soul-exploding essay; art curdling on the page before my eyes newyorker.com/magazine/2024/…

"There is a story in the Hadith...of a cat saving the sleeping prophet from a snake that was slithering up to him. The cat near Jesus’s bed brings to Goswamy’s mind the one by the prophet’s. The painting, like a lung, expands." Prathyush Parasuraman caravanmagazine.in/books/bn-goswa…

"Where we once guarded our control over personal information, we now give up control not just freely but even tenderly...It’s a strange form of Stockholm syndrome for the surveillance age — we love, and love with, the tools of our captors." Zoë Hitzig thedriftmag.com/on-the-grid/

minouche shafik is the new V&A director. staggering stuff, taking failing upwards to an art form gov.uk/government/new…

hilarious that the only retweets this is getting are from crypto bots, who are swiftly developing new capabilities eg irony

Zakia Jafri has left us. She was the symbol of a long battle that she fought in the name of truth. Here's an oped I wrote to say that it is important to remember Ehsan Jafri - and now Zakia too CERI Sciences Po Recherche SciencesPo BASAS King's India Institute indianexpress.com/article/opinio…

haan bhai Kapil Mishra will take a break from inciting riots and start cleaning the streets personally, taliyan bajao

bizarre that the economist still can’t write an article about india free of shitty jokes about curry and yogis. like much of the western press, clearly still stuck in a failing struggle to shake off the boomer yoke economist.com/europe/2025/02…

Esther Kinsky wrote a whole novel, ROMBO, about the soundscape of earthquakes - the “Humming, whirring, roaring, murmuring, thundering, clattering, whooshing, rushing, rumbling, whistling, droning, blaring. And so on.”

is going from flannery o’connor straight to carolyn chute too much disgusting small-town americana at once? or are we to be moved by the beauty of rural solidarity etc? stay tuned

fair except French people all walk around wearing sweatshirts saying “Detroit” and “Milwaukee” so it’s a tie really

One of India’s more prestigious engineering colleges appointed a dean who publicly thanked Gandhi’s killer for “saving India”. It seems nothing can stop Godse’s rehabilitation and Gandhi’s degradation, as I explored in The Drift last year. thedriftmag.com/character-assa…

2020 in new york city appeared suddenly like an apparition on my threshold…have i imagined everything since then or

The IITs, no doubt the origin of a million success stories, are equally the subject of a whole lot of uncritical mythologizing that obscures a whole lot of problems and blinkered thinking - a phenomenon I wrote about in Los Angeles Review of Books. lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-life…

I lived it: went to the old queen’s head in islington because of this The Fence Magazine article and paul mescal was not there the-fence.com/paul-mescal-pu…

revelation of the day is that Berliner Kindl is brewed on a street called Indira Gandhi Straße…prompting an ethical reevaluation

to be bought for every old zoomer and millennial you hate and/or care deeply for; to be read conspicuously at outdoor tables in prenzlauer berg

shoutout to the previous owner of my “importance of being earnest” who wrote “ABSURD” on every page - a scholar for our time

Nehru died 61 years ago this week, but he lives on in every bit - grand and grim - of independent India. re-upping my piece for The TLS on why India’s current rulers hate him and the generous, pluralist world he fought for the-tls.co.uk/regular-featur…