Books and Authors

"The history of tourism is intricately connected to colonialism. Travel writing is a direct descendent of colonial exploratory writing and even today, modern tourism has that DNA. Modern tourism, in its internal logic, has a colonial gaze. This idea of "discovering" other places is built into the idea of why we travel" - Shahnaz Habib, author, 'Airplane Mode; A Passive Aggressive History of Travel...

"Stories leave a deep impact on how our thinking is shaped. These stories are challenging some very traditional ideas that still exist heavily in society. There is a power in terrible representations. Somehow, we have representations where the disabled woman is a burden to family, to society, and to her partner. As a teenager you think, "Oh, somebody will have to sacrifice a lot to fall in love wi...

"Villages are complicated entities. There's always a power game. Now, money values have come in and villages are also changing. The lives between the village and the city are starting to merge. I don't know what that means for the country. Villages and cities are both equally important for us. Some kind of continuity is what the village offers. People who live in villages and don't want to move or...

"While we must read histories produced by historians who have different perspectives on the past, it is very important not to get trapped in any particular ideological framework. For me, it is important to move beyond them" - Upinder Singh, author, 'A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India', talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast on everything from the implausibility of the A...

"Strangers matter online. We tend to put a lot of weight on reviews. But it is difficult to tell which ones are fake and which are not. Computer scientists are still working on it. But they have figured out certain characteristics of fake reviews – like the use of lots of exclamation marks and quotation marks" - Abhishek Borah, author, Mine Your Language, talks to Manjula Narayan about the influen...

I'm not an expert but I am a connoisseur and most of the carpets in this book are part of my collection. Carpets harbour a lot of stories but we seldom read about them because books on carpets usually focus on things like the knots used and how they were made. My idea was to keep the stories" - Jon Westborg, author, 'Of Carpets and Carpetwallahs' talks to Manjula Narayan about talims and carpet de...

"Every culture's sexual values get imbued into all parts of their thinking, not just into how they think about the bedroom. Under patriarchy, mothers are given this special role of restricting their daughters as sexuality is tied up with the sense of social pride or izzat – the mother's value as a mother, within the family, is partly judged on her daughter's gender performance. I don't blame mothe...

"AI doesn't create; it reproduces. AI doesn't know what is good or bad; even in art, it doesn't know. People want to know whether we'll reach a level where AI is as smart as we are. The kids are always asking me that. We won't reach that level the way we 're going because the intuition is just not there" - Appupen, co-author of the graphic novel, 'Dream Machine; AI and the REAL World' talks to Man...

Crime fiction seems to have a steady presence because of the way in which it is able to address contemporary issues of law and order relating also to the absence of justice, which is a key problem we all face. The attempt is to make amends, sometimes even outside the system, and to deliver justice. That's why, perhaps, the figure of the detective continues to fascinate" - Tarun K Saint, editor, 'T...

"The thrill of the hunt is what fuels all collecting probably and it's certainly so for book collecting. But here the interest is bibliographical so there's a scholarly component to it as well. It's a very thrilling experience to see that you are a part of a long tradition of book collecting and of a tradition of transactions between dealers and collectors that's been going on for three or four ce...

Like the pizza, momos are traditional, ethnic, and are loved worldwide" - Rohini Rana, author, 'The Nepal Cookbook; 108 Regional Recipes', talks to Manjula Narayan about the magic of eating with your fingers, the humble potato, magical momos in their many avatars, the flavours of fermentation and smoking, and the subtility and great range of Nepal's cuisine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

"Dr Salim Ali told me, if you're not a scientist, don't show off your secondhand scientific knowledge. Just write simply and share that. So that's what I've done" - Bulbul Sharma, author, 'Sunbirds in the Morning, Grey Hornbills at Dusk' talks to Manjula Narayan about the variety of birds and trees and the dramatic change of the seasons in the capital city. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit...

"I've heard its changed but when I was first in Tibetan regions, it was illegal to have a photo of the Dalai Lama. There's a lot of propaganda against the Dalai Lama and other lamas in China and I've actually heard Tibetan people there parroting that propaganda. There's also tremendous ecological damage through mining, the building of large dams and other forms of destructive resource extraction....

