Essays and Reflections

A Word on Rohit Manchanda's Novels (not a review)

Novels' protagonists in the Manmohan Singh years, the vestigial flurries of Nehruvian India, and the provincial upbringing of cosmopolitan Indian…

Nov 12 •

Between the 'Cad' and the 'Angry Young Man'

Thoughts on the recent Salim-Javed documentary. This is an expanded version of the article published in Indian Express a few weeks ago, including some…

Sep 28 •

Love for Horses, by proxy - Part 1

From the days when I wrote my first stories in 2009 to today, my reading, writing and dreaming selves have loved horses.

Sep 24 •

Writers and Writing in Muzaffarnagar

Featuring my mother's literary life, a septuagenarian 'comrade' with an affinity for truth, and a crude estimation of the Hindi vanity-publishing market

Sep 3 •

The Machine is Learning, Again

My 2020 novel The Machine is Learning, the tech-infused story of Saransh and Jyoti and Mitesh, sees a reissue

Aug 16 •

Ridley Scott's Napoleon, and Tolstoy's

"Scott’s omissions are more mindless than driven by any desire to provide an easy portrait of unmitigated greatness."

Jul 21 •

Midway through 'War and Peace'

Hair 'á la grecque', men with personalities wrapped in professions, and the modalities of boredom apropos fiction

Jul 1 •

That Campus Novel from Deep Storage

Thoughts about an early, failed attempt at the novel, and the opening section of that effort for your kind look-see

Jun 12 •

The Lottery And/Or The Con

On the literary potential of the stock markets, real options, and John D. MacDonald as gurudev

May 20 •

Month #4 of 'War and Peace'

On money in novels, the impossibility of speedy emancipation, and homecomings

Apr 30 •

A Raking Glance

"When asked to, I could pull off an act of reading without knowing how to read, with my finger moving over the right line and my mouth voicing it out…

Apr 28 •

The Word-Power Summer

"Prefixes, suffixes, synonyms, antonyms, etymological stories, memory hacks—these filled that summer of logophilia."

Apr 22 •

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