Sucheta Dasgupta

1 month ago | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

Quotidian language. Laboured dialogue. Wooden characters. A personal preface from the author on the Oulipo movement and the ouroborus that serves to confuse rather than illumine. Yet this fiction on Ajita, the forerunner of the Charvaka school of thought, forges forth with an inexorable, passionate force, drawing the reader inwards to the centrifuge of its arguments and counter-arguments, and then climaxes in a tremendous emotional payoff.

1 month ago | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

The philosophy of environmentalism is no more than one century and a quarter old, and marked by intellectual scepticism regarding poor countries' contribution; as economists Lester Thurow and Eric Hobsbawm, curiously, respectively, maintain, “they want[ed] more ‘development’” and “they simply aren’t interested”. Never mind if the 1973 Chipko movement in the Himalaya gives the lie to these assertions.

Dec 13, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

Writer and editor Githa Hariharan, who successfully challenged the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act in 1995 to uphold the rights of the mother, has an idea of India that she explores in her new book, This Too Is India: Conversations on Diversity and Dissent (Westland, 2024). In this conversation, she shares a bit of it with Sucheta Dasgupta: Why would you want to centre dissent in your idea of India? All of us agree that diversity is the ground India stands on.

Nov 15, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

In the last quarter of the latest Booker-winner, Orbital, one of its six protagonists, American Shaun, is posed by a journalist this perplexing question: With this new era of space travel, how are we writing the future of humanity? Initially, Shaun is at a loss because, the writer says, in space your thoughts are usually about the next few moments; you learn not to think beyond the next half-hour.

Nov 8, 2024 | deccanchronicle.com | Sucheta Dasgupta

According to legend, an officer in Austria’s royal Habsburg army was the first to add sugar and milk to Turkish coffee. Thus, coffee shops were ubiquitous in Vienna in 1938 as were eateries. These sold traditional cuisine like wiener schnitzel (fried veal), tafelspitz (boiled beef), beuschel (veal ragout) and selchfleisch (smoked meat). Enter Kundanlal from Ludhiana, a machine tools manufacturer, there for haemorrhoids surgery.