A Book A Day - A Literary Podcast from India

Salman Rashid is Pakistan’s leading travel writer. The author of nine travel books, A Time of Madness is his first memoir where he recounts his visit to India and finally coming to terms with the dark past of India-Pakistan partition in which he lost many of his family members. I share an incident from the book in this podcast.

The Greatest Folk Tales of Bihar is a book written by Nalin Verma. It is a collection of timeless tales that have been told through generations, are adored for being a literature and treated as sacred testament of village wisdom. I narrate one popular folk story from the book in today's podcast.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. Today I narrate one such short story with you. It's called An Enigmatic Nature.

Though he considered himself to be mainly a painter, lived most of his life in the United States, and wrote his best-known works in English, Kahlil Gibran was the key figure in a Romantic movement that transformed Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Since he is most remembered for his book The Prophet, I pick this one and narrate some of its beautiful chapters in this pod...

The Blank Slate is a 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations. I discuss some of the ideas of the book in today's podcast.

The Book of Indian Kings comprises stories and essays about some of the greatest rulers and statesmen in the history of India. It's a collection by some of the brilliant writers of our times, from Rushdie to Dalrymple. In this podcast, I narrate the essay by Romila Thapar which briefly discusses the Mauryan empire and its most important face, King Ashoka.

A novelist who writes eloquently about the wrenching dislocations of history, Milan Kundera is as good a writer of novels as he is a novelist. In his books The Art of Novel and Testaments Betrayed, he explains the history and the future of novel writing. I narrate some interesting parts of these books in this podcast.

In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky depict how an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facets of the news. What emerges from this groundbreaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media are, and how we can learn to read them and see their function in a radically new way. I discuss some of these ideas in this podcast.

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, published in 1886, is a collection of humorous essays by Jerome K. Jerome. It was the author’s second published book and it helped establish him as a leading English humorist. I read out a few pages from the book in today's podcast.

Yoga philosophy is one of the six major orthodox schools of Hinduism. Ancient, medieval and most modern literature often refers to the Yoga school of Hinduism simply as Yoga. It is closely related to the Samkhya school of Hinduism. What is it really and what can we learn about it beyond certain postures and exercises? I discuss this and more in today's podcast.

The Gene: An Intimate History is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist.

Inderjeet Singh’s book titled Afghan Hindus and Sikhs aims to prove that Afghan Hindus and Sikhs are an indigenous people and not recent settlers. The books provides a thousand-year history of these communities and how the demography has changed under various regimes.

The Lessons of History is a 1968 book by historians Will Durant and Ariel Durant. The book provides a summary of periods and trends in history they had noted upon completion of the 10th volume of their momentous eleven-volume The Story of Civilization. I discuss this book in today's podcast and take you through a short journey of history.

In his book Being the Other, veteran journalist and author Saeed Naqvi looks at how the divisions between Muslims and Hindus began in the modern era. The book is partly a memoir and partly an exploration of the various deliberate and inadvertent acts that have contributed to the othering of the 180 million Muslims in India. I discuss the book in today's podcast.

Andrew Otis’ book titled "Hicky’s Bengal Gazette; India’s first newspaper" fuses the biography of its remarkable editor with the biography of his time. It's an interesting insight to the colonial India and how newspaper culture developed first in Calcutta. I share some anecdotes from the book in today's podcast.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one of the leading figures in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. I discuss some of his books and ideas in today's podcast.  

Narendra Achyut Dabholkar was an Indian medical doctor, social activist, rationalist and author from Maharashtra, India. In 1989 he founded and became president of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti. He has written a number of books on reason, rationalism, atheism, superstitions etc. I discuss one of his books and tell you the story of discussing atheism in a largely superstitious soci...

Fail Better is an essay by Zadie Smith. It's about writers and their quest for the perfect novel. As the essay explores a writer's struggles, it ends up teaching us far more about the quest of reading and writing. I narrate this essay in today's podcast.

Kabuliwala is a Bengali short story written by Rabindranath Tagore in 1892, during Tagore's " Sadhana" period (named for one of Tagore's magazines) from 1891 to 1895. The story is about "The Fruitseller" a Pathan from Kabul, Afghanistan who visits to Calcutta (present day Kolkata), India each year for selling dry-fruits and while living in India he develops filial affection with a five-year-old gi...

An Edible History of Humanity is a book written by Tom Standage that encompasses the history of the world from prehistory to modern day times through the tracing of foods and agricultural techniques used by man. I discuss this book and tell you the story of good in today's podcast.

Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian, philosopher, and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. The Augustinian theodicy, is a type of Christian theodicy that developed in response to the evidential problem of evil. I discuss this in today's podcast.

Haruki Murakami is a Japanese writer. His books and stories have been bestsellers in Japan as well as internationally, with his work being translated into 50 languages and selling millions of copies outside his native country. Today I narrate one of his short stories. It's called The Kingdom That Failed.

Sikhism or Sikhi is a Dharmic religion that originated in the Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent around the end of the 15th century CE. Sikhism is one of the youngest of the major religions and the world's fifth-largest organized religion, with about 25-30 million Sikhs as of the early-21st century. But what is Sikhism? What is its history? I discuss some of these questions and much more in...

The Missionary Position is a book by the British-American journalist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens published in 1995. It is a critique of the work and philosophy of Mother Teresa, the founder of an international Roman Catholic religious congregation, and it challenges the mainstream media's assessment of her charitable efforts. I share some of the interesting points from the book in today's...

Knut Hamsun was a Norwegian writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. Hamsun's work spans more than 70 years and shows variation with regard to consciousness, subject, perspective and environment. In today's podcast, I narrate one of his short stories which beautifully captures the events that take place in the course of a few hours.