• Two Communities – A Story on Interfaith Love

    The name, Saadat Hasan Manto, arouses curiosity in the minds of Indians and Pakistanis. He was a brilliant story-teller, particularly when it came to short stories. In his short stories, Manto consistently makes the point that due to mental differences arising from ethical and religious considerations, love ebbs away like air escaping from a pricked…

  • How to Practice Mindfulness

    What is mindfulness really? Do we understand it? More importantly, how can we practice it in daily life? Let’s find out answers to these questions.

  • Top Book Podcasts in India

    So many books, so little time. That’s the story of every book-reader these days, isn’t it? That’s why, podcasts hold great value. They save your time, allow you to listen from anywhere while doing anything and save any kind of effort that is required for reading. For the same reason, audio-books are gaining popularity. But,…

  • How to Read Bhagavad Gita

    Bhagavad Gita – literally translates to The Song of God – is a holy book for Hindus. There are certainly countless other texts such as Vedas, Upanishads etc and in fact many other Gitas, but this one in particular holds a special place and is read/chanted widely in the Hindu society. How should one read…

  • Understanding Burmese (Myanmar) Conflict

    What’s going on in Myanmar? A coup? Yes. But, how did we get here? To answer that question, we have to go back into the past – as we so often do – and find out the power dynamics there. In order to understand the present-day conflict of Myanmar, or Burma as it was previously…

  • How to Kiss as per Kamasutra

    How to kiss as per Kamasutra, the ancient Indian text on the art of love? It sounds a bit funny, perhaps something close to ‘click-bait’ in modern parlance, but the ancient Indians were comfortable exploring the ideas of intimacy. Hard to believe, right? But that’s how it was. That’s why, over 2200 years later, Kamasutra…

  • The Pluralism of India: Shashi Tharoor

    Note: The below excerpts are taken from Shashi Tharoor’s book India: From Midnight to the Millenium and Beyond. My generation grew up in an India where our sense of nationhood lay in the simple thought: That the singular thing about India was that you could only speak of it in the plural. This pluralism emerged…

  • Revisiting Malgudi Days

    The world first heard about this small town called Malgudi in 1935 when RK Narayan published his first novel Swami and Friends. The town was fictional but everything about it was real. The streets, the cinema, the bank, the haircutting salon, the people believing in Indian astrology on one hand and obsessed with English education…