Posts from the history category.
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...
I didn’t open this book looking for courage.I opened it expecting information.What I found instead was a quiet lineage of bravery — lives lived when there were no safety nets, no hashtags, no reassuring headlines saying things will get better. Over The Rainbow: India’s Queer Heroes doesn’t rush at you with noise. It walks beside you, calmly, carrying stories that were never meant to be erased, onl...
Some books don’t begin when you open them.They begin much earlier — in the quiet fears you carry about love, in the endings you never got to choose, in the stories you were forced to leave unfinished.The Things We Leave Unfinished met me exactly there.I picked this book up with assumptions. I’ll admit that upfront. I thought I was walking into a glossy, trope-heavy romance — something indulgent, d...
They say that if you grow up in Maharashtra, Shivaji Maharaj isn’t just a historical figure — he’s a presence. A pulse. A silhouette carved into your imagination long before you even learn to spell “history.” And over the years, we’ve all read countless books about him: some glorifying him into near-myth, some dissecting his tactics with academic precision, some reducing him to a chapter squeezed ...
