this, too? Or is this just too weird?

Recap on the essays I wrote recently:

ON TRAFFIC SIGNALS

At the start of January, I wrote an essay: “Traffic Signal is a Cultural Artefact”, in which I discuss how traffic signals can help sustain and structure social lives.

Initially, I wrote this essay to be submitted to Griffith Review, but I was just too lazy to send them an email and too enticed to publish it on my blog. The opening of this article is as follows:

It may seem odd to propose traffic signals can tell us so much about our culture. But, in reality, traffic signals are the gateway to one’s culture. In traffic signals, the young and the elderly alike cross paths—huddling through, juggling between, and striding forth—zebra crossing, meeting strangers, falling in love, reeling through heartbreaks, sobbing every now and then, laughing with (and at) one another, sipping coffee, and slurping bubble tea.

Traffic signals halt our movement and absorb us into the world for a moment. Just as we wait for signals to start blinking, we feel, observe, smell, rationalise, envy, smile, and smirk all at once or in intervals. Encounters with traffic signals open us to the embrace of social beings all in relation to one another but also oblivious to each other’s worlds simultaneously. Traffic signals, for that moment, become a space for thriving social engagement.

If you liked reading this, check out the full article here!

ON THE DEEPSEEK

Sometime in between, with all the frenzy about DeepSeek, I thought I would give it a try. I asked all uncomfortable questions about China. And just as I thought, DeepSeek, for all its innovative bravado, failed to respond to the most basic question that seemed to go against the Communist Party in China. It was a fun exercise, nonetheless.

When Sam Altman’s OpenAI released ChatGPT, I was clearly amazed. ChatGPT did most of everything that Google did before it, calculators did before Google, and humans did before calculators. In the last twenty years, the internet has just gone crazy. Everything—almost everything—was now at the grasp of AI.

ChatGPT told better stories, wrote better essays, explained better scientific nuances, solved better complex maths, and wrote better codes than humans. This was revolutionary but lucrative. It costs large sums—in billions. It needed large chunks of the most expensive and advanced chips (geopolitically, this would have meant Chip Wars).

In the past week, something had suddenly changed. And the world was astonished. The stock markets crashed quickly (and then recovered the next day!).

This is a short excerpt from the article I wrote on DeepSeek, but if you would like to read this essay, click here.

ON HENRY BERGSON

In the last few weeks, I read a new book that was making rounds: Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to People by . This book presents a phenomenal narration of the life and times of Henri Bergson. It just was such an easy read that I didn’t have to put lots of effort into it. I will just add a short snippet to it:

I had only come across Henri Bergson recently—a friend had fleetingly mentioned that his text on memory was difficult to grasp, perhaps.

Thanks to Emily Herring, I now know that Bergson was once the most famous philosopher in the world. His popularity peaked at the height of the start of the 20^th century. It had once caused a traffic jam on Broadway Street. People flocked in numbers across all sections to listen to him. Women mainly. The New York Times would go on to write heaps of praises for this philosopher. So did other newspapers and periodicals. Within the philosophical circles, Creative Evolution, Bergson’s 1907 book (translated to English in 1911), was compared to the likes of Immanuel Kant’s Critique.

But, just as quickly as his popularity soared, it faded in no time. And by the start of the Second World War, barely anyone spoke of Bergson. There was no taker for Bergson’s philosophy. He was resented by the Left and was admonished by the Right. His staunchest critiques called him a poet who need not be taken seriously. Bertrand Russell took it upon himself to uproot whatever Bergson was left in Western tradition. And to one’s dismay or delight (this depends, honestly!), Bergson would go on to win a Nobel Prize in Literature.

What happened?

To know what happened, you might as well pick up the book and read it. To check it out, here is a link to the Amazon page.

Well, if you still aren’t sure, then here is a link to my complete review of Herring’s book.

ON BRUSHING YOUR TEETH

I have already given you a sense of what I was doing earlier in the day: reading through Reddit posts, getting opinions on brushing one’s teeth in the mornings and writing up a satirical essay for my blog. And so much have I already written and read about brushing my teeth that my head begins to ache with just the thought of using other brushing teeth in my essay. Well, here you go. It has started now!

A great many battles have been fought in the world over the years—and nothing comes nearly close to the one where thousands of Redditors come head-on against one another every year. And then, the following year. And so on. With each individual penning hundreds of words in anticipation of another thousand words in response, these battles are difficult to fathom.

The climate change hoaxers come nowhere close. Flat earthers—they are no competition. Ukraine war fades in the background. And even Elon Musk and Donald Trump—and their DOGE bros—haven’t been made aware of their competition.

Each year, as the ritual goes, a quirky Redditor posts a r/unpopularopinion, and a hundred thousand likes and comments follow. Much as the name of the subreddit on which it is usually posted, the opinions are both unpopular and polarising, to say the least. War of words, they call it—and everything over ‘brushing teeth’. No kidding. Everything over brushing their teeth.

Brushing teeth, it seems, is a highly polarising act—both in terms of how it is conducted and what tools such activity entails.

To read this satirical essay on brushing teeth and the debates that surround it, check it out here.

This is all for now, and I hope to see you soon again. Share it with those who you think may like it—and are doing things like a PhD.

With my sincere regards,

Adarsh

Dearest gentle reader,

I hope you have been well.

This is the second day of the New Year, 2025. Years pass by, and with every new year, we tend to reflect on how our previous year was—and what we wish the next year to be: kinder, successful, healthier [among many other human desires].

And as with the previous year and the year before, I remember holding onto a few resolutions. However, rarely have I succeeded in following them through. Resolutions, just like everything else, require sustained effort and discipline. But most of us can’t claim to be disciplined, do we?

