Culture presents reflections on such non-serious but non-trivial matters as music, literature and travel.
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 [...]
‘For a sixteen-year-old youth who had yet to begin to shave’, writes Kumar Mukherji in his memoir of life as a music lover, ‘the winter of 1942 would best be remembered as the year when he heard Kesarbai [Kerkar], Roshanara Begum and Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan perform’. Were I to recall the year I turned [...]
When Mohammed Yousuf is at the wicket I often stop by the TV and watch, for he is one of the more graceful batsmen now playing. I thus caught snatches of the three long hundreds he scored against England earlier this summer, in the course of which at least two commentators referred to him as ‘Yousuf [...]
As a rule, this column does not mention or review books recently published. If I make a exception this fortnight it is because the work in question is exceptionally good, and because its author died before seeing it in print. The book is Kumar Mukherji’s The Lost World of Hindustani Music, a wonderful anecdotal history of [...]
Some months ago, a reader wrote in to dispute my characterization of cricket as ‘the most subtle and sophisticated sport known to humans’. He gave twelve reasons as to why it was football, rather than cricket, that should be accorded this honour. He began by quoting Albert Einstein, who once posited a connection between beauty and [...]