George Orwell begins an essay in his column ‘As I Please’ with an arresting apocryphal tale. When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent inquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about: whereupon, so it is said—and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be—he burned what he had written and abandoned his project. Story seems to imply that objectivity in history is unachievable. This was not Orwell’s opinion. He wrote further in the same essay that ‘a certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don’t like it’. Cynicism about historical truth, apprehensi...

Life is an ever-growing collection of unfulfilled desires; each alike Ghalib’s thousands, worth dying for: हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले   Last month I gratified an old longing - For three days I witnessed the annual festival of music in Chennai, The Margazhi Kutcheri. Utter solitude of the unit where I was posted after internship, more than three decades ago, had forced me to look for means to while away the idle hours. As I wrote sometime back, I discovered Kishori Amonkar in these fumbling efforts. Then, a young officer from Kerala often saw me sprawled on a lawn chair, reading, and listening to music, as he walked across the corridor facing my room. He suggested that I listen to Yesudas’s Carnatic albums, which he said were popular in Kerala. A few weeks later he brought me two cassettes of Yesudas’s music, seeing I had not heeded his advice. I liked the music: the fast pace and the fascinating drums.  India Today had launched Music Today then,...

  “To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.” ― Will Thomas, Some Danger Involved   He was the first and the most committed bibliophile I met. We were posted in the same hospital. He was not a doctor, but as is known in the military medical fraternity, a non-technical officer. Till then, I owned very few books – mostly fiction and a smattering of volumes on Indian philosophy. Latter were so obscure that I had not read more than a few pages of any. A succession of events about this time changed the world of my reading. We bought our first personal computer. Within a few months, internet too arrived home. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone was tremendously popular then, especially among children. My kids learned of a new mode of buying books – an online bookshop. I ordered the book at indiaplaza.in. A colleague lent me Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything . I read the b...