Plays
Plays I Have Seen
A log of (most of) the theatre I have watched.
View →Meanderings
Thoughts and observations. These are the things that occupy my mind beyond astronomy.
Essay
August 2022
Emotions Elicited by Inanimate Objects: Exploring Children's Attachment to Toys
Kohut's self-psychology, Winnicott's transitional objects, and the strange depth of what children feel for things that cannot feel back.
Read →Essay
May 2022
The Blurring Lines between Democratisation and Hindu-isation
How British colonialism and Hindu landlordism eroded Bhumij tribal self-governance, and why this matters for environmental democracy now.
Read →Essay
September 2021
Exploring the Imposition of Western Modernity Through Colonial and Postcolonial Writings
Aspiration, violence, and trauma in Wicomb, Naipaul, Mishra, Kincaid, and African poets. How the colonial imposition of modernity ultimately produces aspiration in the colonised.
Read →Essay
December 2021
Vernacular English: Exploring the Banal in Postcolonial Writings
How Bajaj, Kohli, Banerji, and Dangarembga make English a world language by depicting the local, the provincial, and the everyday.
Read →Essay
December 2021
Reinterpreting Borders in an Intersectional Framework in Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha
Territorial, spatial, and social borders in Ghatak's partition film. Caste, patriarchy, and the lives of East Bengali refugees who did not get to choose which side of the line they were on.
Read →Book
September 2023
What Were the Meditations Really For?
Pierre Hadot's reading of Marcus Aurelius: the Meditations as spiritual exercise rather than philosophical treatise, and what that distinction actually changes.
Read →Film
October 2021
Ghare Baire Aaj
Aparna Sen's reworking of Tagore: a Dalit wife, a liberal editor, and a Hindutva demagogue walk into a story Tagore wrote in 1916 and India has been living ever since.
Read on Letterboxd →Essay
October 2021
Indian Humour Throughout the Ages
From the Natya Shastra's classification of hāsyam to Kazi Nazrul Islam writing satirical songs from a British jail. A survey of how humour has moved through Indian history.
Read →Book
October 2023
What the Communist Manifesto Got Wrong
The Maoist misreading, the missing political theory, and why Marx's vagueness about revolution is not a dialectical virtue.
Read →Essay
December 2021
Mughal Influences in Eastern India and Western Europe
The Mughal dynasty's cultural reach: Rembrandt absorbing the mukula gesture into his Amsterdam workshop, and the musical and architectural flowering of the Malla kingdom in Bishnupur.
Read →Essay
December 2021
Bridging the Gap Between the Human and the Non-Human
The Capitalocene, non-human rights, and why knowing the facts about climate change is never enough.
Read →Book
December 2023
The Room Is Not Just a Room
Woolf's A Room of One's Own as a metaphor for mental liberation: its enduring argument, its limits, and its resonance beyond its original terms.
Read →Essay
October 2021
Tourism, Capitalism, and the Vulnerability of the Sikkim Mountains
A landslide in Sikkim, the people stranded by it, and what capitalism's relationship with tourism does to mountains.
Read →Essay
July 2022
What Are the Major Conceptual Difficulties in Defining an Emotion?
The criterion problem, homeostasis, and why defining an emotion may be fundamentally impossible.
Read →Book
November 2023
The Slave Who Knew Everything Oedipus Didn't
The Shepherd's role in King Oedipus: how Sophocles places the truth that destroys a king in the hands of the person with the least power.
Read →Book
October 2021
Zoë Wicomb's You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town
Apartheid childhood, the Bildungsroman form, Eurocentrism, and Simmel's tragedy of culture in Wicomb's Cape Town.
Read →Essay
February 2022
Ecosystems, Human Impact, and the Age of Capital
Rachel Carson, the Anthropocene, and why the Capitalocene is the more honest framing for the crisis we're in.
Read →Essay
March 2022
Genetically Modified Crops: Food Security, Farmer Distress, and the Limits of Biotechnology
BT cotton, the Green Revolution's legacy, and why GMOs are not the most viable solution in Indian agriculture.
Read →Book
September 2023
Blind Darkness and the Razor's Edge
The Isa Upanishad's counterintuitive claim: those who delight in learning enter a blinder darkness than the ignorant. Zeno, Socrates, and the hazard of partial knowledge.
Read →Book
November 2023
Tiresias: The Blindness That Sees
The inversion at the heart of King Oedipus: the physically sightless prophet who sees everything, and the clear-eyed king who is blind to himself.
Read →Essay
February 2022
The Unfulfilled Promises of Globalisation
What globalisation promised the developing world and what it delivered instead. A reading of Stiglitz's Globalization and its Discontents.
Read →Essay
April 2022
Climate Action and Climate Justice
Climate injustice, the colonial roots of the emissions divide, and the frameworks of climate action from the Paris Agreement to the Green New Deal.
Read →Essay
July 2022
Could You Be Having a Lot of Real Fun in a Dream?
Dream yoga, Advaita Vedanta, quantum mechanics, and whether the reality of dreams can sustain real experience.
Read →Essay
January 2024
Alexandra Kollontai and the Women's Question
Kollontai's socialist feminism: why she linked sexual liberation to the class struggle, and why she refused to choose between the personal and the political.
Read →Stamp Collection
