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Nov 28, 2024 | 
thehindu.com | Jaideep Unudurti
“No, no, no,” says Gautam Bhatia. “That would be a disaster.” I’ve just asked him whether the futuristic city of Peruma in his new novel The Sentence (Westland) is a riff on Gurugram. “It’s not a future India. It’s a secondary world,” he says. Lawyer and author Bhatia’s latest science-fiction novel features a city divided by a river. One half is High Town, filled with shiny towers and boulevards. The other is Low Town, or the Commune, a kind of mega-basti organised on anarchist principles.
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Oct 26, 2024 | 
economictimes.indiatimes.com | Jaideep Unudurti
Minutes after Indian Grandmaster Gukesh D’s knight weaved a fatal web around the Chinese player Wei Yi in the 7th round of the FIDE Chess Olympiad in Budapest last month, I’d tweeted, “The trauma of round 10 Chennai is finally ended.” Soon it racked up hundreds of likes.
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Jul 5, 2024 | 
thehindu.com | Jaideep Unudurti
I wanted the novel to feel like an extremely vivid dream,” says Scott Alexander Howard, talking to me from his home in Vancouver, about his first novel The Other Valley (Atlantic Books). The premise of the book is simple yet evocative: we are introduced to a picture-postcard of a town, ringed by high mountains and pine forests, with a lake that “stretched like a finger”; a bucolic vista like something from a Bradbury or a Narayan.
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Mar 15, 2024 | 
openthemagazine.com | Jaideep Unudurti
THIS MONTH WILL MARK four years since WHO declared Covid a pandemic. With the benefit of hindsight, and ample stocks of tetracycline, we can look back at three great waves of the plague which engulfed the world, generating a commonality of experiences. Written by Julia Hauser and with art by Sarnath Banerjee, The Moral Contagion (HarperCollins; 140 pages; `699) looks at not the biology of the pandemic but its morals. I ask Hauser how the collaboration began.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |Talmiz Ahmad |Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed |Jaideep Unudurti
The fact that leaders of several opposition-ruled States were compelled to sit in protest against the Central government in the national capital shows how Centre-State relations have touched an all-time low (Cover Story, March 8). Over the past decade, the Centre has misused its powers, in flagrant violation of the Constitution, and denied these States the fiscal benefits theyrightfully deserve.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Jaideep Unudurti |Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |Talmiz Ahmad |Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed
Some years ago, at the film appreciation course at Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, we watched one of the slow-moving but richly realised rural dramas by the renowned filmmaker G. Aravindan. In the discussion that followed, one of my classmates called Aravindan a “painterly” filmmaker. I was reminded of this while reading The Pig Flip, a graphic novel by Joshy Benedict.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |Talmiz Ahmad |Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed |Jaideep Unudurti
Maria, Just MariaSandhya Mary, translated by Jayasree KalathilHarper Perennial IndiaRs.499After the death of her grandfather, Maria stops speaking because she no longer wants to, and so is sent to a psychiatric hospital to “reconnect with reality”. This humorous novel is a poignant exploration of mental illness and what defines sanity in contemporary society.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |Talmiz Ahmad |Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed |Jaideep Unudurti
After her arrival in Calcutta, she saw an advertisement in the paper. “Wanted: An intelligent young woman to be in-charge of our wholesale business. Must possess working knowledge of new designs and colour schemes of fabrics. Hand-written applications only.”The office building was on a busy street. At eleven o’clock she reached the building dressed in a pale yellow silk sari, carrying a white handbag.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Talmiz Ahmad |Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed |Jaideep Unudurti
The Indian Ocean is the world’s third largest ocean, after the Pacific and the Atlantic. It measures 9,600 km from the Bay of Bengal to the Antarctic and 7,800 km from South Africa to Western Australia. Its total area of 21.45 million square nautical miles constitutes 20 per cent of the world’s water surface. It has a total coastline of 70,000 km. The Indian Ocean is home to about 36 countries, with 35 per cent of the world’s population and 40 per cent of the world’s coastline.
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Mar 7, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Paranjoy Guha Thakurta |Talmiz Ahmad |Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed |Jaideep Unudurti
A new analysis by the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a particle collider at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) provides the first direct evidence of what may be the imprint of the universe’s most powerful magnetic fields on “deconfined” nuclear matter. Collisions of heavy ions briefly produced a magnetic field 1018, or a billion billion, times stronger than the earth’s and 10,000 times stronger than a neutron star’s, and it left observable effects.
