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It was already evening when they arrived, and I sensed a good feeling. The light had softened, retreating gently from the edges of objects, as though the day itself wished to listen to what came next. Dr. Gangadhar Sunkara came with Dr. Chinnababu Sunkavalli—both close friends, healthcare researchers, and men marked by that particular stillness...

Still in her twenties, Rebecca F. Kuang has emerged as one of the most incisive literary voices examining empire’s afterlives. Born in China, raised in the United States, and educated at Cambridge and Oxford, she broke through with The Poppy War, a novel rooted in China’s wars, colonial trauma and organised violence. Its success grew into a...

 My younger brother Salil Tiwari’s son, Sudhanshu, and his wife, Stuti, have been blessed with a son. They live in Meerut, my hometown, and visited me recently. Like all visits involving a newborn, it carried a quiet gravity—soft footsteps, hushed voices, time slowing itself to the rhythm of breath. They have named the child Pranav, a name that...

The readers have lapped up the silver jubilee edition of Wings of Fire. Within a month of its release on October 15, 2025, the 94th birth anniversary of Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, the first print was sold out. At the 38th Hyderabad Book Fair, on December 20th, 2025, I saw people buying  this book, and was pleasantly surprised when one of them approached...

There is a peculiar magic in the things we eat—an intimacy so daily, so habitual, that it becomes almost invisible. Food enters our bodies the way air enters our lungs: without ceremony, without question. We assume its shapes, its colours, its textures, as though they were born complete, needing no history, no explanation. But if we slow...

Shakespeare once reminded us that life is but a stage; listen closely, and beneath those familiar words, you can hear the soft hum of entrances and exits. Each of us arrives in medias res, as the Latins say—dropped into the middle of a vast, unfolding drama whose beginning we never witnessed and whose ending we shall not see. The world continues...

I have been fascinated by Shakespeare, as most of those fancy English phrases and words that enchanted me were created by this one man who lived in England during 1564–1616. I was always intrigued by how one individual could produce such a great body of work that continues to charm billions of English-speaking people over centuries. Then, a...

In an era where our minds scroll faster than our hearts can feel, where information pours in like a relentless monsoon yet wisdom dries up like parched earth—the Bhagavad Gita stands not as an ancient relic, but as a future-ready operating system for the human spirit. Today, we wrestle with dilemmas Krishna did not name, but fully...

I watched Christopher Nolan’s Inception when it was released in 2010, back when going to the theatre still felt like an event. The film is centred around the idea of entering and manipulating dreams, slipping into layers of the mind as easily as walking through doors. In that world, the only reliable test for what is real is a small spinning top:...

When Hari Atkuri visited me with his niece, Krishna, I felt an immediate shift in the air—as if a gentle breeze had entered the room carrying the fragrance of an unseen, far-off garden. Warm, curious, and quietly luminous, their presence brought a rare ease, the kind that arrives only when good intent and pure purpose walk in together. Hari, who...