For me, the year 2024 has been kind. I was fortunate to be admitted into a PhD program at the University of Queensland, Australia. I was also lucky to get a few publications out in the first year, and I don’t think there will be any more in stock for another year or two. The PhD advisory team is great. Peers, all superb! Relationship: I couldn’t have asked for anything more. In all, 2024 was a good year for me.

At the start of 2024, I moved to Brisbane from New Delhi, India. (Here is this article on settling into Brisbane as a student.) Although I struggled a bit with the new life in a new country in the initial few weeks and months, I began to get used to it through time. In the first few months, I got swamped with the PhD project, thinking about the research puzzle (one big question/puzzle that was worth spending the next four years trying to answer). Once I was clear about the puzzle, I began to read around the puzzle: read widely.

In 2024, I read texts on history, politics, and international studies. While I have had to read a lot to structure my chapters, I have also spent a fair bit of time reading other books beyond my PhD.

In February, for instance, I read Kafka’s Letters to Milena. It is a brilliantly written book in the form of diary-like entries of letters to Milena. In one such letter, Kafka writes: “Today, I did practically nothing except sit around and read a little here, a little there—but mostly I did nothing, or else listened to a very light pain working in the temples. All day long I was preoccupied with your letters: in agony, in love, in worry, and in an entirely indefinite fear of the indefinite, which is indefinite mainly because it is infinitely beyond my strength.” (Here are my short summative notes on Kafka’s letters to Milena.)

Then, in March, I was preoccupied with Austin Kleon’s works Show Your Work and Steal Like an Artist. I don’t feel confident at all in sharing my work with others. I find the exercise somewhat self-loathing. But, as writers and academics, we live through an exchange of ideas. One thing is to have an idea; another is to influence others with that idea. Kleon’s books help you become more confident with yourself and your work. This one quote I find truly inspiring is: “You are only as good as your last work”. So, fret not; you can always improve with the next one. (Here are Austin Kleon’s tips to steal like an artist and tips to show your work.)

In April, I watched a movie I liked enough to write about: Laapata Ladies. In the story, two young brides (who are veiled and wearing the same outfit) get lost in the train. It was really a fun watch. If you haven’t watched it yet, watch it on Netflix. (Here is my short review of the Laapata Ladies if you would like to read it before watching it.)

In May, I got interested in writing as a craft. I read a few essays about writing in general. I also wrote about Paul Graham, a famous essayist, and Orhan Pamuk, a famous novelist, and his tips on writing. In both their tips, one thing stood out: thinking with writing. Among other tips, both emphasized writing simply. Write in simple words—just as Orwell tells us, if you can convey something in a much simpler way, do so. (Here is Orhan Pamuk on writing, Paul Graham on writing, and George Orwell on Writing.)

Between June and August, I got swamped with lots of PhD work. Thinking and writing a new chapter. Reading for it. Getting confused. Failing at writing well. Rewriting. Revising. And finally, submitting the chapter.

In September, I had a bit of a break and read Sergei Gureiv and Daniel Treisman’s Spin Dictators. Unlike the past century of fear dictators, Gureiv and Treisman argue that spin dictators have ditched their military uniforms for Western suits, seldom use military force, refrain from using violence, do not censor information, do not execute political opponents in football stadiums, and, most importantly, even permit opposition parties and hold elections. (Here is a complete review of Spin Dictators by Sergei Gureiv and Daniel Treisman.) Besides that, I watched a movie titled His Three Daughters. (Here is its review.)

In October, I read a bit more. I read this Microhistorical classic by Carlo Ginzburg: The Cheese and the Worms. The book 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. Ginzburg documents it all. (Here are a few thoughts on Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms.)

I re-read Farzana Shaikh’s Making Sense of Pakistan and Pallavi Raghavan’s Animosity at Bay. Shaikh’s book looks at how religion and its various interpretations shaped Pakistan. (Here is the review.) Raghavan’s book discusses the efforts to think of the process of partition itself as a state-building exercise in both India and Pakistan. (Here is the review.)

In between, I wrote my research statement for the confirmation of PhD candidature. It was a gruelling last few months. I was a bit stressed, too, along the way. It was devastating, too: the tragic passing of my primary supervisor, Emma Hutchison. As I proceed through the years, I hope to work hard and write a good PhD.

In these last few weeks, in December 2024, I ended up reading a few pieces of fiction: Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry; I read Joya Chatterji’s Shadows at Noon; and I watched a few movies and TV series: Murder Mindfully, In Our Prime, Squid Game, and All We Imagine as Light. So much of TV these last few days. In between, I also went to watch the India v/s Australia Test Match in Gabba—and it rained all day :)

When I first came to Australia, I began taking the running seriously. When I first started to run this last year, I would be really tired by the time I ran two kilometres. But, after a year, I can run ten kilometres with ease. I feel proud about this. And I hope to continue running, eating healthy, and writing more [among all other gibberish habits I wish to cultivate]. Maybe, one of these days, I can run a marathon; who knows?

Kind regards,

Adarsh

Dear Reader,

As much as I love writing, I have not been regularly writing my newsletter. That I am both aware of and guilty of. But, for the last few months, I have been preparing documents for my thesis statement presentation scheduled for next week. Therefore, these last few months and weeks have been more thesis--than anything else.

But recently, I had some time to get back to reading and writing other things. Recently, I completed a few books I had read halfway through, wrote reviews for those books I had read in between, and even managed to read fiction in a day.

