The Invisible Blueprint

Incorruptible is an enticing term. Moreso when it lends incapability of being bribed or being morally compromised. It may seem unacceptable now as corruption has gained new ground. Has it got any meaningful sense when ‘good companies often go bad’? In today's world of volatility and uncertainty, the longer-term perspective is the least fashionable. Over the last two decades, however, Eric Ries's ideas about innovation and long-term thinking have made companies build new management practices. As the creator of the Lean Startup: the idea of creating a Long-Term Stock Exchange, Ries offers a bracingly practical vision of how companies can stay true and still win, and where the longevity of companies and investments gets measured in years and not weeks.

Full of compelling case studies and careful implementation details, Incorruptible unfolds the book into three distinct parts: The Shape of the Abyss explores why even well-intentioned companies end-up betraying their promises; Escape Velocity provides the specific tools that make corruption not just difficult but impossible; and finally To Bend the Light shows how the organisations reshape entire industries around their values and paths. The reason to take the book seriously is not that Ries has discovered a pure way out of corruption but has found that durable institutions alter the field around them.

Incorruptible is a must-read for those involved in building durable businesses or trying to do something good within the capitalist system. It gives a clear account of why companies fail to deliver on the good intentions they had at their founding, and a brilliant toolkit for anyone hoping to build something enduringly positive. It's extremely well researched, engagingly written and synthesizes a lot of fun, and has many examples that stick to the brain and show that things can be done better. In many ways, it is a brilliant practical book. 

One recalls 1959 inention by engineer Nils Bohlin, the three-point safety belt that is the same kind of seat belt we still use today. Volvo could have kept this patented innovation for themselves but open-sourced the patent so that other companies could use three-point belts for free. Volvo’s seat belt story is often retold in business circles but nobody ever tells it from the investors’ point of view. Did the decision spark a battle? Did financial projections show the company was walking away from millions in licensing fees? It’s not hard to imagine the scene.

But Volvo CEO saw something that others couldn’t. When he became CEO in 1956, Volvo sold 31,000 cars annually; by his retirement in 1971, that number had grown to 214,000 (nearly four times faster than the auto industry during the same period). CEO decision was vindicated. Numbers apart, the company ‘gave away’ its most valuable, patented innovation. Volvo grew their brand, their influence, and their visibility. Studies have shown that three-point belts reduced serious injuries by over 50 percent. 

Taking the case of Volvo, Ries mission is to build a company towards human flourishing. It does leave us in awe of such companies but provides practical frameworks that build in protective corporate governance to keep companies on a mission. It's not about visionary founders but about idealistic cultures. It's not merely about creative governance structures that holds the majority vote. It's all of those, integrated and inseparable from what the company offers its non-shareholder stakeholders and its competitive advantage.

Incorruptible is the practical guide to keep a company mission driven as it scales. It shows how leaders breakthrough business models, cultures and governance to ensure that their mission endures. It offers a compelling vision for a future built by businesses that exist to serve rather than extract. The book is replete with detailed case studies drawn from some of the most commercially successful businesses in the world. It enlists companies that are able to resist the temptation to plunder their customers and betray their trust in the name of profit. 

Over the last two decades, Reis’s ideas about innovation, long-term thinking, governance and market reform have reshaped company building and management. His idea connects fiduciary duty with human flourishing into a single, convincing argument. More than anything else, it argues how to build a mission-driven company that makes piles of money by staying both humane and ethical. 

Incorruptible
by Eric Ries
Penguin RandomHouse
Extent: 403 pp. Price: Rs 1099.

First published in the Hindu BusinessLine on Oct 26, 2026.

What's in a name?

Cities carry memories, but some cities seem to carry time itself. Delhi is one such city. Empires have risen and vanished here, dynasties have renamed neighborhoods and rebuilt capitals, conquerors and colonizers have sought to imprint their authority on its landscape, yet the city has continued to answer to a name that appears older and more enduring than many of its rulers. Why has Delhi remained Delhi when so many other Indian cities have reclaimed, revised or reinvented their names? In The Shortest History of Delhi, historian John Zubrzycki approaches the city not merely as a political capital but as a living archive of myths, invasions, faiths, ambitions and memories. Through a brisk yet evocative narrative, he traces how Delhi became an idea larger than geography: a city repeatedly destroyed and recreated yet never deprived of its identity. 

Known originally as Indraprastha, which is mythically attributed to the Pandava kingdom, the origins of the name Delhi remain uncertain, though several theories trace it to early historical and medieval references to Dilli, Dhilli or Dhillika. There is no clarity on how the city got this name, and why has it persisted for so long? More so when several Indian cities have officially changed their colonial-era names, from Calcutta to Kolkata and Bombay to Mumbai, while Delhi has remained Delhi.

What’s in a name? Shakespeare's famous observation that "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" may not hold true for cities, whose names often embody history, memory and identity. The city gives the place its identity, a reason for it to carry it. The city carries many reasons for its being. Some interpret the city’s name to mean threshold (dehleez or dehali), reflecting as an entry point into India. John Zubrzycki, an Australian author with a Ph.D in Indian history from the University in New South Wales, adds fascinating complexity to the city’s multi-layered history.

The story of city’s name has an interesting history. During the reign of the Tomar king Anangpal (in the eleventh century), Hindu bards variously called it dilli, dhilli or dhillika. The British heard the Hindus pronouncing it as dilli while the Muslims were comfortable calling it dehli. Such distinctions may have acquired political overtones over time. It seems good sense prevailed in putting such mindless controversy to rest, the correct spelling of the official name being ‘Delhi’. Resilience is central to Delhi's character.

Many parts of the city have been renamed, but the city has got its distinct identity intact. ‘Delhi is still a name to conjure with,’ wrote Lord Hardinge, when arguing against the shifting of the capital ‘It is intimately associated in the minds…which go back even beyond the dawn of history.’ Lord Crewe, then the secretary of state, declared that the creation of a new capital would be taken as ‘an unfaltering determination to maintain the colonial rule’. It was for the colonialist to justify shifting the capital from Calcutta to Delhi. Never, however, the case for changing the name of the city ever featured. 

Delhi not only retained its mythical status, but much beyond it. Through its stories of intrigue and empire, Zubrzycki chronicles more than a thousand years of Delhi's history through invasions and the struggles. There is an interesting inscription, that dates back to 1607, which highlights the imperial significance of Delhi. It refers to Akbar as Dillishvara, the lord of Delhi, although Akbar spent relatively little time ruling from Delhi itself.

A Persian inscription, dated to 1621, described Jahangir as Shahanshah-e-Delhi on the Salimgarh bridge. Interestingly, Jahangir hardly lived in Delhi. Not only imperial kings, its many shrines, tombs and resting places of saints earned it the moniker "The Threshold of Twenty-Two Saints". There are interesting sub-stories within the main story of Delhi. The nomenclature that makes up Delhi make it for many cities and lay within them the endless games of discovery.

It is hard not to romanticize Delhi. Its story is one of empires and intrigue, splendor and decay, destruction and rebirth. Over centuries, one city has grown upon the remains and memories of another, leaving history visible almost everywhere. Many books have tried to understand Delhi through different lenses, but the challenge is to tell its story without losing what makes the city so singular. Delhi can intimidate and inspire, exhaust and exhilarate in equal measure. It is ancient and restless, bruised and resilient. It’s a city called Delhi

Today, Delhi is a sprawling metropolis that draws people from every corner of the subcontinent, a mosaic of religions, languages, castes, classes and aspirations. Yet beneath this diversity lies a remarkable continuity. Through centuries of upheaval and reinvention, one thing has endured: the name Delhi. As Zubrzycki's book persuasively demonstrates, that name is not merely a label. It is the repository of a thousand years of memory, power, myth and resilience.

The Shortest History of Delhi 

by John Zubrzycki
Picador India
Extent: 214. Price: Rs.433.

