it has taken me ages to start writing my newsletter again!
what really happened though?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, I am free to write my newsletter after such a long time.
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 :)
Your writing is addictive, man!