In this newsletter entry, I will list out some of the things I have read, written, and found interesting:

1. Despite much of the academic work and other commitments, I have managed to watch a lot of movies. In recent days, I have tried to restrict myself from this torment and rather focus on things that matter--maybe read fiction instead. But, among the things I watched was this heartwarming sibling drama: "His Three Daughters" on Netflix. The whole movie is set in a cramped apartment in New York, narrating how three estranged sisters await their father's death--and navigate through their differences. I found this movie really lovely. Do check out the review here.

2. There were two books I had read on South Asia some months ago and had not written their reviews. So, these last few days, I sat through and jotted down a few thoughts on the two books.

Farzana Shaikh's book Making Sense of Pakistan discusses how multiple, often-contradictory visions of Pakistan have caused Pakistan's present to be as fraught as it is. She outlines how Islam and its various interpretations became a unifying and mobilising tool for the Pakistani state. Check my review of the book here.

In another book on South Asia, Historian Pallavi Raghavan, in her book Animosity at Bay: An Alternative History of India-Pakistan Relationship, 1947-1952, takes a contrarian view from a general understanding that flames of partition continue to define India-Pakistan relations towards examining how partition enabled the state-making projects in India and Pakistan, often mediated through dialogue and cooperation. This is a refreshing take. Read my review here.

3. In 2023, Princeton University Press sent a review copy of Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman's book Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. But it took me just too long to read it. It is one of the most lucid books I have read in recent years.

The authors, Guriev and Treisman, discuss how dictatorship has been taking new shapes. Nowadays, dictators are more democratic in their outlook--conducting elections as well as allowing free speech and protest--than democrats themselves. This they called spin dictatorship. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, check out my thoughts here.

4. Microhistory. Carlo Ginzburg. and Menocchio. I have heard of these names several times in the last few months. I came across Ginzburg in one of the lectures I was attending earlier. Then, when I was listening to Sanjay Subramanium's interaction with Gayatri Spivak and Urvashi Butalia, I came across Ginzburg and microhistory once again. Check out the lecture here.

So, when I first grabbed an old copy of Ginzburg's The Cheese and The Worms, I was hooked. The first sentence, "His name was Domenico Scandella, but he was called Menocchio", already wants you to know what was about him. In Ginzburg's brilliance, this book draws on Inquisition trial documents to account for the absurd worldview of a Friulian miller in Italy.

According to Menocchio: “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…”

History students must read this work. Check out my review of this book.

5. Besides these, I have also read this novella by Banana Yoshimoto, titled Kitchen, published in 1988 and translated in 1993. This book is lovely. I won't write anything about it here. Perhaps, if you want to read fiction you want to remember for a while, just grab this 100-page book written in such simplistic language. Read my review here.

These aside, I am looking forward to reading this one book by Emily Herring, titled Herald of a Restless World: How Henry Bergson Brought Philosophy to People. Although this book has to wait for my thesis statement presentation and confirmation, I think the book will hook you up. At least, the introduction is so engaging that you wouldn't want to put the book down. Here is a short link for those who want to buy it.

Well, that's the newsletter for this month. Thank you, dear read, for your patience and see you again.

Happy reading :)

I hope you’ve been well!

Here is a short post for this week. At the outset, I haven’t gotten myself to writing/reading anything outside of my PhD project this week. And I am sure this will continue for the next few months—as I figure things out.

Lately, I have learned that there are always new ways and new things to think of in a PhD. While it is challenging to seep yourself into a barrage of articles on a topic, it is also exciting to think of how you coherently make sense of them in your head—and later on, on paper.

Besides this, the parliamentary election results in India are promising, despite my initial pessimism emanating from a serious reading of exit polls (that predicted the ruling BJP to win over 400 seats). It is a lesson that one shouldn’t take exit polls too seriously when the results are announced days into the exit poll predictions.

Apart from the exit poll debacle (all of them got the result wrong this time!), there is a sense in India that the overarching persona of Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist Prime Minister, is not all that impenetrable and can easily be defeated with a coalition of multiple forces. There is much more to unpack here, but several have written brilliantly on the election results. I will link a few good essays below.

In France and elsewhere in Europe, there has been a significant rise in the number of far-right and other right-wing parties. In the EU Parliamentary elections, Marine Le Pen’s Nationalist Rally Party (which won about twice as Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party) of France and Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) have significantly made inroads.

After losing significant seats to Le Pen’s party in the recent EU elections, Macron decided to dissolve the National Assembly and call for snap polls in France. Now, it is interesting to see what happens here.

Apart from these things, I have not thought of anything new in the last week. I think it is important to admit that good ideas take time. But, as usual, this week I wrote a blog on Arjun Appadorai’s 1993 essay: “Number in the Colonial Imagination”.

In colonial India, the census became a paramount driver of understanding the Indian society through its occupations, class, caste, and religions. This created what David Ludden calls “orientalist empiricism”—a “hunt for information” and using numbers and numerical data to archive this information.  In practice, these numerical imperatives were thought to help embark on “social control” or—in best cases, even reform colonies.

This is the link to read this essay on numbers and colonial imagination.

Here are some other articles you may like:

1. Read this article on the latest CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: clearing misconceptions about the post-poll survey

2. Check this FT essay on why Emmanuel Macron went all in against Marine Le Pen and decided to

3. Watch this Samdish Bhatia’s Unfiltered video on his travel to a village in Bihar, where he speaks with Deshpremi (translated: Patriot), a destitute—wholly malnourished—youngster, who has to beg to eat his second meal in a day. It is heart-wrenching!

4. Read this FT story on Indian elections in charts.

It is all for this week.

Perhaps, for the next week, I get more time to think and write something. However, the informal nature of this newsletter will continue to persist, given I also write a blog alongside.

With my warm wishes,

Adarsh.

I hope you are well. Well, it’s been a week since I last wrote to you.

Now, I see the purpose of writing this newsletter every week, which was very fuzzy (like the name here: fuzzy notes) and confusing. This letter can help me connect and write to you each week about what my week has been like—and what I have been reading lately.

Having said that, I now think I should clarify why this week has driven me into oblivion. Or, as Nietzsche once said, “If you gaze too deep into the abyss, the abyss will stare back unto you”. There is a lot of abyss that surrounds the world today.

There is all that is happening in Gaza. Deeply troubling—and unfathomable. I have often felt that, in times like this, the US would fuck it up wholly in what it believes—and be exposed to its own deep-seated racial biases. For the US, what happens in Gaza is merely a humanitarian crisis, whereas what Putin is doing in Ukraine is a war crime.

I have often thought of Israel as an “American Taboo”. Here is something I wrote on this aspect.

Here is a short excerpt:

We no longer talk about the Israeli state excesses, settler colonialism, or the persecution of the Palestinian people in Israel. The Zionist State of Israel, which is attempting to survive, is always the putative “victim” in this “perpetrator-victim” narrative that the rest of the world, like America, now applies to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Israel’s genocidal objective, which is predicated on victimhood and state survival, is currently focusing on a significant attack in the Gaza region, and hardly anyone has stood out against it.

In the process of re-telling the Israel-Palestine issue through “Secondly,” all of Israel’s transgressions are absolved, while the supposed crimes of the Gaza people are underlined. It has not only conditioned us to the point where one cannot sympathise with Palestine, but it has also made us accomplices in the historical atrocities against the Palestinian people.

Because of the linguistic manipulation, we are all now victims of the American “Israel” taboo. We cannot firmly endorse Palestine without condemning Hamas. Furthermore, we cannot criticise Israel without defending its right to exist. Today, we are all made to read the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of “Secondly”, and that has made all the difference.

Read: “America’s ‘Israel’ Taboo is Now Everyone’s to Deal With”

In times like this, we need to rethink the “social contract”—how society ought to rethink ways to organize itself so that the least empowered feel the most empowered and the most deprived feel the least deprived. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the editors at the Financial Times wrote of the need to think of “radical reforms required to forge a society that will work for all.”

I think in the instances of why wars are fought in society, we need to think of deep, underlying reasons and figure out ways to mitigate them. Is there a way of shaming those who have caused harm to society (like what the Israeli government officials have been doing to Gaza’s civilians and killing thousands of children every day)? Will history treat them kindly? Does history’s treatment even matter? All these things are something for us to ponder about.

Here is a short link to understanding the intensity of the Israel-Hamas war and its impact on civilian lives through maps.

Apart from that, Rafa Nadal (one of my favourite sportspersons) lost to Alex Zvarev in his (almost) final appearance in Rolland Garros. It was sad. Nonetheless, as someone once said, we must celebrate people for their impact on our lives rather than being sad or gloomy. I feel that each of us grows old—and in the process, we tend to lose on what we would do. And that is how it is.

It looks like Modi’s BJP will have a decisive victory once again if one were to go by the predictions of exit polls. Some have even gone overboard to predict that Modi may even cross 400 seats in the Lok Sabha elections. Well, in that vein, I came across this brilliant interview between Yamini Ayyar and Rohan Venkat discussing what makes Modi’s BJP really a formidable force.

In their discussion, Yamini outlines a “techno-patrimonial welfare state”—an idea of welfare not as a social contract based on a normative framework of rights but as a “gift offered by the party leader” towards its citizens. It merely means that when political leaders (specifically the BJP leaders) talk about Direct Benefits Transfer, the whole narrative sustains around the “patronage and charisma of the leader” who provides stuff.

Elsewhere, Yamini Ayyar has outlined the framework broadly:

Beyond these reductive frameworks, I posit that India is coalescing toward a “techno-patrimonial” character of welfarism, one that strips itself of any emancipatory goals such as advancing social citizenship and building solidarity. Instead, it casts citizens as passive recipients (labharthis) of state largesse rather than active claim-making, rights-bearing actors. This form of welfare is a critical to politics of the contemporary moment, where political power is increasingly manufactured through the deification of the leader and unbridled voter loyalty extracted through welfare benefits.

According to Yamini, welfare politics (even freebies) was based on the normative logic of the state as exercising its rights to ease the lives of citizens and empower their rights. However, the BJP’s new mechanisms to directly transfer money into bank accounts create a subordinate status for citizens, who are now seen as people receiving gifts from the big leader.

Besides these things, I have also written a few things myself.

I recently wrote a brief essay, with insights from my paper earlier published with IA titled: feeling for the Anthropocene. In this new article for E-International Relations, I look at how global ecological activism can benefit from the emotional valence of Chipko’s activism.

Apart from that, I also wrote this one essay on Jinnah’s Spirit for my blog this week. In this essay, I point to the initial political crisis in Pakistan soon after Jinnah’s death—and how the military bureaucratic apparatus took hold of the state. During that period, almost exactly seven years after Jinnah’s death, a certain person from the government called Mr. Ibrahim conducted a seance of Jinnah’s spirit.

