Culture presents reflections on such non-serious but non-trivial matters as music, literature and travel.
I write this the morning after I attended a tabla recital by a man who must be close to being the best tabalchi of our age, Yogesh Samsi. Although I admire Samsi’s art (and craft), I remain unconvinced that his instrument can do its work without the endorsement alongside of a voice, sitar, sarod, flute, or [...]
In my opinion, Test cricket may be compared to the finest Scotch, fifty-overs a side to Indian Made Foreign Liquour, and 20-20 to the local hooch. The addict who cannot have the first or the second will make do with the last. The pleasures of the shortest game are intense but also wholly ephemeral. There is [...]
The two greatest comebacks in the history of Indian sport were both conducted in the great city of Kolkata. The better-known, since more recent, was the magnificent 281 scored by V. V. S. Laxman in the Eden Gardens in March 2001. After Australia had forced India to follow on, and four early wickets had fallen, Laxman [...]
I have been reading the correspondence of the American polymath Edmund Wilson. Wilson was the most influential literary critic of his day, whose essays and reviews could make or break a writer’s career. He was steeped in American and European literature, and taught himself Russian and Hebrew. His range was enormous; he read and wrote about [...]
On my last trip to Kolkata, I had what can only be described as a uniquely bhadralok experience: I bought a book by a Dasgupta about another Dasgupta, which was sold to me by a third Dasgupta, after he had been guided by a fourth Dasgupta. To explain how this came about, I need to go [...]
In his new book, A Writer’s People, V. S. Naipaul reflects on the work of, among others, Nirad C. Chaudhuri. Naipaul praises (with some reservations) Chaudhuri’s two volumes of autobiography, but is dismissive of his other, more impersonal, books, such as his analyses of Hindu philosophy and his lives of Clive and Max Müeller. The little [...]
Surfing the Net, I came across an essay by a Swedish writer on the social significance of my favourite stimulant. Jacob Norberg’s ‘No Coffee’, published in Eurozine (see www.eurozine.com) explores the role played by the café in modern European society. Following the German thinker Jurgen Habermas, Norberg argues that to drink a cup of coffee in [...]
Choosing a cricket team (real or hypothetical) is an exercise fraught with danger, for you and me as much as for the chairman of selectors. Where the chairman of selectors is interrogated by the media, you and me are chastised by our friends, an experience that is scarcely more pleasant for being more private. In this [...]
I have been reading the letters of Macaulay, these printed in a handsome volume published a hundred years ago, and edited by his nephew George Otto Trevelyan. Some forty pages of this book excerpt the letters he wrote to his family and friends from India. It was in June 1834 that Macaulay arrived in the sub-continent. [...]
The first argument I had with my wife was about literature. We had known each other only a few weeks, but fortunately—in those pre-cable TV, pre-Internet, days—we knew already that boy and girl could find common ground in discussing books and authors. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had just appeared, and the lady who was not then [...]