Posts from the history category.
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...
I didn’t expect to find myself sprinting through the cobbled streets of Prague at midnight, heart hammering, clutching a book that seemed to pulse with its own life, but there I was.Dan Brown is back, after nearly a decade, and he’s brought Robert Langdon with him — the Harvard symbologist whose wardrobe is as memorable as his mind: loafers, turtlenecks, and a Mickey Mouse watch, a little like a l...
Imagine this: it’s late at night, the world outside is quiet, and I promise myself, “Just one more chapter.” You know where this is going — I didn’t stop. That’s what Amish Tripathi’s The Chola Tigers: Avengers of Somnath did to me. And honestly, I’m glad I let the hours slip, because this book feels like sitting by a fire while an old storyteller spins a tale of vengeance, courage, and a nation t...
You know those moments when you stumble on a book that doesn’t just tell a story, but makes you look at the world around you differently? That’s exactly what happened to me with Bakhtiyarpur: Story of the Destruction of the World’s Intellectual Capital Nalanda by Pankaj Lochan. I’ll admit, the first thing that hooked me wasn’t even the pages — it was the haunting irony of a railway station named a...