After the initial pleasantries between the spiritualist and Mr. Jinnah (the spirit), Mr. Ibrahim (an officer of the Government of Pakistan) is permitted by the spirit Jinnah to speak with him. Mr. Ibrahim’s first question is: “Would you like to smoke a cigarette?” A cigarette is lighted and fixed in a wire-stand upon an affirmative answer. Mr Ibrahim adds: “Sir, as a creator and father of Pakistan, you have done your best to bring it up on proper lines, won’t you guide the destiny of the nation now? To this, Mr. Jinnah responds: “My dear friend, it is not for me now to go to Pakistan and guide the political situation there. I see here flashes of evil pictures about Pakistan. I think the political conditions there are most unhappy. There are the Heads who have in them selfishness, and none at all is eager to be selfless there”.

Read: “When Jinnah’s Spirit Spoke of Pakistan’s Future”

Well, now it looks like I have written enough for today. I hope you came to learn something or just enjoyed reading this letter. Beyond all this confusion, I hope and wish that the week ahead brings me some clarity on this. But tomorrow, we have election results in India, so fingers crossed on that! 🤞

If you enjoyed reading this essay, do spread the word—and share it with others :)

Warmly,

Adarsh.

It has been a while now!

While I regularly update my blog with some interesting essays, I find it challenging to push out newsletters similarly. Nevertheless, I will continue to write more newsletters over time. It is also a space for me to engage with my readers more personally. I want to tell them how I develop ideas for my blog and what I write about them.

This week, I chose to write about writing stuff.

In the last few months and weeks, I have been reading about writing — and writing about writing. Specifically, I have read recently about Austin Kleon’s two books, Orhan Pamuk’s New Yorker essay on writing and Paul Graham’s tips for writing.

Things Orhan Pamuk tells us about writing.

The first author I introduce here today is Orhan Pamuk.

I stumbled upon Orhan Pamuk’s essay in the New Yorker through my PhD supervisor, Roland Bleiker (who himself spends significant time training his students in writing). Here is a link to a video of Roland’s tips for writing in social sciences.

Titled “My Father’s Suitcase”, Pamuk’s essay seeks to come to terms with what it is like to be a writer. In the article, Pamuk talks about his father—and his efforts at being a writer (and Pamuk’s uneasiness with it). Apart from the lucid structure in which it is written, Pamuk tells us that to write is to struggle.

Orhan Pamuk admits, “I am not that interesting”.

To be a writer, my PhD supervisor tells me, is to feel introverted, to be boring, and to hook oneself onto books.

Likewise, Pamuk writes, “I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who—wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature.”

Orhan writes: “The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance. The lovely Turkish expression ‘to dig a well with a needle’ seems to me to have been invented with writers in mind.”

Pamuk adds that, as a writer, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There is everything already in place. You have to make sure to write “of things that we all know but do not know that we know.”

Pamuk writes: “A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is.”

Read my full essay: To Write Like Orhan Pamuk is to Struggle Through Writing.

Austin Kleon tells us to show our work.

The second writer I want to discuss here is Austin Kleon.

I recently read two brilliant books, Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work, by Austin Kleon. One of my close friends from graduation suggested that I read them once. And he wasn’t wrong about how much I enjoyed reading these two short books.

On stealing

Kleon asks: Why is it essential to steal like an artist? To steal like an artist to become an artist oneself. If you aren’t an artist still, you may as well pretend like one (and steal!). For Austin, every artist steals something—from others.

There is no originality. And those who claim that you are original don’t understand that all ideas have a previous life—and one can only be drawn on from others.

We become what we are due to our internalisation and socialisation of the world. But not everything may be worth stealing. As an artist, you need to be able to tell the difference between what is worth stealing and what is not.

Here are some 10 tips Kleon has on stealing like an artist:

1. Steal Like An Artist.

2. Don’t Wait Until You Know Who You Are To Get Started.

3. Write the Book You Want to Read.

4. Use Your Hands.

5. Side Projects and Hobbies are Important.

6. The Secret: Do Good Work And With People.

7. Geography is No Longer Our Master.

8. Be Nice. (The World is a Small Town.)

9. Be Boring. (It’s the Only Way to Get Work Done.)

10. Creativity is Subtraction

Kleon also has something to tell us about writing. He tells us not just to write anything but what we truly like. Write something we genuinely want to read. Writing something (or an eternal dilemma: What should I write?) is challenging as it is. But, if you write what you like, much of your life gets simpler.

Read the full essay on Austin Kleon’s 10 tips to steal like an artist.

Now, on showing your work.

Writing is something. Most of us can write if we put in a bit of work (and no, not everyone is a good writer!). But, once after we have written, we also need to make sure that what we have written is read-worthy—or is available for readers to read.

This is where Austin Kleon’s book Show Your Work comes to your rescue. In this work, Kleon asks: How does one get their stuff out there? How do you get noticed? What is your audience, and how do you attract them?

It is not enough to be a good writer; one has to be findable. One’s work should stand out among the rest of the works. Originality helps. But there are lots of other essential things you have to do.

Here are some 10 tips Kleon has on showing your work to the world:

1. You Don’t Have To Be a Genius

2. Think Process, Not Product.

3. Share Something Every Day

4. Open Up Your Cabinet of Curiosities

5. Tell Good Stories

6. Teach What You Know

7. Don’t Turn Into Human Spam

8. Learn to Take a Punch as You Show Your Work

9. Sell Out

10. Stick Around as You Show Your Work

Each of these notes suggests that we must think in terms of process and not at the final product. We are only as good as the last thing we write. We can take chances. If we treat writing as a process, we won’t worry about what happens with one product. We will aim to improve ourselves every once in a while. We learn to do it better each time.

Read the full essay on Kleon’s tips to show your work.

Paul Graham tells us to write simply.

The third and final author for today’s newsletter is Paul Graham.

