What are people doing to be happy in these times? Nothing much. Most people do nothing special to feel happy. They don't have try too hard, they are just happy. In happiness they are not amateurs; they don’t over-articulate joy.
As the pandemic ends Indians who must exit India periodically to survive life await their vacation. Russia, Ukraine are open to Indian tourists but the West is more alluring. What Indians enjoy about the West is the whole spectacle of the West. My latest:
@razibkhan Have you read Iravati Karve’s yugAnta? It is a commentary on Mahabharata stripped down to historical and humanistic elements. I found it to be intriguingly consistent with what we now know about migrations into India. Here’s an essay on it:
It is criminal that no Indian film director has made a historical epic about Malik Ambar yet. Kidnapped from Ethiopia, sold into slavery in India, eventually freed and leads a mercenary army in a guerilla resistance against the Mughals
We have only one job: if we're lucky, we must take care of the unlucky; everything else is merely an argument about the best way. And the best way the young can serve humanity is by pursuing material success than the easy option of do-gooding. My latest:
In my latest @livemint @Mint_Opinion column I argue that the farm bill reforms are a good idea. Farmers' grievances are a result of state policies trapping them in unproductive agriculture. The solution is to reform land policy & tackle low productivity.
Two pieces from my past life that I'd like to share - the early history of the internet in India, like everywhere in Asia, was weird and interesting and worthy of much more research. I wrote this on the 10th anniversary of the "blog" in 2009: