One would not expect a novel by John Grisham to be a catalyst in your seriously step back and reflect on your life but the book “Skipping Christmas” does. The Krank family, sick of the materialism and money culture surrounding Christmas festivities decide that one year they will forego all the celebrations and have a […]

With an Amitabh ghosh book, you just don’t get a novel you get generous doses of history and geography , folk lore , lots of scientific facts related to the plot( in this case – dolphins in general and Gangetic dolphins in particular) and you still enjoy the story at the level of a story. The archipelago […]

1939-1945, and the few years before and after, were arguably some of the darkest in human history. They were also some of the most studied, researched and documented years, and Hollywood has regularly looked to this period for inspiration for countless films and stories, both factual and fictitious. Perhaps the common factor in most of […]

According to the ancient Hindu scriptures, history is divided into four epochs. As William Dalrymple was told again and again on his travels around the Indian subcontinent, the region is now in the throes of the ‘Kali Yug’, the Age of Kali, an epoch of darkness and disintegration. In such an age normal conventions fall […]

These days when some one asks me about my favorite book, two books come to mind. One of them is the Bible which of course for a Christian is not all that strange. The other book that comes to mind almost immediately is Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner”. It has been quite a while since […]