keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
Dec 4, 2020 24 tweets 14 min read Read on X
9. Richard Lloyd Parry narrates his deep & perceptive essay on Japan, Japanese royal family, & the greatly admirable previous Emperor Akihito & his efforts to make the monarchy & Japanese society more sensitive to harm done in his father's name. [mp3] sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo… Image
10. An excellent long conversation with Stephen Kotkin on the occasion of the 100th birth anniversary of the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, conservative, anti-Communist, and a terrifying moral presence. files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2019… ImageImage
11. Excellently fun & insightful conversation w/ Pratap Bhanu Mehta who talks to two Pakistanis who probe what does it mean to be Indian, what is the Indian project, where does it fall short -- a great many interesting & open questions discussed.
feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/2452922… [.mp3] Image
12. Anne Applebaum speaks on the Holodomor -- when in 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food by Stalin & USSR. The weaponization of hunger for political end goals. archive.org/details/anne-a… [a whole list here] Image
13. The great Mike Davis -- other than Perry Anderson, few fill me w/ awe on how widely they have read & written about as he -- on the changing shape of American politics and the rise of new forces: lumpen billionaires + disaffected working class.
sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo… Image
14. I don't know anything abt birds and so this was fascinating. Wenfei Tong on "Bird Love".
Some birds have a reciprocal promiscuity payoff & raise many offsprings, while others have long-term monogamy strategy. Why? Where does this calculus come from? traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT9629897263.… Image
15. From Epiros in northern Greece near Albania | An Epirotic Odyssey: [.mp3]
feedproxy.google.com/~r/smarty_pant… Musicologist Christopher King goes on an odyssey to uncover Europe’s oldest surviving folk music, and spins us some rare 78s.
Many fascinating music segments. Image
16. What is it to dream? mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/201…
Jennifer Windt on her efforts to develop a framework on dreams, where do dreams live relative to concepts as perception, hallucination, & imagination.

I have tried to record dreams in 2020, but I oftn forget. A diary of dreams! Image
17.
Ferdinand Mount's excellent lecture on debates surrounding the British Raj, from its rapacious origins in the Elizabethan Court to Shashi Tharoor's 'An Era of Darkness' which acts as a beachhead that lends shape to various assessments. [mp3]
sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo… ImageImage
18. via a story of Cholesterol & Linoleic Acid, Malcolm Gladwell on a son's obligation to his father. This podcast moved me greatly. It made me think about that ancient question: how to keep alive the ideals of one's parents after their death.
leopard.megaphone.fm/PPY7869295725.… [audio] Image
19. You ask your husband if he's having an affair. He says no. You believe him. Inconsistencies in his story, you explain away. Your default is truth. Till one day, a trigger gives old evidence new meaning.
Gladwell on Cuba's long serving spy in America. leopard.megaphone.fm/CAD5718383969.… Image
20. One Nation Under Goethe

Till I read Walter Kaufmann, who woehsips Goethe [& disparages Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, & Jung] I didn't realize how pivotal Goethe was to German identity. The new Safranski bio only convinces me more so.

Neil MacGregor -->
open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/… Image
21. How to study history of Capitalism?

Sven Beckert on how 'cotton' was born & became a constant global struggle b/w slaves & planters, merchants & statesmen, workers & factory owners -- creating new inequalities aggravated by technology & colonialism. radioopensource.org/?powerpress_pi… Image
22. Everybody (well, a few "everybody") speaks about Weber's 'Protestant Ethic' & Capitalism -- but what is it really?

Peter Ghosh et al help cut through the fog that has accreted over a century or more...
open.live.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/… Image
23.

On Panini’s Grammar, Peter Adamson & Jonardon Ganeri offer a quick survey that still makes me wonder at the extraordinary ambitions, and success, of his Ashtadhyayi.

How to write code that governs the writing of future code. hopwag2.podbean.com/mf/feed/h8nwrp… Image
24. Ashis Nandy: "New India is those who embarrass you by scratching their backs with forks, sitting in Parliament. That’s the New India, and you don’t like to recognize them because they’re new to power, new to the urbanity to which you are accustomed."
media.blubrry.com/radioopensourc… Image
25.

Mo Yan on his novels, writing strong women and avoiding censorship in China. One part poet, one part butcher ~ all life is interesting, nothing is sacrosanct except perhaps the earth shaking destiny of the Chinese present. buzzsprout.com/1371667/557170… Image
26.

Ken Liu on Chinese science fiction, as a writer, a translator of 2 volumes of The Three-Body Problem, & the place of Chinese science fiction in its literary universe.

And many recommendations. chtbl.com/track/47257E/p… Image
27.