First published in www.raagdelhi.com 

Should anyone own it?

Published in 1961, noted historian E H Carr’s monumental What is History? unveiled crucial understanding of history that remains relevant over time. The function of history is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the past and the present. He further stressed that the role of the historian should neither suffer nor history be made to lose its fascination. Much has changed about history and historiography since then, it ignites fierce debate and contests between the state and historians on how it is produced and institutionalized. Who Owns the Past? offers a fraught guide between social history of historians and the politics of writing history.

In a chronological span starting in the 1870s when Sir Syed Ahmad Khan raised objections to a history textbook, Shaan Kashyap takes stock of how history writing has been contested and imagined for next 150 years, till 2020. Each major event in history is viewed with a change in perspective, as history goes through revision and re-examination. Did well-respected historians not point out that ‘the destruction of temples was not necessarily on account of religious bigotry, but also due to political rivalry’? Interpretation of such events through rationalist lens may not concur with the prevailing majoritarian reality of the time. Does it mean that writing about the past must confirm to the lived social and political reality?

Should history writing be seen as a form of storytelling that may appeal to the majority? In principle, it should not. Since few countries inhabit their past as turbulently as India, a medieval mosque and even a dead emperor are the topic of intense national argument all across. More than the professional historians, it is a section of the public, religious movements and dominant politician who are essential historians who are re-writing this version of history. Social media spreads it across, leaving the general public wondering ‘who owns the past?’

Spread across ten chapters, this is an absorbing book on the sociology of power struggles that defines the present at the cost of the past. Kashyap traces the intellectual battles that have shaped it and examines how textbooks are crafted, how institutions legitimize change, and how political ideology leaves its imprint on these stories. Insightful but provocative, it raises an important question: if the past is constantly under seize, what does that mean for our future?

In a society where politics constantly reshapes history, there are uncomfortable questions raised  on the role of historians. History does not belong only to historians but seems as much or more ownership by the public who makes nearly everyone within this discipline uncomfortable. Kashyap doesn’t hesitate to admit that ‘history writing cannot be left to trained historians alone’. Many prominent historians, from Jadunath Sarkar to Ramachandra Guha, were never trained as one. In such a situation, more than a discipline history is a world view.

Who Owns the Past? is a reflective question on historical authority and on what grounds that authority gets exercised. History is neither an inheritance to be owned nor a weapon to be used for getting across an argument. Only historians can resolve historical challenges. For instance, to get a sense of the man behind the bigot emperor, historian Munis D. Faruqui has cut across many distortions in the long prevailing narrative to recreate secular image of Aurangzeb. Not without reason, the sixth Mughal Emperor ruled for nearly half a century.

While the book traces the evolution of historical writing across nearly a century-and-a-half, its deeper interest lies in ensuring that the historians should not suffer on account of it (history) becoming a public vocation. As it seems, the relationship between historians and political power is waning. Since history is invariably used as a tool by the government to trigger empathy towards its ideological predisposition, there are concerns about historian’s vulnerability as scholar in the public arena. Can the historian be left to fend for his/her position?

With history having escaped the classroom and entered mass politics, a new era has dawned on professional historians in which they are gradually losing their academic authority. When every ideological camp seeks possession of the past, Who Owns the Past? wonders if history is an inheritance to be owned.

Who owns the past?
by Shaan Kashyap
Vintage/Penguin RandomHouse, New Delhi
Extent: 390, Price: Rs. 799.

Medieval history is my interest and passion. It helps learn about how the past relates with the present. 

Search for identity

Facing the harsh realities of the chaotic history during the long-drawn Bangladesh Liberation War, one story resonated that had more real facts than fiction in an uncertain life of a   refugee called Kulbhushan. Lost in a maze of memories, the refugee sought an identity by adopting various names such as Bhushan Chacha, Kulbhushan Jain and Gopal Chandra Das. Hailing from Kushtia, in the East Pakistan, he dropped ‘Kul’ from his name to marry a Bengali woman in then Calcutta. The act of reinventing name was questioned by elders in the family: “Did the bride side change their ancestral name?”

Sahitya Akademi Award–winning author Alka Saraogi, explores these questions in Register me as Kulbhushan: could reinvention of name help reclaim identity in a new nation? Set in the historic city of Calcutta (now Kolkata), the novel captures the period when survival often demanded reinvention of identity. At this time when identity means only an official proof, reinvention of name without any particular record runs the risk of identity. It is one man’s determination to be officially recognized that becomes a moving reflection on identity as something shaped by borders and bureaucracy. 

It is a novel on the trauma of partition, a deeply observed epic of exile and the fundamental human desire to belong. The protagonist moves through alien space with grace and humility as a refugee. The idea of forgetting the immediate past worked in his favor for sailing through the daily ordeal of existence. Erasing time gone bye worked as a means of surviving trauma. By punching the button of forgetting - a technique he learnt from his childhood friend - he could survive the suffocating streets and the drudgery of the family.

Register me as Kulbhushan is the story of a refugee, who through self-awareness helps reader capture a nuanced portrayal of the fractures in society. With that being the case, one wonders if there was truly any place that a refugee could call home. Be it the partition of Punjab or Bengal, scars of communal violence have made permanent place in painful memories. Partition is more than the reallocation of a nation-state territory but a displacement of people from homeland and history. It is a mental phenomenon that has serious implications on the refugee. 

Eight months may seem a long time since Kulbhushan came from Kushtia, but wasn’t sure where he was supposed to rest his long legs each night. The travel through the inhospitable dense forests of Dandakaranya added to his learnings. Ever since he alighted at Sealdah, refugees were sleeping on the floor with dirty sheets spread out underneath their legs. On his way through the crowd, he was assaulted by the stench of unwashed bodies, piles of refuse and a roaring heaving clamor everywhere he looked. It was quite a common sight all through.

The novel gives multiple eyes to see the world. Within the main story there are many small stories, much it may seem like a monologue or an autobiography. But it could easily be called a part war story or a communal fiasco. The novel’s major Muslim character, Mohammad Islam, is long blamed by Kulbhushan as the person whose threat letter that caused his exile. Embedded in the novel is the story of displaced from their country due to race and caste. Register me as Kulbhushan is a meditation on lie and truth and beauty and ugliness prevailing in a society. 

Alka Saraogi has evolved an engaging narrative style that integrates fact with fiction. The characters carry stories within stories. John Vater, who is splendid with his translation, thinks that the novel is passed on as anecdotes of personal experiences. It eventually turns out to be tale of the misery of a refugee who searches for real identity within double identity of existence in a region that has historically been one.  

Register me as Kulbhushan
by Alka Saraogi 
Translated by John Vater
Penguin, New Delhi
Extent: 445 pages. Price: Rs. 599.

First published in the Hindu, Aug 29, 2026.

Are we devouring the planet?

Even if the world weans itself from fossil fuels, the climate story will continue to overheat our atmosphere. Transition towards quitting fossil fuels may have begun, with nations and corporations with their net-zero commitments, but emissions of greenhouse gases are unlikely to be curtailed anytime soon. But the climate story will continue unabated. With overall food system generating about one-third of global emissions, it is FOOD that is as big a climate challenge as OIL. Even if greenhouse gases from every other sector were eliminated today, food production alone would account for emissions to increase global temperature by 2°C before 2100. 

Climate change impacts are already making the problem hard to fix. The earth’s twin abilities to produce food and to store carbon are at a cross purpose. Producing more food means more land to be cleared for cultivation at the cost of losing natural carbon storehouses. This means the carbon dioxide the land could absorb if it weren’t used for crop production. Studies project that total demand for more farmlands could amount to 10 million square kilometers by 2050, equivalent to the size of Canada. In climate context, this will amount to colossal waste, as land is the vast reservoir of carbon - holding three times as the atmosphere and four times as much as above-ground vegetation. If the Paris climate summit target has to be met, the world will need to eliminate three-fourths of food-related emissions by 2050. But instead of preserving land to sequester emissions, it is about what is called ‘eating-the-earth’ problem. 

