For Caravan, I tracked down real-estate SMSes for the better part of a month, discovering the odd, odd properties that lay at the other end of the trail of spam: It would have been sheer cussedness to not be entranced by the Golf Estate sample unit. A scale model of the entire layout showed clumps [...]
In the New York Times, my review of Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: Shrewdly, Siddhartha Deb’s “The Beautiful and the Damned” avoids reaching for this category altogether and is very much the finer book for it. Deb, the author of two novels and an associate professor at the New School, borrows his title [...]
A modified version of this appeared in the August-September issue of Conde Nast Traveller India To be a really good angler, one must tell really good stories about angling. Sunny Jind is among the best. Witness, for instance, his story of how an ex-girlfriend from America tracked him down online after 38 years, and flew [...]
To bring this blog up to speed, links to a few pieces I’ve written over the past couple of months: In Mint Lounge, thoughts on the wonderful Aaranya Kaandam and its neo-noir. In The National, an elegy to the departed — and not terribly missed! — safari suit. On FirstPost.com, trying to figure out why [...]
More than a month ago, Sunil Sethi interviewed me for his NDTV show “Just Books,” but I understand the episode aired only last weekend. As is usually the case with most things on television, I missed the actual broadcast. Here, though, is the episode of “Just Books” where Following Fish was featured. My segment starts [...]
A year or so ago, I wrote a feature for Mint on a Mumbai-based firm of behaviour architects who were starting to use the lessons of cognitive neuroscience to bring down the number of track-trespassing deaths in the city. They now have many months’ worth of data, and I wrote about the success of this [...]
In Open this week, a review of Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects — a book that is exactly what its title promises: There’s no better way to illustrate MacGregor’s approach than with the example of the Rosetta Stone, object number 33 on his list of 100. The Rosetta Stone is [...]
A recent discussion at the Berkeley School of Journalism between two veterans of long-form journalism, on the future of the craft, makes for interesting reading. There are two novel points that the speakers make, notable for how contradictory they appear — one so incredibly forward-looking, one seemingly old-fashioned. Here’s the first: If you were going to set [...]
In Caravan this month, a profile of Lalit Modi, a story that took me three-and-a-half fascinating months to research and write, and that forms the magazine’s March cover. Below are the first few paragraphs excerpted from the piece: EVERY spring, for the past three years—for the first three seasons of the Indian Premier League—Lalit Kumar [...]
James Wood reviews Teju Cole’s Open City in this week’s New Yorker, and it turns out that the narrative of Open City — running from the fall of 2006 to the summer of 2007 — coincides perfectly with the first year I spent in New York, doing pretty much what Cole’s protagonist does: studying at [...]