Nikhil Krishnan

Cambridge

Journalist at The Telegraph

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Articles

It’s Always the Other Side That’s Been Brainwashed

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Nikhil Krishnan

It wasn’t so long ago that respectable psychologists didn’t really talk about “brainwashing.” The term had the slightly kitschy flavor of other Cold War embarrassments—C.I.A. spy cats and Reds-under-the-bed paranoia. But Google’s indispensable Ngram Viewer, which analyzes how frequently phrases appear in printed texts, confirms that the past two decades have seen an uptick in the word’s usage. What’s bringing brainwashing back?
Hope, despair and retreat in an unquiet age

1 month ago | the-tls.co.uk | Kieran Setiya |Nikhil Krishnan |Charles Foster |Noga Arikha

Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And wisdom is early to despair: / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / … So be beginning, be beginning to despair”. We age, decline and die, like everyone we love. Yet despair is not, to put it mildly, a popular stance.
Does Morality Do Us Any Good?

Dec 23, 2024 | newyorker.com | Nikhil Krishnan

Naturally, I hold slavery to be an abomination and liberal democracies to be better than totalitarian dictatorships. But why? I could draw on my years of education to tell you it has something to do with my belief in freedom, autonomy, the awfulness of treating a fellow human being as a mere instrument. But a skeptic can point out that I had these convictions before I was ever in a position to articulate a cogent argument for them.
Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is a gentle triumph

Sep 22, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Nikhil Krishnan

Alan Hollinghurst, author of Our Evenings Getty When Alan Hollinghurst first came to prominence in the late 1980s with his debut, The Swimming-Pool Library, what shocked and thrilled his readers was less the sexual frankness of his prose than the aesthete’s seriousness he brought to subjects typically left to pornographers. As he enters his seventies, his newest novel – only his seventh – shows no decline in elegance, rather a deepening of his interest in what were once secondary themes in...
Racist sexual predator? That isn’t Paul Gauguin’s full story

Sep 12, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Nikhil Krishnan

Detail from Gaugin's Nevermore (1897) Credit: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images Anyone with a free hour to spend in central London could do worse than pop into the top floor of the Courtauld Gallery.
How India reshaped the world – then fell into decline

Aug 23, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Nikhil Krishnan

Englishmen abroad: a 1970 painting of East India Company officers watching a cock fight in Lucknow, India Credit: Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images Why do people around the world have a number system based on place value and the use of the number zero? Why is the national airline of Indonesia named after Garuda, the large eagle-like bird who serves as the mount of the Hindu god Vishnu? Why is there a vast temple complex to the same god in the forests of Cambodia? William...
Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel makes its opinions too clear

Mar 21, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Nikhil Krishnan

Andrew O'Hagan's new novel is his seventh Credit: Alamy Caledonian Road is a long novel – over 600 pages long – and a large one. It opens with a two-page cast list to which all but the most vigilant readers will find themselves repeatedly returning.
How Orwell fared in Burma’s imperial police – and the bedroom

Feb 6, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Nikhil Krishnan

Burma Sahib is Paul Theroux's 30th novel Credit: Hamish Hamilton Paul Theroux’s 30th novel, about George Orwell’s years as a policeman in Burma, is part of a well-populated genre: Tan Twan Eng on Somerset Maugham in Malaysia, Colm Tóibín on Thomas Mann in America, Damon Galgut on EM Forster in India.
PG Wodehouse scoffed at politics

Dec 19, 2023 | unherd.com | Nikhil Krishnan

A certain kind of reader is unlikely to accept any kind of argument for P. G. Wodehouse’s Mike. Set in a private, all-boys school, the novel features a main character, the Mike of the title, with few distinguishing traits beyond being a good egg and an even better cricketer. Is it, perhaps, a satire of such institutions and people? Far from it: the main criticism of Sedleigh, the school in which the novel’s second half is set, is that it isn’t very good at cricket.
How Can Determinists Believe in Free Will?

Nov 6, 2023 | newyorker.com | Nikhil Krishnan

But why stop there? There are bars everywhere, and billboards advertising the pleasures of spirits. The days are getting colder, and you live in a cold country—a cold country and a decadent one. Everyone drinks; how could he do otherwise? But, again, why stop there? Generous soul that you are, you wonder if he had a bad day, or week, or year, or life—one marked by the kind of suffering from which the bottle promises respite.