It is now clear that the world has to get more out of the earth without using more of the earth. Mark Twain had rightly remarked, they are not making more of it. The land problem is mostly an agriculture problem (We Are Eating the Earth by Michael Grunwald). The land used to live, learn, work, and play is just a fraction of the land that is used to cultivate food. The farming sprawl is thirty times that of the urban sprawl, the size of Asia plus Europe have already been converted into farmland. The issue at the core is the expanding agricultural footprints which is at enormous cost to our best defenses against climate change. That would account for more forests and other natural carbon storehouses. 

The food system itself is not climate friendly, and probably the most destructive. Every piece of land needs to be valued either as a potential food source or a potential carbon sink. Either way it is ‘carbon’ that is at the center. To return atmospheric carbon to pre-industrial levels of 1750, soils would need to absorb 680 billion tons (Regenesis by George Monbiot). However, sucking up of carbon isn’t a linear phenomenon and much still remains to be known. What could be done in theory is not the same as what can be done in practice. To address the uncertainty, ‘Four Per Thousand’ global campaign has been launched to increase the carbon content uniformly in farm soils by 0.4 percent. While tropical and temperate soils significantly vary in their carbon sucking capacity, in theory it can help trap 89 percent of agricultural emissions. 

Fossil fuels have been conceived as the biggest problem while the eating-the-earth remains under-publicized and under-understood. The fossil fuel problem is getting better understood but not others. Critical is to learn what went wrong when and how, before solutions could be prescribed. The human destruction of nature began a long time before the industrial revolution (The Burning Earth by Sunil Amrith). Way back in the year 1208, the Charter of Forests (issued by England’s King Henry III) became the written law that acknowledged human freedom to exploit natural resources. Till the advent of industrial revolution, the benign climate and rainfall allowed both imperial and colonial forces to clear land, expand cultivation, and build cities. Not much seems to change since then.

While quitting fossil fuel could only be part of the solution, the challenging task is the need to preserve ecosystems that sequester carbon. It is in this regard that beef could be avoided as it uses more land for producing less. One cow meat is as much as 100 chickens, emitting 50 times more greenhouse gases than coal. Given that there are multiple reasons contributing to climate change, there cannot be one solution to fix the problem. It has thus been realized that changing the consumption pattern of 8 billion people and the production pattern of 600 million will be extremely complex. Only systemic changes can stop frying the planet, guilt-trapping people into individual actions may have modest impacts. Undoubtably, food is now as big a climate challenge as oil and coal. While the farms that feed the world might not consume the entire earth, it makes two-fifths of our planet’s land vulnerable. The challenging task ahead is to produce more food per acre alongside restoring unproductive lands to nature. Each of us is eating the earth but how we eat matters. 

First published in Hindustan Times on Aug 26, 2026

Legacy of the rebel begam

During the centenary year of the Uprising, the first war of India’s independence, Jawahar Lal Nehru had requested the Indian embassy in Kathmandu in 1957 to search for Begum Hazrat Mahal’s grave. Why the woman who seemed to have come from nowhere and vanish into nothingness gained so much interest? She remains an elusive figure in Indian history - little being clear about her early life, date and place of birth. But she was known to be the daughter of a slave – of African ancestry – and a domestic servant.

Considered by many that she was an unscrupulous woman who led a failed revolt before vanishing completely, upon her death a government official had curiously wondered ‘who she was’? Archivist and a historian specializing in colonial history, Rosie Llewellyn Jones from the University of London brings to life the begum’s story, the relationship she had with her ex-husband King Wajid Ali Shah and the part she played during the Uprising in 1857. Having had constructed the imagery of the king in The Last King of India in 2014, the acclaimed historian rescues the unlike ruler from obscurity, Hazrat Mahal.

She had neither royal blood nor family connections with nobility but became an accidental heroine by getting married to the king. However, the marriage didn’t last long. Towards the end of the 1840s the king divorced Hazart Mahal and seven other mut’ah wives. The king undertook around 375 wives in two kinds of union, the nikah or permanent marriage and mut’ah or temporary marriage. Noticeable is the fact that the king didn’t associate with any woman without getting into some kind of marriage. What is known is that she entered the life of the king as a courtesan and was named Hazrat Mahal. She gave birth to their son Birjis Qadr in 1844 and, after Wajid Ali inherited the throne, briefly enjoyed the position of a favorite before getting divorced.

In 1856, the East India Company annexed Awadh and deposed Wajid Ali Shah. The takeover was sudden and brutal, with the deposed king exiled and eventually imprisoned in Calcutta. Under the new situation, thirteen-year-old Birjis Qadr became the royal figurehead of Awadh’s rebel opposition and his mother, the begam, its de facto leader. Hazrat Mahal was forced to unite the fragmented rebels: erstwhile nawabs, powerful landowners, enraged soldiers and citizenry. Lack of education and experience notwithstanding, she negotiated with an unimaginably powerful enemy by keeping the rebels united. And at the center of her brief rule was one of the most dramatic episodes in the colonial history: the siege of the Lucknow Residency. It was not a single structure, but the generic name for a 33-acre complex on a hill overlooking the Gomti.

What makes her story unique is how she seized the opportunity and exploited it to keep the all-powerful East India Company at bay for nearly a year. That in itself deserves recognition. and equally remarkable is how she was able to influence trusted officers much senior her age. An erstwhile province of the Mughal empire, Awadha gained virtual independence at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It didn’t last long. Towards the middle of the century, the East India Company had overwhelming presence all across. 

Rosie observes that writing the first full-length biography of the begum was not without negotiating several opposing points of view, to present an honest picture of the extraordinary woman. Without doubt, Hazrat Mahal was so closely associated with the Uprising that it was often difficult to separate her own history from the events that took place during that period. It was not lack of courage on her part that led to the defeat but lack of resources. It is clear that Hazrat Mahal chose exile in Nepal in 1860, never to live under the colonial rule. 

Spread across nine chapters, Hazrat Mahal provides details of the begum’s remarkable transition from poverty and obscurity to becoming a wealthy, confident woman in a royal household. The king could not have related in any way to Hazrat Mahal’s background. A lower-class woman from a servile background had found no reason to emulate the niceties of the royal language. She was focused on what was important: trying to wrest Awadh from the British enemy. Interestingly, the begum was rarely seen on the battlefield not as a participant but an observer, concealed in a curtained howdah on the back of an elephant. 

The fifteen months between the departure of the king and the start of the Uprising saw the emergence of a rebel begam named Hazrat Mahal.

Hazrat Mahal
by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones      
PanMacmillan, New Delhi
Extent: 273, Price: Rs. 560.

First published in www.raagdelhi.com (Hazrat Mahal: Legacy of a rebel begum)

Will history repeat itself?

The world hasn’t yet fully come to terms with the idea that, within the next decade, an impoverished former colony could become the third-largest economy in the world. It is further projected that, for the first time in 300 years, no European country will be among the three largest economies. Will an impoverished country that, in the middle of the 20th century, accounted for three percent of global gross domestic product, now be among the top three global economies?

In his insightful examination of the shifting global order, Minhaz Merchant concludes that by 2030, India will reshape the world order. This would be a remarkable achievement for a country that hasn’t been viewed as an economic power since the rise of colonialism about three centuries ago.

Before the emergence of the West, India was referred to as ‘sone ki chidiya’, a metaphor to reflect its immense wealth, culture, and influence. The idea of the ‘golden bird’ lives on as a reminder of the region’s rich past -- and perhaps also as a vision for its future. The metaphor was ‘real’ not too long ago. According to economic historian Angus Maddison, in 1750, India accounted for 24 percent of global wealth. However, British rule – they were definitely here for profit with some proselytization thrown in on the side -- ensured that the country was stripped of its natural resources and subjected to rapacious economic practices.

