An Englishman living in the United States in the late nineteenth century wrote stories about an Indian boy that continue to captivate children and adults alike around the world. Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book when he was residing in Vermont. The house where he resided is now owned and preserved by The Landmark Trust USA. They hold an annual…
There was a clear bifurcation in the milieu in which the books that I read as a child were set. On one hand were the Amar Chitra Katha comics, which were set in India but mainly based on mythology and history, and then, there were comics such as Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, Phantom, etc., and books that I read, which…
Comics were an integral part of my life growing up. I read them all without discrimination. However, there was a clear hierarchy within the world of comics. The Amar Chitra Katha series (Eternal Stories in Pictures) was probably the most ubiquitous, as it was printed in India. It was also the kind you were most likely to receive as a…
“It’s spelled ‘Rossie’ not ‘Rosie’,” said my brother. He was talking about my recent post in which I mentioned that as a young boy, when I was sick, I spent time reading books, and one of the stories that stuck in my mind was “Our Miss Rosie.” The story was about a white lady who takes a pair of African-American…
“A perfect trailer house for Jupiter’s hideout!”, I thought to myself. I was walking on one of the trails in my town, pushing Nikhil’s adaptive wheelchair while Nikhil took in all the sights and pointed out things that caught his interest. We had come around a bend in the trail and the house trailer was jammed between a few truck…
The little-known story of the 19th-century spy Pandit Kinthup who was the first to ascertain that the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra were the same rivers.
There are many stereotypes of Americans, some positive and some negative. “Lack of cultural awareness” is one of the negative ones and to a certain extent, I have found that to be true in my experience. There were the occasional “did you have elephants and tigers in your neighborhood?” type questions when I was studying at Clemson. “How is it…
If you lived in Bangalore anytime between 1970 and 2010 and loved reading and purchasing books, you have probably been receiving forwards in various WhatsApp groups about the recent demise of Mr. T. S. Shanbhag. Mr. Shanbhag was the owner of Premier Bookshop on Church Street, Bangalore, and was an institution to himself. He, sadly, like many others in India,…
“Didn’t we study a poem called ‘On Killing a Tree?’”, asked my brother. “It was written by Gieve Patel,” he added. We had just started our daily WhatsApp call and I mentioned to him that I had spent the better part of the morning cutting down a tree. My wife had been asking me for the last three years to…
My introduction to the word “Geography” came via my third-grade textbook. It was passed on to me by my friend and neighbor Srikanth, who is a year older than me. I received it probably sometime in December after the end of my second grade and I remember poring over the black and white photographs of people and their dwellings in…