Posts from the history category.
I didn’t mean to start this book on a weekday night. I really didn’t. I had promised myself an early sleep, a calm mind, maybe even some music. But books have a strange way of choosing their own timing, don’t they? Escape from Kabul by Dr. Enakshi Sengupta didn’t knock politely — it slipped into my hands like a pulse waiting to be heard. And somewhere between opening the first page and taking the ...
It begins with a gunshot — not one fired in the pages, but the echo of a life lived on the edge of it. As I turned the first few pages of The Enforcer, I felt as though I had stepped into the heart of India’s most volatile battleground — Uttar Pradesh — where the line between justice and survival often blurs, and one man in uniform dares to walk that trembling line every single day.Written by Anir...
There are books that whisper. Books that reason. And then there are books that roar. Giorgia Meloni’s I Am Giorgia: My Roots, My Principles belongs to the last kind — the kind that slaps you awake before you’ve finished your espresso. Reading it felt like sitting across a table from a woman who doesn’t just speak — she commands the air around her. Whether you agree with her politics or not, it’s i...
There’s something about prisons that unsettles me — not the concrete, the locks, or the barbed wire, but the silence. That heavy, echoing silence that follows you like a shadow, whispering stories you’re not supposed to hear. When I picked up Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer by Sunil Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury, I thought I was signing up for a cold, procedural memoir — a peek behind t...
Image Location : Petroglyph National Monument, Albuquerque, New Mexico.Someone chiseled / scratched these figures into these rocks a few centuries ago. To record what they saw perhaps, explain it to others. Commemorate a change in nature? Interpretation to present a perspective? Doodling?Not much is known about what these figures represent - perhaps lost knowledge. Could we be seen in the same lig...
Have you repaid your debts on time? Are you obedient, reliable, trustworthy, following customs? Are you generous and into charity, helping your community? If yes, congratulations! Your name goes into the ledger with a clean record, the “good book.” Otherwise, beware your name may end up in the dreaded “black (bad) book.”This was real life in the Middle Ages and early modern period (1400s–1700s). B...
There are books that feel like thick tomes, demanding months of your time, and then there are the slender ones — the kind you slip into your bag, read in a single sitting, yet carry with you long after you’ve turned the last page. World War 1: A History From Beginning to End by Henry Freeman belongs to the latter. I opened it one rainy afternoon, thinking I’d skim a few chapters, and before I knew...
When I was a child, someone told me that Shiva was a god who could wear ashes as perfume, dance in cremation grounds as if they were ballrooms, and yet be the tender husband who tied Parvati’s anklet when it came loose. That image has never left me. So, when I picked up Adideva: 25 Legends Behind His 25 Names by Deepa Bhaskaran Salem, I half expected familiar retellings. Instead, I found myself tu...
There’s a peculiar comfort in leafing through a book that feels like both a mirror and a map. I didn’t expect a book on the Constitution to make me pause mid-page and reflect on my own life, but that’s exactly what happened with Why the Constitution Matters by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud. Imagine sitting in a quiet corner of a café, the hum of conversations around you, and suddenly realizing that the...
A beautiful and ultimately sad story of a chef who lived in the highest realms of grand cooking. One of two books that I have read on the topic - the other being Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. And he took his own life too. I have on occasion entertained this fantasy of having my own restaurant and cooking for a living. Of planning out my dining room, what the menu might look like and th...