Era of India opens a window to this political and economic history that influenced and shaped the modern nation. In three distinct and immensely readable sections, the book traces the rise and fall of civilizations from antiquity to the present. Sourcing material from across centuries and countries, it examines how the world order is now tilting towards India. It goes a step further to assess the shifts in power triggered by the decline of the West and the rise of the rest.

All very well but will the current leaders, the US, facilitate such a shift in global power? The America First policy might have created the illusion of a revival of US hegemony but, in reality, that country’s crumbling infrastructure and ballooning debt may limit its geopolitical influence, suggests Merchant. Further, the emerging power triad represented by the US, China and India, will be complicated by a web of diverse geographical alliances. All of which means that, at this turning point in modern history, despite economic and military superiority, the three may not be without their own weaknesses and vulnerability.

Merchant’s basic contention is that India is on the economic ascent and is now way ahead of Britain, its former colonizer. As it surges forward, he believes, a majority of Fortune 500 companies will have their capability centers located in the country. Its technological infrastructure and expanding consumer market will provide a perfect ecosystem for these companies to grow. The drivers of economic growth will be spruced up to compete with the best, globally. In this narrative-defining book, all opportunities will be realized in favor of India.

Era of India is an optimistic volume that highlights all that favors the rise of India. Among these is the country’s democratic character. While the US and India have many similar democratic characteristics, China is vastly different from both. Therefore, it is critical to also understand China, which has been the biggest driver of global economic growth in the last 25 years. No country has lifted more people out of poverty faster than China, and it is the only economic power that has moved closer to the size of the US economy. In such a situation, speculations about the new global growth order will, of course, have to include China.

India’s economic rise is presented as a distinct, non-acquisitive model, one that does not enforce colonialism of any kind. The US and China are quite in contrast. While the US exerts its global military supremacy with concurrent trade restrictions, China, on the other hand, adopts a tactical cold-blooded geopolitical doctrine, which is confined to nibbling at territories. Whatever the modern manifestations, it is true that, throughout history, in the quest for economic supremacy, powerful nations have waged wars and inflicted atrocities on other people. Will India leverage its growing soft power any differently? As the cliché goes, only time will tell.

Minhaz Merchant combines history, geopolitics, economics, and demographic sociology to present the civilizational evolution of the concept of the nation-state especially in the Indian context. Era of India is an ambitious undertaking that attempts to capture the finer nuances of change. It is immensely readable but is it really possible to predict the future on the basis of the past? We shall have to wait and watch.

Era of India  

by Minhaz Merchant
PenguinVintage, New Delhi.
Extent: 501, Price: Rs. 999.

Published in Hindustan Times on August 15, 2026.

Are birds' dinosaurs?

Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist whom birds fascinate, because these are attentively smart to solve problems and learn from their mistakes. These are hyperenergetic fast-growing flying machines that have continued to evolve and many of them have adapted into so many forms over millions of years. But what is fascinating are not their avian features alone, because birds are not just birds but ‘living dinosaurs’. A professor at the University of Edinburgh, Brusatte is firm in his astounding belief that birds are indeed dinosaurs. From palm-size hummingbirds to nine-foot-tall patriches, birds are bracing for a future that we may not speculate, 

The Story of Birds isn’t just a book about modern birds but how birds came into being, narrated through a paleontologist’s lens. Brusatte blends his own field experiences with decades of research - from both fossil records and modern bird studies - to trace the full evolutionary journey from dinosaurs to birds. And it seems the journey hasn’t ended yet. While the dinosaurs, the great icons of extinction, may have ended when a six-mile-wide asteroid fell from the sky sixty-six million year ago, their evolutionary journey hasn’t finished. The past isn’t completely past.  

This is well-paced and highly engaging book on the evolution of birds - from their dinosaur origins all the way to the crows we encounter today. It takes us through an anatomical exploration that makes birds unique. For instance, most people who consume chickens, an estimated 65 billion each year, know little about what they end-up dismembering – a bird or actually a dinosaur. Such is the glorious and miraculous presence of birds which diversified and spread across the globe far outpacing mammals during the post-extinction period. 

The dinosaur-bird connection is much simpler to understand. Birds evolved from dinosaur ancestors, and in a genealogical sense are direct descendants, and part of the dinosaur family tree. As scientists classify species by ancestry, Brusatte connects birds with dinosaurs in the same way. Many of the signature features of dinosaur are intact in birds. These can be called by any other name, but birds cannot escape the DNA of their family bloodline. From feathers to wings to big brains and high wire metabolism are infect dinosaur features that birds inherited from their ancestors. With such features, the birds will persist even if the Age of Humans does not.   

Birds are smart and certain types like parrots are some of the smartest creatures on earth. They do more with such small brains as compared with mammal species. Brusatte compares neurons in a bird’s brain with other computer devices: “Birds have more cognitive power than mammals. Their computer chips may be small, but they have crammed more transistors onto them, and those transistors are more efficient”. Neurons in birds use three times less energy than mammal neurons, perhaps because bird neurons are crowded so tightly that they can more easily communicate with each other. Much has to be learnt about distinct anatomical features of no less than 10 thousand species of birds, which gets them unique strength to fight adversities. 

Birds are elegant survivors. They were the only dinosaurs to have endured the asteroid. They navigated global warming, ice age, volcanic eruptions, and fluctuating seas. Because they carry inside them dinosaur DNA, the genes of their ancestors suffered even worse natural calamities. Some birds, notably bald eagle and kiwis, have put their survival instinct to good use. Brusatte concludes that birds are often the first to sense the danger and prepare to counter it. This book is about the history of bird evolution and how it related to dinosaurs.  

The Story of Birds provide definitive evidence that the age of dinosaurs hasn’t truly ended, it has just undergone a rebranding. It is a fascinating, informative and well written book that opens our eyes to the incredible evolutionary journey of birds. Brusatte has a gift for making paleontological history feel accessible and exciting. The author clearly has so much love for his subject matter that the reader can’t help but be captivated. Although written in accessible layman language, it's meticulously annotated, and the chapter notes are likely worth the price of the book.

Birds are the inheritors of 150 million years of evolution, real true dinosaurs, some of the most remarkable creatures that have ever lived. The Story of Birds is an absolutely beautiful experience that leaves with an incredible appreciation for the feathered dinosaurs that live with us.

The Story of Birds
by Steve Brusatte
Picador/MacMillan, New Delhi
Extent: 435, Price: Rs. 899.

First published in Deccan Herald on Sept 20, 2026.

Aurangzeb Reconsidered

Sir Jadunath Sarkar published his magisterial History of Aurangzeb in five volumes in 1924 and provided the dominant framework for understanding Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir. The sixth Mughal emperor who ruled for nearly half a century from 1658 till his death in 1707, was perceived a religious bigot who was responsible for the collapse of the Mughal Empire. Such narrative persisted with the bigot image till imperial historian Audrey Trushke dispelled it in Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth in 2017 and found the emperor more pious than his imperial predecessors. 

Given the surge of Hindu nationalism any historic re-reading in favor of the bigot emperor is strongly contested or rejected, as Aurangzeb has been foregrounded as an archetypal evil Muslim. Aurangzeb and the Mughal Empire are treated so dangerous and vile that efforts to erase it from the public consciousness have escalated. The city named after him (the city of Aurangabad is now Sambhajinagar) has been rechristened, however, suggestions that his tomb be destroyed and his body disinterred continues to evoke sectarian interests. To get a sense of the man behind the emperor, historian Munis D. Faruqui cuts across many distortions to get a balanced account in his recently published Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire. 

The book has been in the making for last thirty years, and for good reasons. It is deeply researched work that questions the early assessments of the emperor by historians. Sarkar’s views were broadly shaped by the Hindu-Muslim tensions of the 1920s and the distaste for Muslim nationalist politics. It extended legitimacy to Aurnagzeb as a religious zealot who undid much of what the third emperor Akbar had achieved. But a revelatory assessment has found in him an emperor in contrast, referred as a zinda pir who was accepted all across. However, many continue to accept the storyline peddled by colonial-era thinkers and historians while there is an untold side to him as an emperor who strove to be just.