Paul is an interesting case. He is a prominent face in the tech world. He has helped build businesses most of his life. His startup accelerator, Y-Combinator, has funded Airbnb and Reddit, among others. Many entrepreneurs have, admittedly, read him over the years.

For Paul, writing is a crucial way of thinking about ideas. He has written on tech, philosophy, writing, and startup culture, among other things.

Writing simply just means using simple language, simple words, and simple sentences. Graham writes: “I try to write using ordinary words… [And] that kind of writing is easier to read, and the easier something is to read, the more deeply readers will engage with it.

I write academic journal articles. Barely anyone picks it up and reads it. But my blog—it circulates (unconsciously) across internet. Why? I don’t say deeply insightful stuff on my blog, but it still circulates, whereas an essay I would have written, say, for International Affairs, like this one, barely gets read. Simpler things are easier for people to relate to. They can learn through simpler things.

Paul tells us that we have to write in simple language. We don’t have to use flowery terms and words that most readers cannot understand. The more complicated you write, the less your readers will get you. Fancy writing, for Graham, conceals the fact that one knows nothing—and they still want to say something even when they have nothing to say. Writing complex is just a bad habit.

Paul Graham also points us to his writing process here:

Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can;
rewrite it over and over;
cut out everything unnecessary;
write in a conversational tone;
develop a nose for bad writing, so you can see and fix it in yours;
imitate writers you like;
if you can’t get started, tell someone what you plan to write about, then write down what you said;
expect 80% of the ideas in an essay to happen after you start writing it, and 50% of those you start with to be wrong;
be confident enough to cut;
have friends you trust read your stuff and tell you which bits are confusing or drag;
don’t (always) make detailed outlines;
mull ideas over for a few days before writing;
carry a small notebook or scrap paper with you;
start writing when you think of the first sentence;
if a deadline forces you to start before that, just say the most important sentence first;
write about stuff you like;
don’t try to sound impressive;
don’t hesitate to change the topic on the fly;
use footnotes to contain digressions;
use anaphora to knit sentences together;
read your essays out loud to see (a) where you stumble over awkward phrases and (b) which bits are boring (the paragraphs you dread reading);
try to tell the reader something new and useful;
work in fairly big quanta of time; when you restart, begin by rereading what you have so far;
when you finish, leave yourself something easy to start with;
accumulate notes for topics you plan to cover at the bottom of the file;
don’t feel obliged to cover any of them;
write for a reader who won’t read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios; 
if you say anything mistaken, fix it immediately;
ask friends which sentence you’ll regret most;
go back and tone down harsh remarks;
publish stuff online, because an audience makes you write more, and thus generate more ideas;
print out drafts instead of just looking at them on the screen;
use simple, germanic words;
learn to distinguish surprises from digressions;
learn to recognize the approach of an ending, and when one appears, grab it.

Read the full essay on Paul Graham’s advice on writing here.

Well, this is all I have to write for this week. I hope to read these essays—and find them useful! I also hope to be more regular with my newsletter writing schedule.

Share this with others—and spread the word. Until next time, happy reading :)

Warmly,

Adarsh.

This week has been relatively peaceful for me. I have had enough time to think and write—and to watch a movie/or a series occasionally. As you have read from the title, I wrote two essays this week.

One is related to a recently read book, Kafka’s Letters to Milena. And another is regarding an intuition about a society where no jobs are left for humans. The first one, by the virtue of it coming from Kafka, was sad yet heart-warming. The second, due to the topic at hand, is a bleak depiction of the world we would be in if we didn’t think hard.

About the first:

Reading Franz Kafka is always exciting—a term that does not suffice enough how dull a world the writer tends to create around. In his famous work Metamorphosis, Kafka thought of how Gregor Samsa had turned into a giant creature which could barely reconcile with its new avatar.

A Kafkaesque world is no joke.

But reading Kafka is easy. He writes well. Like excellent writers, he does not expect his readers to pick up a dictionary—and look up every other odd word in a sentence. Some writers write difficult. They use way too complex words. The word “speak” does not suffice for them; they would use “converse”.

But Kafka, no, he is not one such. His writing has a certain elegance that only the poets carry. The book Kafka’s Letters to Milena captures Kafka in his best of times and worst of times—all in his letters to his love interest, Milena.

Here is my essay about Kafka’s love letters to Milena.

Of all his letters, one which has been circulated often across social media is this:

Dear Frau Milena,

I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: ‘Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.’ Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.

(Letters to Milena, Schocken Books, 1952)

Here is another one:

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence, and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

A final one, for now:

Sleep is the most innocent creature there is, and a sleepless man
the most guilty.

Apart from this essay, I hope you will quite enjoy these essays as well :)

• Here is an essay on what it is like to Immanuel Kant?

• There is another one about reading a book Virginia Woolf-style.

Now, about the second:

For a while now, I have thought of the importance of work. Why should humans work in a society? I have come up with answers regarding our social conditioning, which is such that we cannot survive without it—and, of course, for other obvious reasons such as money and livelihood. None of these have often quite satisfied me as sufficient explanations for why we should work.

Most of what we end up doing is not something we like. Most of us would choose to do different things passionately if given an opportunity. We are often made to do things because there is a demand for them in society. But we still work—and as a result, sometimes, even spend very little time with our family and friends. This cannot be healthy at times. Perhaps it is a capitalist tendency to think of work as a paramount condition of human life. I don't know.

The issue is whether or not AI will replace all of our work tomorrow; it is much more perverse. It entails fundamental questions of who controls these machines. Who does it tend to benefit? And if an ordinary individual does not work tomorrow because a machine elsewhere has taken over their job, how do they make their livelihood?

