The life of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose illuminates how scientific genius can emerge from the most unexpected quarters Somaditya (Soma) Banerjee On a summer day in 1924, a young Indian physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose sent a paper and a letter to Albert Einstein. It would shape the nascent field of quantum mechanics and… Read More A light from the periphery
Robert Musil (1880-1942) served as a soldier in the Austrian army throughout World War 1 by Roger Kimball “Why, then, aren’t we realists?” Ulrich asked himself. Neither of them was, neither he nor she: their ideas and their conduct had long left no doubt of that; but they were nihilists and activists, sometimes one and sometimes the other,… Read More The qualities of Robert Musil
Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . .… Read More The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Maybe we have lost the quality of friendship in becoming too particular about whom we choose to have as friends, and in a sense eroding what is, after all, the essence of friendship—camaraderie of various kinds and a fundamental trust in the other : From Just Being NB: Professor Romila Thapar is a stalwart of… Read More Romila Thapar: Just Being
This is no book; who touches this touches a man: Walt Whitman Zweig and his second wife, Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann, committed suicide on February 22, 1942; the day after he submitted the manuscript of this book to the publisher. His farewell message read: I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect… Read More Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday
Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” the theologian Walter Brueggemann noted. It is an extraordinary statement, one that reminds us that though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past. We can tell of a past that was nothing but defeats, cruelties and… Read More ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times (2016)
NB: A timely reminder that a century ago the two outstanding revolutionaries of the world were Gandhi and Lenin; and that Indian intellectuals were profoundly affected by their ideas. To carry this discussion further, the essays immediately following this article argue that the most significant contra-position in the world in the past century – in… Read More Polar perspectives: Gandhi vs Lenin
Interview with the author November 11, 2025 There is a whole agenda out there waiting for a younger generation of the left to lay out in a rigorous and comprehensive way. But that is an agenda that will simply collapse if it subscribes to “orthodoxies” and other forms of intellectual snobbery. Historical materialism as Marx… Read More Jairus Banaji on his book A Marxist Mosaic
NB: Shashank is a former student of history at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi. He can be assured that his erstwhile teachers are very proud of him. DS The 2025 Karwaan Book Award has been awarded to Shashank Shekhar Sinha for Casting the Buddha: A Monumental History of Buddhism in India. The Jury also awarded… Read More Shashank Shekhar Sinha wins the 2025 Karwaan Book Award for ‘Casting the Buddha’
The Bible is unquestionably the most scrutinized “book” in history. Yet certain obvious facts about it nonetheless escape notice. For example, as Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in the Review’s December 18, 2025, the Bible is not in fact a book, but “books,” as its original Greek name (biblia) attests: sixty-six of them, or seventy-three, or seventy-six, depending… Read More A Christmas Story
After the truth-shower 