Curiously, both sides rely on the same evidence to reach very different conclusions. Was he a great ruler who has been unfairly vilified? Should history not matter about what it has been? Faruqui steps in to rescue Aurangzeb from both praise and condemnation, restoring him to the complexity of his life and times. Drawing on multi-volume Akhbarat, the handwritten Persian news bulletins and newsletters, Faruqui brings the granular details of the tensions at the court and rumblings inside the harems. It helps to get a nuanced understanding of how the empire worked, what influence the harem and the eunuchate had, and how the legacy of the empire was conceived, and considered for posterity.

The answer, as it emerges, is genuinely complicated. The Akhbarat is the most elaborate bureaucratic information systems available to reveal the priorities and anxieties of the imperial state. Having referred particularly to the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu’alla (News of the Exalted Imperial Court) and the Dastawizat (Documents from the Mughal Era), the book has expressed despair at weaponizing of a historical figure. Such materials have either been neglected or only selectively utilized by previous writers/historians. As a result, the fixation with religiosity has helped lose sight of the far more significant insights about Aurangzeb.   

Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire insists that such fixation on religiosity and neglect of the Hindus obscured important dimensions of imperial governance. It further offers a persuasive new insight on the life and career of Aurangzeb, one of the most influential and debated kings. Such polarized views suited the colonialists, which encouraged them to portray themselves as enlightened rulers. On the contrary, the empire was managed for almost fifty years by negotiating internal rebellions and external invasions.   

Rather than settling the debate over the emperor, the narrative invites a rethinking on the Mughal regime of the time. How a talented administrator and a remarkable general came to be known as a bigot?  The book challenges existing writing on Aurangzeb and offers a fresh way of understanding him. It extends a much longer conversation about power, institutions, legitimacy and imperial decline within the Mughal world. Aurangzeb ‘Alamgir and the Mughal Empire reconsiders the much-studied details of Aurangzeb’s life and reign, in the hope of reviving scholarly attention to his complicated legacy. Credible archival research has painted a fresh portrait that will permanently change how we see the most infamous of the Mughals.

Aurangzeb Alamgir
by Munis D. Faruqui
Juggernaut, New Delhi
Extent: 384, Price: Rs. 999.

First published in raagdelhi.com on July 28, 2026 

From seed to shade

Certain trees have stood well beyond their botanical existence as emblems of profound human experience and milestones. Amongst them, an apple tree inspired Isaac Newton to formulate his theory of gravity and a peepal tree under which Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment. These iconic trees continue to stand as a living testimony to pivotal moments in history. Come to think of any tree, it stands as a living testimony at the juncture of both science and spirituality, and ecology and eternity. Who else would have known it better than Peepal Baba, who got a popular identity for his relentless campaign in planting and nurturing millions of trees over past five decades. Ghosts on Peepal Trees is the memoir of Swami Prem Parivartan, alias Peepal Baba, which offers an absorbing tutorial on every aspect of tree, from seed to shade.

Drawn from handwritten notes and scattered observations written over years , the author pools together the stories of his intense engagement with a wide diversity of trees in his journey across country’s 21 states and 226 districts. Under the aegis of Give Me Trees, a movement has been generated as an act of eco-philosophy – ‘we inhale what the trees exhale, and humans live because trees exist’. Not without reason the trees exist long before humans and may do so till all lifeform persists. With a background in literature, the author’s curiosity of living things got rhythmic observation.   

At such times when development juggernaut accounts for chopping trees to erect concrete jungles, planting and nurturing trees can be a humble vocation that can be rightfully pursued by able-bodied individuals. But it is not a simple timepass but a vocation that connects science with spirituality. Ghosts on Peepal Tree is more than a memoir; it is a transformative narrative that connects and inspires. It educates the reader that a tree is a living piece of ecological infrastructure, that offers free climate regulation and biodiverse services.

While the peepal as a tree is revered all across, the awe for the species is based on scientific facts. It is perhaps the only tree species that emits oxygen during night. Unlike other trees, the peepal doesn’t rest. A special adaptation measure called Crassulacean Acid Metabolism helps absorb carbon dioxide during night. As the sun rises the next day, this stored carbon dioxide is used for photosynthesis. This makes peepal scientifically extraordinary, a keystone species in tropical ecosystem. In addition, it absorbs as much as 20 kilograms of carbon dioxide during the year and releases no less than 300 liters of oxygen daily. Not only that, but this tree is also distinct for its ability that combines three types of rooting systems that makes it a living cathedral of wood and wisdom, sustaining under diverse situations. 

Influenced by the teachings of Osho, the author dismantles many myths around trees with logically argued facts. It celebrates trees as natural creativity. The myth about ghosts on peepal were actually lessons in how faith protects forests. It further proves how simple acts of care protects trees, even when there no formal mechanism or structure to do so. These messages reach out to millions through the author’s social media platforms. 

Ghosts on Peepal Trees is a veritable treatise on trees, that cultivates empathy and sensitivity towards trees. Walking under the canopy of trees, little gets realized that one is walking under a cathedral of oxygen. Each story in the book reads like a research paper. It connects with the virtues of trees and inspires reader into the act of raising trees. It is an experiential writing at its best which educates and inspires. It is more than a book of stories.

The stories in the book are symbols of our existence, woven through our culture, scriptures, myths and memories. At this time when greens are restricted on our computer screens, reading stories in Ghosts on Peepal Trees helps us fall in love with greens and biodiversity, to take small steps that generate greenery. In authors own words: ‘It is a memoir of exploration, of ghosts and angels, of trees and teachers, and of the quiet miracle of existence’.  

Ghosts on Peepal Trees
by Peepal Baba
Ebury/Penguin RandomHouse, New Delhi.
Extent: 296, Price: Rs.399.

First published in the Hindu BusinessLine on July 20, 2026

What if, Dara Shukoh...

The legacy surrounding him have far outlived Dara Shukoh, inspiring historians to reconstruct the unusual persona of a prince who ‘what if’ could have been an Emperor? It was indeed his intention to reconcile the Vedic with the Islamic schools, ‘what if’ Dara had been able to do so? Perpetually caught in a ‘what if’ whirlpool – Dara lay trapped in the binary of good Muslim/bad Muslim, poet/bigot, dreamer/strategist with Aurangzeb. The ‘what if’ moment for Dara hangs in the air and will continue to be so – for it is a battle between the pen and the sword. 

Dara Shukoh was a visionary thinker, a talented poet, a prolific writer, a theologian, a calligraphist and a warm-hearted family man, the eldest son and chosen successor of Mughal Emperor Shahjahan held a bundle of virtues like none other but could not breach the war of succession that had come to symbolize the ruling dynasty. Yet, the tragedy of this multifaceted visionary continues in our own times too.

Dara is a classic Shakespearean tragedy hero, who fits into Aristotle’s idea of catharsis through tragedy. Dara was a great unifier of religions and essayed his brand of religious liberalism at a time when orthodox Sunni faith was on its ascendancy. In retelling of a somewhat decisive period in medieval history, literary historian Amit Ranjan presents Dara as a scholar-philosopher who may not have been any match to his three brothers, but his scholarly erudition was to become a legend in history. Dara’s translation of the Upanishads into Persian is one among his works that continues to engage a generation of Indologists. 

Packed with a nuanced portrait of the prince, Dara Shukoh is a sensitive and touching re-examination of the life and times of the poet-prince to whom history remained kind in parts. While he did not live to attain the imperial status, Shahjahan had ordained for him, his legacy resonates far and wide even after little over four centuries. That the prince pursued the path of religious tolerance in the volatile times of power politics is enough to remind us not to lose out to the forces who are condemned to repeat history. It seems there is more to Dara Shikoh then there ever was, relevance of his vision and philosophy has persisted over time.