(Future of Work, 2023)

Now, if we substitute work—and each of us gets paid a certain sum of money to consume and spend time with our family and friends, travel, and do things as we like- do we take it? My sense is we would.

What if the world, after AI/robots take over all jobs, could lead to such a utopian future? This, again, is doubtful. It is still impossible to tell if robots could replace humans in all jobs.

Despite that, read my latest essay on what it is like to live in a world where robots have taken all our jobs.

How does it feel?

Do share your thoughts on these two — and tell me what you think about a world without work/jobs :)

I am not a clumsy person.

But things happen, life takes different turns, and you must reconcile and make terms with it. In the last two months, several things have happened in my life.

1. At the end of December 2023, I moved from Delhi, India, to Brisbane, Australia — for a new academic journey. It has been a life-changing moment for me. I have never travelled outside of my country. And it is not something all of us from where I come from get to do every day. Going places and doing things is an elite endeavour. But I am lucky to have gotten a chance to do so.

2. I moved to Brisbane because I got admitted to the University of Queensland after two years of PhD studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University. I had a certain compulsion—both familial and financial constraints—to pursue this decision.

3. In January 2024, I have mostly tried to settle in Brisbane as someone new to the place who doesn’t know things and hopes to learn them.

4. Now, I am free to write my newsletter after such a long time.

5. However, this newsletter will not follow the same structure I used to earlier. In this newsletter, at least, I will only try to post some of the articles I published in the last few months while I was away from writing this newsletter.

I can use this platform to glimpse why I wrote a specific article on my blog (https://adarshbadri.me). Anyway, give suggestions!

I have drafted several essays on my blog in the past few months since I wrote my last newsletter. I will only post some of those here :)

I must share my experiences in Brisbane with you all, given I have already written substantially about why I moved to Brisbane. Here is a post about my life in Brisbane and how I am settling into a new atmosphere. Brisbane is the third largest city in Australia, after Melbourne and Sydney. I have not fully explored it yet. And I do not wish to any sooner! Ask me why. If I do all the exploring in the first month or two, I will easily be bored for the next four years, so I will take it slow from here onwards.

Now, I have been blogging for a few years. I have been only learning to be better at it with time. However, I still have a long way to go in that direction. But it felt really wonderful to share some of my thoughts on my blogging journey this year in 2023. And here is a link to read about it. But, if you want me to write more about how you can start your blogging, tell me in the comments about what I should write more about.

I have had a certain interest in postcolonial societies for a while now. My PhD studies will invariably revolve around some of the questions on postcolonial societies. However, as a political science student, I was first introduced to Hamza Alavi’s “Overdeveloped State” in the first year of my Master’s class at Delhi University. At the time, I barely understood the postcolonial critique of Marxist theory, or even, say Marxist theory as a whole. However, when I went back to it last year, it made perfect sense, so here are simplified notes on Alavi’s “The States in Post-Colonial Societies”.

Polycrisis was a buzzword for the whole of last year. Adam Tooze wrote substantially on it. I have also followed several others who have contributed to the polycrisis debate. (In fact, I had a chance to meet Adam Tooze at one of the conferences in New Delhi as a curious student who wanted to know how he wrote so much in so little time. And he had only one suggestion for me: WRITE!) So, now, in an attempt to rethink polycrisis, I argue in this provocative essay that we have always been in the polycrisis, and now we know of it.

Many of my friends and peers often struggle to write book reviews. I have not had it easy either. Writing makes all writing somewhat easy, but there are things you will only be able to acquire with time, practice and much trial and error. I still feel I must improve myself as a writer — to write like, say, Pratinav Anil or as lucidly as a New Yorker essay. But I hope these ten tips about writing a book review can help everyone who wants to get into the habit of writing.

Finally, I will add my book review of TCA Raghavan’s brilliant book “The People Next Door”, which documents an interesting history of India-Pakistan relations. I hope these readings help you in one way or another.

But, despite everything else, it feels good to be back writing my newsletters.

If you enjoyed reading today’s newsletter, share it across — and ask your friends and family to subscribe :)

Dear Reader,

This is the third edition of fuzzy notes, a weekly newsletter on politics, philosophy, society, culture, and international affairs.

The week, for me personally, has been rewarding. Many things are happening in life—which I hope to share with you very soon. Apart from that, there have been many things happening on the international front.

Since yesterday, there has been a situation of continued escalation of Israel-Palestine relations, with Hamas in the Gaza Strip attacking parts of Israel. The week also has seen the Nobel prize given to people in various fields of research.

Back home in India, there was a police raid on a not-very well-known but often critical established regime, news media, Newsclick, in Delhi—another aspect of how institutional corrosion is evidenced in India on an ongoing basis. And there have been many more things. This week’s newsletter reflects all these aspects briefly.

Along with the excerpts of these articles, some complementary readings are also linked in the newsletter.

Politics: On Edward Said and Writing in the Service of Life

Not many in social sciences in the modern day have had a profound influence as Edward Said has had on the understanding of culture, society, and representations.

When I first read Said’s Orientalism as a master’s student at Delhi University, I enjoyed every paragraph of the first few chapters. I re-read it through and through over the period. Said has had a significant influence on those who study postcolonial theory.

This article by Layla AlAmmar, titled: “Edward Said: Writing in the Service of Life”, illustrates how Said’s life was that of service. An innate desire to see things change and their role in shaping those changes.

This is a brilliant essay on how Said’s life was one of the examples of how (we, students, writers, intellectuals, and philosophers) can truly write – in service of life.

