Posts from the history category.
There’s something unsettling about the idea that six ordinary days can reroute an entire life.Not years. Not decades. Six days.That quiet tension hums beneath Six Days in Bombay, the latest standalone from Alka Joshi, and it caught me off guard. I went in expecting historical richness and atmospheric detail. I did not expect to feel personally confronted by a young nurse’s hunger for a life larger...
I remember closing this book one evening and realising the room around me felt louder than before. The fan hummed. A dog barked somewhere far away. And yet, after Desiccated Land, silence carried weight. This is not the silence of peace. It is the kind that lingers after you’ve heard too much truth at once and don’t know where to place it.David Lepeska comes to Kashmir not as a saviour, not as an ...
Similar to Shantaram, this is a window into a bygone Bombay that i have never known. Delightful read this one - the poetry in the words and the scenes evoke empathy for the characters even when they are at their worst.
There are books you read with a pen in hand, underlining arguments, marking dates. And then there are books you read with your shoulders slightly tense, jaw tight, phone face-down beside you, because the world it speaks of is not safely contained between covers. Toward Armageddon belongs to the second kind. I found myself reading it not at a desk, but late at night, the room quiet, news alerts del...
Some books announce themselves with a thesis. This one arrived like humidity on skin — quiet, unavoidable, already inside the room before I knew it. I was reading, but I was also standing on a riverbank at night, ash cooling, water moving, the world refusing to pause for grief. That opening feeling never really left me. Dhara doesn’t ask for attention. It assumes you will eventually slow down enou...
Some books announce themselves loudly. This one arrived like a coded message slipped across a café table — quiet, dangerous, and impossible to ignore once you realised what it carried. I read The Silk Route Spy not in its original English, but in its Marathi translation, and that detail matters. Because this is a story about crossing borders — political, moral, emotional — and reading it in a lang...
A true love letter to New England - not just the forests and the wildlife. But the history and geography. The palimpsest of stories that sometimes cross paths across eras and some that are lost to the vagaries of time. Waiting to be discovered and told.
Have you observed how ‘Folk Tales’ are usually intentionally layered? Different ages understand them differently. A child sees adventure and enjoys what happens. An adult sees symbolism and understands what it means. An elder sees life wisdom, thus making these folktales timeless teaching tools!This book is based on a charming concept - to share folk stories from different parts of India. It also ...
I closed the book in the late afternoon, when the house had begun to sound hollow again. The kind of quiet that arrives after lunch, when even the ceiling fan seems to turn more slowly. My legs were stretched out. One foot rested against the table leg without thinking. For a few seconds, I didn’t move. Not because I was overwhelmed — but because I felt oddly relocated.As if I had returned from som...
The fatigue arrived before the admiration did.Not physical tiredness — something deeper. The kind that settles in the shoulders when you realize how long power has been carried, argued over, bent, and bruised.I finished the book late at night. The house had already decided to sleep. I stayed back, sitting upright longer than needed, aware of a quiet inside me that hadn’t been there before. Not sti...