Ranjan claims that the question that haunted Aurangzeb was: will Dara dead turn out more powerful than Dara alive? The popularity of the slain prince was too great to comprehend, leaving him alive was too costly a proposition. Aurangzeb not only had a strange grudge against Dara but also against those who supported his spiritual disposition. His pathological, visceral hatred for Dara was recorded in history because Aurangzeb never wanted a martyr out of his elder brother. To keep his throne intact, he eliminated his father, his brothers, and his sisters. And he didn’t even spare Sufi-poet daughter Zeb-un-Nissa, who had to rot for twenty years in prison.

Historians have gone at length detailing dynastic wars. Dara’s head had rolled in the pursuit of power, but the succession war was far from over. Head-hunting had become a private obsession with Aurangzeb, and many heads were to roll who gave company to the slain prince. But why did he persist tooth-and-nail to wipe Dara’s legacy remains a mute question? It seems the threat perception was overwhelming, and so were deception and betrayal as its governing tools. It is another matter that this weakened the empire. 

Dara Shukoh is a brilliant exposition of the bygone era, which presents the enigmatic prince as a mystic with ecstatic assertion about his spiritual vision. Written with poetic empathy, it brings to light the philosophical insights of the person who remained in pursuit of truth all his life. If he is the person who could have changed the course of our history, then it will be prudent to preserve his wide ranging works as a historical heritage. Amit Ranjan’s meticulously researched and pictorial biography of the slain prince presents him as a syncretic scholar of extraordinary genius. 

Dara was ahead of times in expressing love, compassion and tolerance towards other faiths. In discussions with the learned men of all faiths, Dara had concluded that apart from the manner of exposition of the doctrines there was no difference between Islam and Hinduism. Dara’s abiding interest in Gnosticism and monotheism continues to endear till this day. However, for the crown prince the search for spiritual truth was for his personal redemption. 

Dara Shukoh
by Amit Ranjan
Penguin Random House, New Delhi
Extent: 277, Price: Rs, 799. 

First published in raagdelhi.com on July 8, 2026.

A positive look at failure

No self-respecting individual, be a leader or a follower, wants to admit failure. Simply put, most are wired not to accept failure. Because the fear of failure gets drilled into us at the schools itself. Consequently, there is an innate tendency to shy away from talking or discussing failures. Sigmund Freud argued that there is a huge stigma around discussing any kind of failure in society. Failure is a dirty word. To rise up the ranks one has to be invincible, with an unblemished record of success. No wonder, politicians are worst at admitting failures in public.  

The classic work of corporate gurus like Peter Drucker emphasized optimizing personal behavior to achieve individual and organizational peak. It laid emphasis on success as the guiding mantra to surge ahead. Nobody wants to appear failed or defeated, the fear of becoming the outcast is inherent in human psyche. Thanks to social media, however, the fear of failure has now heightened – this is something people growing up have never faced in the past. Too many young people find themselves at risk of fearing failure.

With so many shifts already around, it is perfect time to rethink failure as a subject to be seriously looked into. Failure has taken many forms. There are intelligent failures that one experiments deliberately to learn lessons from. What takes us by surprise are basic failures which include mistakes and slips; and complex failures when a mixture of factors is at play, over which there is not much immediate control. Business journalist Dougal Shaw draws on conversations around failure with entrepreneurs and business leaders to look at these failures in a more positive light. 

To build a positive culture around failure, Shaw lists seven lessons drawn from countless discussions with entrepreneurs and business leaders. It includes mental strategies to rebuild confidence; recalibrate thinking to address crises; insights into turning negative customer reviews; tips to create breakthroughs in failures; and, finding new pathways to success as a team. Overarching key message is that failure can be a signpost to success, only if one would have grit, agility and ambition to seize the opportunities failure presents. 

Fail Smarter is a valuable resource on lessons from failures that could eventually help entrepreneurs carve out huge successes in their ventures. It helps understand and appreciate failure better, and harness the creative opportunities that failure unfolds. Despite increase in number of failures among prospective entrepreneurs, the desire to create a start-up has only increased. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor has surveyed societies’ attitudes to entrepreneurship for a quarter of a century and has found that fear of failure among prospective entrepreneurs has sharply increased since 2019. 

Shaw met numerable business leaders who value failures for its harboring learning lessons that can lead to personal growth and resilience. “I wish that I’d known earlier in my career just how important it is to be prepared to fail,” Josh Bayliss, CEO of The Virgin Group said, “because I think that’s when you learn the most.” Dealing well with failure and learning from it is what makes winning entrepreneurs because an entrepreneur is a risk-taker by definition.

Fail Smarter is a veritable meditation on failure, building a positive culture around failure and encouraging people to shift from blame and shame to acceptance and resilience. Since most of what Shaw has been able to capture in the book are soundbites of personal experiences by leading entrepreneurs in dealing with failure. It is indeed an exploration of what took entrepreneurs and business leaders learn from things that go wrong. The most successful leaders seem to focus on what went wrong while building their businesses. 

There is little denying the fact that failure is 90 percent of the journey. Not long ago at the Global AI Summit in 2023, a fireside chat with delegates from Silicon Valley concluded ‘give up the security of the regular pay cheque and be comfortable with failing.’ This is one bitter pill that can help swallow the change. And if a more mature attitude on failure is adopted, accepting failure will generate new ideas in making a good business sense. Fail Smarter enlists many such ideas. The successful leader must lead by example under the situation and lead by example at both receiving and delivering feedback about failure.

The setbacks, failures and difficult moments are often the experiences that shape the biggest breakthroughs. So why is there a stigma around openly talking about them? That’s exactly what Shaw has explored in his book that combines personal stories with practical insights on resilience, growth and learning. Failure can be a key character in the story, but it should not be the narrator.

Fail Smarter
by Dougal Shaw
Profile/Hachette, New Delhi
Extent: 255, Price: Rs, 499.

First published in the Hindu BusinessLine on June 29, 2026. 

Scoring goals in a global power play

Kicking ball as a game was not limited to a particular time or place in human history. Called cuju, back in the third century BCE, people used to play it in ancient China. How did a simple kicking game conquer the world? The antiquity of game shows that there is something very human about kicking a ball around. That it will grow to become the planet’s most popular sport could not be imagined. More than just a ball game it has turned out as a cultural and economic juggernaut of unimaginable proportions. The World Cup is not only the most-watched sporting event, but it also even has the power to sway elections and topple governments. The event has often been employed to promote policies and ideologies.

The ninety-year history of the coveted cup has many such instances of its popularity being politically appropriated. Italy under Benito Mussolini had hosted the World Cup in 1934 to showcase his fascist regime and promote its policies. The authoritarian hereditary monarchy of Qatar could sportswash the world with the regime’s exploitative action and policies during the World Cup 2022. Nations like Saudi Arabia which will host 2034 event believe that associating with football will encourage the world to see the kingdom in a more positive light.

It is more than just a kicking game. There was little commercialization in the early years which now has become a money guzzling event. Making money was not a priority which now is the main motto. FIFA, the self-regulatory governing body of football, has cash reserves larger than independent countries like Kenya or Cuba. With the fan following for the game growing exponentially, efforts to raise revenues and increase profits has continued to expand. It is ‘a pleasure that hurts’, a poetic expression that refers to game both to the fan reaction who watches his team play and the despair over how autocrats mint money instead. 

Sports historian Brian D. Bunk who teaches at the University of Massachusetts traces football’s meteoric rise as a game. Drawing on historical and contemporary events, from famous victories to backroom deals that now power the game, The Shortest History of Football shows how a game continues to influence global politics and economics. Although many people see football as an escape from everyday life, the sport has never been divorced from its share of violence and power. However, it is also enriched with both glories and tragedies.