It takes time for an idea like that to truly sink in, to think of truth itself as a representation that is constructed and circulated, received and consumed, or to conceive of it as something that travels far beyond its origins, that outlives the context which produced it. Consider the “great many other things” that are interwoven with representations: language, culture, history, political and religious leanings, all the known and unknown idiosyncrasies of the representer. These constructions don’t emerge from a vacuum, nor do they subsequently float in empty space. Rather, they inhabit what Orientalism determines to be “a common field of play [that has been] defined for them.” In his more charitable moments, Said conceives of representations (such as novels) as belonging to a family, existing in a kind of ecosystem of references and linkages. His thoughts on the nature of representation are some of his most insightful and had a profound effect on how I would conceive of my writings, both creative and scholarly, from that point on.

So gripped was I by Orientalism that I went on to read (and reread) nearly everything Said wrote — from Culture and Imperialism to Freud and the Non-European to Beginnings to his brilliant essay collection, Reflections on Exile. Immersing myself in his corpus showed me a few things, perhaps the most significant of which was that you cannot be content with an intellectual’s first utterance on a topic.

Complement reading on Edward Said with Tariq Ali on Edward Said; Tariq Ali’s interview of Edward Said; and if you haven’t read Edward Said, READ HIM!

Society: Teaching in a Trump Country: The Political Potential of Introductory Sociology

Sociology, if not appropriately taught, harbours a disconnect with reality. Many students of sociology face this intrinsic problem. When I read the sociological interventions on the caste system in India, I am dismayed by how little scholars have dealt with the complexities of it, how unfair their understandings are, and how ideologically driven their assessments are.

I have often told my peers how little sociologists know about Indian society – how focused they are on numbers and how little they conduct village studies—and understand the inherent logic of caste, class, gender, etc.

My dismay towards how understudied Indian society was pushed me towards my interest in politics. In the next essay titled: “Teaching in a Trump Country: The Political Potential of Introductory Sociology”, Shelly Steward addresses the logic of initial dismays students of sociology carry—and how one should deal with and address them.

As a Berkeley sociologist living in Williston, I found myself caught between two discourses—one held by the oil workers I spent my days with, another among fellow academic sociologists. Based on contributions to political campaigns, academics and oil and gas workers make up the most ideologically liberal and conservative professions. These differences run deep, and are rooted to the careers themselves. Many academics see freedom of speech and accessible education as central to their profession; oil workers see environmental deregulation and privatization as central to theirs. I heard these two discourses daily and struggled to draw any lines between them; each side seemed closed to the other.

Using everyday examples that seemed apolitical, though, allowed students to develop an understanding of society and their own relation to it. And that understanding held great political potential. For some students, it meant giving them a way to articulate the fear and discomfort they felt. For others, it meant coming to see the election as more than a distant news event or a one-issue matter. These lessons, students told me, helped them see why sociological thinking was relevant to them, and equipped them to think about politics as something more than posting campaign signs that matched their neighbors’. They began to see themselves as part of a wider society, and to place their own community in an increasingly divided nation.

Read the full essay, and if you are an academic, incorporate some of these insights into your own writings.

Culture: John Fosse’s Search for Peace

The Norwegian-novelist, Jon Fosse, is the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature. Fosse writes, as those who have read him claim, infusing both hope and affection in his work. He examines the lives of ordinary people in their everydays—the complexities they deal with.

Fosse is praised for his seven-part novel Septology, a “slow prose” of how a painter named Asle grapples with the death of his wife, Ales. In this culture section, I have chosen the New Yorker interview of Jon Fosse with Merve Emre.  

The word that comes to mind to describe all this—the light, the music, the sacred waters, the sacred garments—is “pilgrimage.” One rarely sees living writers treated with such reverence. “I am just a strange guy from the western part of Norway, from the rural part of Norway,” Fosse told me. He grew up a mixture of a communist and an anarchist, a “hippie” who loved playing the fiddle and reading in the countryside.

He enrolled at the University of Bergen, where he studied comparative literature and started writing in Nynorsk, the written standard specific to the rural regions of the west. His first novel, “Red, Black,” was published in 1983, followed throughout the next three decades by “Melancholy I” and “Melancholy II,” “Morning and Evening,” “Aliss at the Fire,” and “Trilogy.”

To read Fosse’s plays and novels is to enter into communion with a writer whose presence one feels all the more intensely owing to his air of reserve, his withdrawal. His plays, whose characters usually have generic names—the Man, the Woman, Mother, Child—seize upon the intensity of our primordial relations and are by turns bleak and comic.

I have not read Jon Fosse yet. But the kinds of articles I have read about his writings make me want to read him soon.

Philosophy: Feminist Killjoy Handbook with Sara Ahmed

I have read Sara Ahmed. She is a brilliant feminist writer who both allows you to feel and be touched by the subjects she engages with. I have learnt quite a lot from her writings—and I hope to write like her someday.

“Sara’s work both as a scholar in the academy working on queer phenomenology, on post-coloniality, and on emotions, as well as her work after she left the academy, has been an inspiration.” Here is a podcast of her interview with Academic Aunties (Ethel Tungohan). Listen in here.

International Affairs: What Makes a Good Book Review

This is not an article I read this week. However, as I thought through what to post for this week’s international affairs section, I thought of posting this brilliant essay on writing book reviews by Amanda Murdie.

I have quite learned from this essay about how writing a good book review works—and how one should write well. Despite all the resources that are out there on how one should write a book review in IR, I found this to be the most helpful essay.

This is one of the best and most exciting book reviews I have read in a long time in IR.

It is the end of this newsletter. I hope this reading list will keep you busy for the next week as you straddle between family, work, and leisure.

See you next week! Until then, happy reading :)

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