Tag: best-of lists
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Not Just a Walk in the Park
Long roadtrips are great – we love those so much. We often dream of saddling up on a BMW R1250GS and riding off into the sunset. Or, for the times we crave air-conditioned comfort and when a motorcycle just won’t do, we think of the Mahindra Thar, which has a rugged charm that’s all its…
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Anglo-Indian Stories: The Books You Must Read
Risen from our colonial past, the Anglo-Indian community in India is unique in many ways, and an invaluable part of modern India. When British (or other European, mainly Portuguese) men married Indian women, mostly in the late-19th and early- to mid-20th centuries, their progeny came to be known as Anglo-Indians. After 1947 – through the…
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Bad Medicine: The 7 Books That Took On Big Pharma
Truth is stranger than fiction, they say. And that sure seems to be the case in the world of medicine. Over the last two decades, the pharma industry has earned significant disrepute for the dark, dubious ways in which it sometimes functions. Pharma companies (especially those that manufacture generic drugs), many of which have often…
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Iconic Brands: The Books That Mean Business
From Nike, LEGO and Sony to Volkswagen, Nokia and Adidas, there are so many companies – iconic brands – that we know and love, and whose products are a part of our everyday lives. But how much do we really know about the companies we sometimes adore? For those who may be interested in looking…
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Travels in Africa: The 7 Books to Read
Once known as the dark continent and still seen as a ‘difficult’ place by some, Africa is the world’s second-largest continent, with 20% of the Earth’s land area and a population of more than 1.4 billion people. Half a dozen European countries plundered, raped and mercilessly looted Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries and…
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Our Must-Reads List for March
We’ll admit, our reading wishlist for March is a bit ‘heavy,’ with Pico Iyer introspecting on a life spent traipsing around the world, Ashoka Mody reflecting on how everything went wrong in India (and how things might be resolved in the future), Dhirendra Jha examining new evidence in the context of Gandhiji’s assassination and Nathuram…
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On the Hippie Trail – Part I
For most of us, the word ‘hippie’ is associated with images from the 1960s-70s, of Westerners – long-haired white men and women – clad in semi-tattered psychedelic clothing, smoking weed, chilling out on the beaches of Goa, dancing to their own beat and generally not giving a damn. An article from the July 7, 1967…
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Flights of Fancy: Essential Reading for Aircraft Geeks
Blame it on Top Gun. Ever since Tom ‘Maverick’ Cruise set the screen on fire in 1986, with his heroics aboard an F-14A Tomcat in the Tony Scott-directed, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced hotshot flyboy movie, we’ve always fantasised about being a fighter pilot. In the 35 odd years since then, our fantasies went nowhere, while Cruise, incredibly,…
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Must-Read Books on Hindustani Classical Music
Calcutta-based Rebanta Gupta, who loves Hindustani classical music, presents his essential reading list for fans of this particularly fascinating genre of music. My cousin Sharanya seems to have always harboured an antipathy towards Hindustani classical music since his childhood. When he was five or six, he once saw me practicing my vocal lessons one evening…
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The Best Books on Bicycle Travel (Part II)
In Part I of this story, we spoke about some of the best books on bicycle travel. There was Rob Lilwall, who cycled home from Siberia, Dervla Murphy, who cycled all the way from Ireland to India and Mark Beaumont, who cycled around the world and then, in a separate trip, across the Americas. There…
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