The history of football is concise but comprehensive, revealing several aspects about the way sport has been played and understood. 1994 World Cup match between Columbia and the US is worth mentioning in this regard. Much to the dislike of fans, the Columbian defender Andres Escobar scored what is called ‘self-goal’. Little over a week later, Escobar returned home and was murdered by people linked to drug cartels. The tragic incident revealed the ways in which drug cartel had inserted itself into the country’s football culture. In addition, the repeated incidence of stadium deaths and hooliganism persistence haven’t been kicked away. 

People are passionate about the game and results on the pitch have often led to tragedy. Such events are sometimes the result of deliberate acts and other times, sheer accidents. They make up the darker side of the game. Fans have grown strong attachment to certain players and have created interesting ways of demonstrating their allegiances. Bunk has profiled the best players in the game, from the Brazilian football star Arthur Friedenreich in the early 20th century to the best ever Argentinian player Lionel Messi in early 21st century, but wonders if the star players can win a game on their own?

From school football to club football, the game has come a longways. Women football has kept pace in emerging as an international event. While people wish that game remains separate from politics, the history of football shows it otherwise. Individual players and clubs are fighting to achieve such an autonomy, but national governments are using football as a tool to bolster the regime and policies, including right wing governments. FIFA itself has its own interests to bolster its revenues and influence. 

2026 World Cup seems squeezed between self-aggrandizing interests of FIFA President and the host country’s President. While FIFA wants to maximize revenue as its chief bids for re-election next year, the host country is seeking to meet its political interests. Not without reason football remains the world’s most popular sport. 

The Shortest History of Football
by Brian D. Bunk       
Pan MacMillan, New Delhi. 
Extent: 247, Price: Rs. 599.

First published in Deccan Herald on June 28, 2026.

Tracing the malware path

What began as a revenge action by Harvard educated evolutionary biologist Joseph Popp - who was not considered for a permanent position at the World Health Organization - turned out to be the malicious step towards institutionalizing the dark economy of hacking. With computer connectivity and data sharing gaining new interest during late 1980s, Popp conveniently used the computer software for promoting AIDS education in 1989. It was so designed that the malware shocked the user but without any data being lost. The victim’s computer hard drive was restored after the originator was paid to unlock it. Popp used a payment mechanism system that was easily accessible to the victim but not the police.

Anja Shortland, a professor at the King’s College, traces the malware path that was paved in 1989, and which has now fully grown into a ransom industry worth $1 billion each year. The cost to global business in 2025 has been a whopping $74 billion. “It is like trashing a car to steal a pair of sunglasses,” quips Shortland. But Popp had to prove his worth to two adversaries: the organization that didn’t acknowledge his credentials for a permanent position, and the arrogant ‘masters of the universe’ of the business world. Popp’s plot to extract payment for data hostage didn’t last long but before falling into obscurity he could bequeath a blueprint for ransomware for later generation of hackers.

Since its first appearance in the late 80s, ransomware has gone through many astonishing changes. No sooner the criminals’ payments problem was resolved, ransomware quickly advanced from a low-level nuisance to a problem touching all facets of society. A ransomware attack is a cybercrime in which hackers use malware to encrypt data and charge a fee to receive a decryption key. In financial terms it might seem an inefficient form of crime, but is still growing all across in the internet connected world because it’s much cheaper to cough up incentive then minimize its devastating disruptions.

Shortland, a leading expert in cybercrime peels many layers of digital underworld that is reshaping our online existence in her latest book We Know You Can Pay a Million, which seeks to explore the large corporate set-ups that have grown up around the ransomware industry. The most amazing aspect of this industry is that the havoc wreaked by ransomware is many times over the amount collected by cybergangs. Such has been the psychological cost of the recent attack that the production of the Jaguar Land Rover has been set back by weeks. The British Library has yet to fully recover from the hacking it suffered in 2023.

The astonishing aspect of ransomware attacks is that every attack inspires further attacks. Despite the effort and creativity that goes into taking every attack down, the threat of ransomware to companies and individuals gets greater than ever. The number of arrests and takedowns lead to proliferation and splintering of ransomware brands. For instance, security experts could spot as many as seventy-five ransomware strains, with an average of forty-five groups active each month in the recent past. Leading group LockBitSupp asserts: “This business works…and will always work…takedown isn’t an indication of a systematic problem with ransomware.” 

Shortland says that ransomware became a real problem from 2013 onwards when internet became widespread. The challenge is transboundary and indeed global. Between 2021 and 2024, the US alone counted some 4,900 attacks leading to at least US$ 3.1 billion in ransomware payments. For anyone tracking the daily stream of global ransomware attacks, the extreme vulnerability of global and local supply chains, public services, transport and critical infrastructure is abundantly clear. With ports, trains and airports been subject to temporary shutdowns, the vulnerability of cyber connected infrastructure is glaring.

Need it be said that artificial intelligence will ease ransomware gangs to target a country. It will have serious repercussions to national security and peoples’ lives. Costa Rica was attacked in 2022 and has valid reasons for promotion of higher standards of cyber-hygiene. Shortland has proposed the counter-ransomware dashboard with four interconnected features including penalties and resilience. She further suggests that the ransomware be brought into the sphere of broad political debate. Politicians must be pressed to formulate clear cybersecurity strategies. This book may not be interest to the average reader but must get the attention of the right people to avoid unimaginable catastrophe.

We Know You Can Pay a Million
by Anja Shortland
Hachette, New Delhi
Extent: 293, Price: Rs, 699.

First published in Hindu BusinessLine on June 15, 2026.

Unearthing forgotten queer pasts

Our society may forbid transgressive desires, but it has non-hesitatingly preserved such expressions in murals, paintings and artifacts since time immemorial. While Shiva’s Ardhanareswara captures the synthesis of masculinity and femineity, the stone carvings in Khajuraho temple reflect proto-feminist past that is quintessentially queer. The fascinating thing about queerness is that it permeates time. Whether it is suppressed by societal norms or expressed as myriad human desires, an ounce of femineity or masculinity is present in each one of us. Curiously, queerness is as normal as breathing because human bodies and minds do not fit into prescribed templates. 

Due to rapid social, economic and political change the world is going through, many of the traditional gender binaries have been rendered increasingly dysfunctional and obsolete. Even in ancient, medieval, and early modern times, polyamory, polygamy, and polyandry were well recognized. Draupadi may seem the only polyandrous woman in mythology, however, the polyandrous practice has been real across many communities in the subcontinent. Polyandry, the keeping of multiple husbands, was permitted in the remote mountain regions as late as the 19th century. Anthropologists have come up with socio-economic reasons for such arrangements, but ‘human desire’ has been the pivot that sustained these relations.

Ancient mythology is full of gender fluidity. Gods have been included; divinities transcend their gender. Shiva is often depicted as hyper masculine whereas Vishnu is quite feminine to start with. 

These are predominant examples but social practices relating to gender identities had a subculture that persisted through ages. Indian society was pretty cool about it but to the prudish Victorian eyes this was scandalous. As a consequence, the colonial rulers erased south-Asian queer sub-cultures. Colonial authorities passed a posy of laws to criminalize them, and we were indoctrinated to think of the past as necessarily regressive.  

A doctorate from the University of Strathclyde, Sindhu Rajasekhran considers herself ambiguous and acknowledges the decriminalization of Section 377 which spared the headache of justifying her being what she claims to be – sapphic, fluid, ambiguous, bisexual. Digging deeper into the subject of gender identity she found that gender fluidity is not a foreign fad and the fact that it doesn’t easily fit into the Victorian idea of gender binary led to its decolonization. Forbidden Desire places the categories of gender identity in cultural perspective. It further argues that queerness has the potential to dismantle patriarchal patrons and perhaps the reason for the new gender identities (LGBTQ+) yet to gain social acceptance. 

