February 29, 2016

Once upon a time, I thought it a criminal waste of precious, Universe-given time and life to watch grown men running after an inflated ball. Or batting it, or bowling it. Once upon a time, as a child, I did both: kick balls, and hit them with bats and hockey sticks (hockey I was better…

January 5, 2016

The title of my new book, “Works in Progress,” emphasizes my position that nothing is final for me: I am always open to rethinking my conclusions (if any), and my stories are just one tiny strand in the vast tapestry of human history and thinking. I have a bad habit of publishing and unpublishing books,…

November 23, 2015

(Random thoughts, in 1996, of an evolving, changing mind*.) Butter Chicken in Ludhiana is a hilarious book, though having admired its author greatly, and perhaps too much, I suddenly began to ask myself, “Who does Pankaj Mishra think he is?” [Okay, he is a writer, and so am I. Writers write stuff.] For it is…

November 16, 2015

Some people believe that restrictions on language — official or social censorship of speech and writing — compel writers and other artists to be more creative, and these restrictions are therefore a good thing. While this argument has some merit, on the whole, restrictions on language are restrictions on thought, which must reflect natural speech…

November 6, 2015

Formatting my 2000 book Impressing the Whites in order to make it easily available on createspace.com and Amazon, I was surprised by some lines in the document (yes, authors write many books, and sometimes forget much of what they’ve written in their earlier books), such as this paragraph: … as the number of wars and…

September 21, 2015

When I was in my late teens, I used to read Punch magazine, and one of my favorite writers was Alan Coren, who published a humor collection titled Golfing for Cats. It turned out that the book had nothing to do either with golfing or cats; but golfing and cats were the two hottest subjects…

September 21, 2015

UPDATED Jan 15, 2016: These three books are very close to my heart. And I’m pretty much coming to the point where the last copies of the classic editions are running out (Please don’t buy the Avatar Prabhu U.S. edition (hardcover), unless you’re too poor to afford any other (I’d prefer a reader to money)–I…

September 9, 2015

This is a mini-blog: my own quick view about this: Possibly those people who, by virtue of their “caste,” have been suppressed and kept back for centuries … they must be helped with job and educational reservations, because it is much harder for them to catch up. However, ANYONE, regardless of class or caste, who…