Shoot First, Mumble Later

Back in the late 1980s, I'd be stumped when asked to recommend one book that would provide an insight into Bombay's present and past...

Amitav Ghosh's blog entry for November 5 was a review of Churning the Earth: The Making of Global India by Aseem Shrivastava and Ashis...

Of the intellectuals and artists who have signed on to the cultural boycott of Israel, the one I respect most is John Berger. His name is al...

My review of Aravind Adiga's novel Last Man in Tower has been published by CNN Go. Read it here .

I watched a bit of the Swedish adaptation of Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night. It was better than watching ranting anchors and rantin...

I'm late with a 70th birthday homage to John Lennon, but that's because I've been shuttling between cities too much. Anytime the...

My latest column for Yahoo! India can be read here .

My column for Yahoo! India, published yesterday. Do not hope to hope again Brad Pitt, who has stayed impeccably diplomatic throughout his ca...

If the world of critical theory venerates one secular saint, it is Walter Benjamin (1892 - 1940), a Jewish-German philosopher who grew famou...

With temperatures reaching 45 degrees Celsius up north, Facebook updates have begun quoting the opening line of T.S.Eliot's The Waste La...

The best I can say about Tim Burton is that I prefer Mars Attacks to Independence Day . Burton's Alice In Wonderland , which should be ...

The Kala Ghoda Arts Festival was driven, in its initial years, by the visual arts crowd. The area's status as an arts precinct arose pri...

From this morning's Times of India: "In March 1998, one evening while his father was admitted to the ICU of Breach Candy Hospital,...

The title of this post is, I'm afraid, deceptive. It refers to one of Arun Kolatkar's Kala Ghoda Poems . Published in 2004, shortly ...

My short review of The Lost Symbol gave away little of the plot, but if you plan to read the book, this post might reveal more than you wan...

Dan Brown's latest novel has a lame title and limps out of the blocks before gathering speed and confidence. The book displays all the e...

In the mid-nineties, as Imran Khan and Benazir Bhutto became implacable foes, I wondered what their relationship had been like when both wer...

I found two reasons to like the Half-Blood Prince film and two to dislike it. To consider the good things first, the movie is a joy to look ...

To mark the release of the film version of the Half Blood Prince , here's my ranking of J.K. Rowling's seven volume series. I haven...

Today, June 16, is known to fans of James Joyce as Bloomsday, the day on which the entire action of Joyce's Ulysses takes place. The da...