It goes without saying that patriarchy is petrified of gender fluidity, because it alone has the potential to dismantle hierarchical pyramids. The patriarchy is built on a solid foundation of masculine thinking, which fetishizes the feminine. As androgenic expressions are gaining currency, there is a reason to believe Rajasekaran’s assertion that future is turning femme. In this context, mxn is a gender fluid expression that is neither man nor woman. With this being the new perspective, everyone is free to express in a manner that reflects their true selves.

Queerness isn’t out of the ordinary. It doesn’t confirm to prespecified choices and neither confine to established customs. It is a period of destabilization in traditional gender roles and relationships. Forbidden Desire is a new way of approaching big questions about existence and the societies we create(d), then and now.

Forbidden Desire 
by Sindhu Rajasekaran 
Simon&Schuster, New Delhi. 
Extent: 238, Price: Rs. 799.

First published in Deccan Herald on June 14, 2026. 

Life, lived beyond life

Spine chilling stories about ghosts are tales of the supernatural, which exist in only our imagination but are no less intriguing and compelling. These stories are reflections of our history and reflect our unending connection to those who came before us. Every haunted place follows a human story of the bygone era - a tragic love affair, an unsolved murder, or a miserable life. Ghosts may not be seen but are echoes of human emotions and have unwritten history of not just about dates and events but about people. Digging into these stories uncovers lives that are not to be forgotten. 

Eric Chopra, the founder of Itihāsology, journeys through the capital’s most beguiling sites Jamali-Kamali, Firoz Shah Kotla, Khooni Darwaza, and Malcha Mahal to unearth the stories and legends that seem wrapped around these heritage structures. Between the living and the lived, there is an in-between world of paranormal (in)activities which are either inhabited or haunted - ‘jinn's are noble souls who inhabit eerie places whereas ghosts haunt the dilapidated structures.’ 

Ghosted emerges from these never-ending curiosities, which wanders through unending conversations sustained by horror aficionados. And it’s this enduring appetite for the other world that sustains the enigmatic inhabitation of jinn's and ghosts. Human fascination with the other world is old and persistent. Chopra showcases the layered, multi-hued history of our unwritten past. And whether one believes on the paranormal, Ghosted makes for so compelling a read that one is nudged to visit the sites to see for oneself.

It is part history and part hearsay that has been weaved together into an absorbing narrative. It isn’t the academic history but popular history, that is mystical no less. It blends archival research with myths without any attempt to settle what, when, and why of a past that persists till the present. Instead, it acknowledges how ordinary people relate to them without questioning and how handwritten pleas and petitions are filed by numerous believers. Far from judging these beliefs, the claims of getting the pleas fulfilled are frequent. Rarely are such claims authenticated but help in reinforcing the beliefs.

Chopra is one of his kind of researcher, holding the tradition of enriching popular history that has been kept alive since antiquity. Ancient societies are known to have written letters to their dead relatives, have been filing written petitions for seeking requiem from their earthly troubles, and have kept alive rituals and practices. The haunted refuse to leave the cultural imagination, which are revered in tombs and dargahs. The city remains the palimpsest history of sages, sultans, poets, and lovers who linger in human memory. 

Ghosted talks about how humans relate to the haunted but not the other way round. Who knows that the haunted may harbor a story? The case of Kate Morgan, who haunts the Hotel del Coronado since 1892, reflects the challenges women faced in her era: social stigma for unwed pregnancies, limited resources for independence, and little tolerance for scandal. Many believe her ghost lingers in a hotel room, a haunting reminder of the struggle's women endured, and the quiet tragedies often lost to history. There are stories on what’s lost and what endures, to understand the many ways the haunted may tell their stories.

Chopra is a natural storyteller, combining his passion for public history with archival research. This makes him a compelling writer of narrative non-fiction which connects with the current generation. Such writings bring the joy of discovering the past to new and old readers and may help explore new facets to the haunted stories. With the city landscape littered with fabled apparitions, there is much to choose from. 

Delhi is rich in haunted geography, and people engage with history through heritage walks. Only tourists help in maintaining the haunted structures. Even menswear collection, Jamali Kamali, has contributed to enhancing interest in haunted structures. Ghosted is an engaging read, weaving a relationship with these historical sites. Each site has an engaging public history.

Ghosted: Delhi’s Haunted Monuments 
by Eric Chopra 
Speaking Tiger, New Delhi. 
Extent: 280, Price: Rs. 480.

First published in Hindustan Times on June 5, 2026. 

When curiosity does not kill the cat

Why the banana peel prompts a comical slip? Why zebra alone has black stripes? Why don’t woodpeckers get headaches? Why a toast lands butter-side down by the time it hits the floor? These amusing observations do raise playful curiosity that makes people laugh first and make them think later. And there is no dearth of such cases worth taking note of. The criteria of laughing first and thinking later clicked with Marc Abrahams, who firmly believes that science can be serious and ridiculous at the same time. For cultivating a culture of playful skepticism and attention that blends humor and academic rigor, Marc instituted Ig Nobel Prizes in 1999. ‘Ig Nobel’ is an antinode to the idea that science must always be serious and somber. 

These prizes highlight the absurdities of human endeavors but without mocking the embedded science in it. It celebrates its quirks, its questions and its capacity to illuminate the edges of human understanding. The Ig Nobels bring attention to work that might have otherwise been ignored forever. That is true of the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in Ornithology awarded to Ivan R, Schwab and late Philip May. As early as 1976, May had argued that woodpeckers were nature’s living experiment on head injury prevention. But it took three decades before the value of the headstrongness of woodpeckers – without getting succumbed to brain injury – was accepted as an engineering idea which lay trapped as an evolutionary mystery.  

Following several years of research in the quest for Ig Nobels, science writer Upasana Sarraju has put together a thoughtful and reflective compilation on weird science and scientists for whom the curiosity tugged along to bag the coveted prize, which disproves the proverbial expression curiosity killed the cat. Curiosity of twelve extraordinary scientists is presented as unusual stories in search of science. Scientific achievements having a curious property get the award, both celebrating the enjoyable side of science and enticing people to become interested in science. 

Each prize justifies for being funny and radical at the same time. A 2012 Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to a team of researchers for their study on the dynamics of spilling coffee from a cup as you walk. On the flip side, the team paid attention to walking speeds and the quantity of coffee initially in the cup. However, the interplay between the complex motion of a cup, the biomechanics of walking, and the low-viscosity-liquid dynamics came under scientific scrutiny. One wonders if this research has direct implications but other awards on fluid dynamics and even the viscosity of the fluid determine how the liquids behave under varying conditions.  

The surprisingness of a banana peel may seem frivolous for a scientific inquiry but 2014 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics led to discussions about the design of safer flooring materials, which is particularly important in public spaces like hospitals and shopping centers. In eleven chapters, Sarraju explores strange corners which winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes have selected and curated science that is cool, interesting and real. These inimitable Prizes are windows into the strange, wonderful and sometimes hilarious world of asking questions just because.   

Weird but chaotic, predictable but laughable, discovery is in itself a great thrill. The safest way to transport rhinos is by lifting the animal upside down. It may seem a wild joke but in reality, that is the fact which can hardly be ignored. Even that may be true for transporting even pigs. What does this all mean? It means that the world is full of scientists who are funny, odd and endlessly curious. It also means that scientists are eccentric, mischievous, and deeply weird.  

Written with delightful insights and interests, Sarraju explores what lies beyond the heart of scientific discovery. It explores how a laughable beginning becomes an idea that can change the world. Each award is first understood as an idea before it is developed as a concept for further exploration. In doing so, the author leaves the reader with possible questions for additional insights. For instance, open the smelliest thing in your fridge and reflect does your brain lights up with disgust, hunger or a primal urge to throw it far. Our ability to imagine and seek out more mysterious reality drives us towards an incredible future.

Unruly: The Ig Nobel Prizes 
by Upasana Sarraju
Penguin RandomHouse, New Delhi. 
Extent: 318, Price: Rs. 499.

First published in Deccan Herald on May 31, 2026.