"The community of corpse burners or Doms take pride in their ability to give moksh but it's also a way of justifying their place in a society that otherwise shuns them, humiliates them and treats them as untouchables. They believe they have religious capital. But at the end of the day, there are no privileged caste people who want to do this job. That's why the Doms are continuing to do this job a...

I keep thinking of all the other writers who also have these sorts of protagonists. The cops of Karen Slaughter, Ian Rankin and Peter James are not exactly happy guys who are at peace with the world; their relationships are in shambles; they are eccentric. It's probably like taking the mad genius idea and remoulding it to fit the flawed cop. I know this character, Borei Gowda, so well; I know what...

"Poetry is not instant coffee; that is undrinkable. What is slow brewed coffee or a tea ceremony? Everything is slow, which means you can appreciate the nuances of the sounds, the cadence of the language, the content of the poems. The good young poets and the good older poets are not very dissimilar. That's because the focus of these poets is grounded on the same things and measured on the same fr...

"Within Rajasthan's Raika culture, camels are raised in a system that's cruelty free - the calves are not separated from their mothers, camels walk around and choose their own diets and have a close relationship with humans. It's an alternative model of livestock and food production that has great value. The Raika demonstrate a way of keeping animals that's in tune with the environment and has hig...

"Nehru and Ambedkar represented two very different visions of the way Buddhism could be imagined. Buddhism is a full-fledged revolution for Ambedkar and Nehru's government was not comfortable with that sort of vision of Buddhism. [Similarly] there is a fracture between the Ambedkarite vision of Buddhism and SN Goenka's vision, in which you can be a Hindu or Christian and still practise Vipassana....

"In our family, whenever anyone goes out, they don't ask him, 'What did you see?' The first question is 'What did you eat?' So, food is paramount. In my childhood, if ever I wanted to have good food at home, I'd ask my father for it. Funnily enough, it was the men in the family who took on that role. My father is a very passionate cook. I felt that there should be some place where his recipes are...

"Hindutva pop stars are trying to make hate entertaining and so normalized that people don't realise they are consuming propaganda. They are changing your life through their work and yet most know very little about them" - Kunal Purohit, author, 'H-Pop; The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars' follows a singer, a poet and a journalist-spiritual coach to understand polarisation, points of radical...

The idea of the old and the new has always had an interesting relationship with the city of Delhi; the name 'Delhi' has been shifting from site to site. I'd say the Qutub Minar and the Meherauli Archeological Park are the most important sites. If you look at the Qutub Minar complex you can understand a lot about the evolution of architecture and culture in Delhi, and also about Indian history and...

For women of a certain class, there was a tremendous romance attached to Indian swamis and gurus. That's perhaps because gurus of that time presented themselves as an antidote to the very stiff, rigid idea of manhood that prevailed in Victorian and Edwardian society. What could be more romantic than this figure talking about liberation and enlightenment experiences? For these people it was as if J...

Ever since my release, I've been thinking of what can be done to improve the situation in prisons. One of the byproducts of people like us going to jail is that we get a glimpse into the world behind bars. If we are able to do even a little bit to help that, this book would be very much worth it" - Sudha Bharadwaj, author, 'From Phansi Yard; My Year With the Women of Yerawada' talks to Manjula Nar...

"What we assume is gut instinct when it comes to the cooking of our mothers and grandmothers is actually hours and hours of practice. They didn't have much choice, they had to cook. So, just by dint of spending 10,000 hours on something, you become good at it. Really, someone who develops a recipe is a scientist and someone who cooks at home and makes delicious food is a chemical engineer" - Krish...

"There is so much diversity in one plate of a chaat dish and there is so much diversity from one end of the country to the other. In a plate of chaat, there are differences in texture, temperature, colour, spices and condiments. Chaat, for me, is an ideal representation of what Indian food stands for" - Sonal Ved, author, 'India Local; Classic Street Food Recipes' talks to Manjula Narayan about ev...