If you love cricket, particularly Indian cricket, Ram Guha's melancholic love letter to a game that was a subtle beauty once, loved by writers and common folk, but has now transformed to a cynical dowager who will put on a spectacle, only if you pay. traffic.libsyn.com/seenunseen/E20… Image
28.

Who was Edmund Burke? Or, how could one oppose the French Revolution while still publicly legislate against the East India Company. David Bromwich, who reads America more carefully than almost any body else I know, on Burke as a moral psychologist. feeds.acast.com/public/streams… Image
29.

Alive at India’s Dead Ends: A Lecture by Shri Gopalkrishna Gandhi

< During Rama's coronation, a woman drops a pot she was carrying.

“Thatham thatham tham
Thathatham thatham thahaha”

That has to be one of the earliest onomatopoeia in Sanskrit...>

archive.org/embed/mm-intro… Image
30.

Maria Heim on Buddhaghosa, a 5thC Pali Buddhist scholar, who contributed to what we call Theravada Buddhism today; on intention (cetana) as the basis of moral psychology unlike Western ethics that focus on individual choices and decisions. traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT4409285155.… Image
31. The histories of American abolitionism were interracial, transnational, & tied to the development of democracy.
A fascinating talk on Manisha Sinha's important book on the long struggle of abolitionists who, as I learnt, wrote & wrote & wrote...
traffic.libsyn.com/secure/benfran… Image
32.

If you, like me, are fascinated by China's train systems, here David Feng talks abt Chinese trains & subways, its history & evolution -- frm Imperial Peking Railway to Sun Yat Sen to the Maglev running from Shanghai Pudong to Longyang Road Station. chtbl.com/track/65FD73/t… Image

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More from @KS1729

Jan 17, 2023
For 2023, a new thread of sentences.

1. “I walked past the brothel as if past the house of a beloved.”

— The Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin #KafkaDiaries
2. From 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' by Thomas De Quincey Image
3. आशासु शीतलतरासु पयोदतोयै-
राशासिताप्तिविवशेषु च सज्जनेषु ।
नैशाकरोदयविधौ निशि मध्यमायां
क्लेशापहस्त्रिजगतां त्वमिहाविरासी: ॥२॥
Read 59 tweets
Dec 30, 2022
A thread of Indian paintings, from 1900 to 2022, arranged according to year of creation. One painting per year.

Many works & artists missing. 🙏

My hope was to *see* the changes in Indian aesthetics—from Colonialism to Covid.
1900 -- Traveller and Lotus -- Abanindranath Tagore Image
1901 -- Shakuntala -- Raja Ravi Varma Image
Read 125 tweets
Mar 21, 2022
Like, An Experiment

***

Call me,
like a grasshopper in a May meadow
like silent sentinels all around the town
like leaves upon this shepherd’s head
like a snow hill in the air.
like a candle moving about in a tomb.
like a Czar in an ice palace made of frozen sighs,
like the segment made in the new-mown grass by a long-armed mower
like a corkscrew,
like a restless needle sojourning in the body of a man
like another cursed Jonah,
like a bench on the Battery
like a coffer-dam
like an ape
like a string of inions
like the stained porcupine quills round an Indian moccasin
like a hamper
like lightning
like a mildewed
like polished ebony
like a tenpin between the andirons
like a strip of that same patchwork quilt
like a Newfoundland dog just from the water
Read 8 tweets
Mar 2, 2022
Narendra Pachkhede on G. N. Devy's new book abt the relationship b/w India & Mahabharata: "He does not dwell on what is the relationship of this greatest literary work with our people, but rather he delves into how this relationship functions."
thewire.in/books/gn-devy-…
"The allure of the Mahabharata and how it provides insight into its cultural memory in India could be best explained through the idea of a controlling text – a reference point for all thinkers and a recourse to fall back on for the nation."
This review also kindly makes a mention of my book and compares it to the writings of Hilda Doolittle and her poems marked by Greek/Roman myth. Didn't know who she was so had to google her. 😎 literaryladiesguide.com/classic-women-…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 10, 2022
For 2022, a new thread of sentences.
Read freely, quote happily, attribute with caution. For a similar threads from 2021 and 2018-20, see 👇🏼:

1. “The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in “forlorn.” It comes from an Old English 1/3
word meaning to perish, which comes from an even older word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object only appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. 2/3
In the sixteenth century we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and each other and has been steadily expanding ever since.”

Kathryn Schulz

3/3
Read 57 tweets
Jul 19, 2021
A story about the Gibraltar skull, involving Darwin, always reminds me of how difficult it is to truly speak about the world as we see it. This incident, involving the skull, in a world-historic life such as Darwin's often reminds me of a line by V. S. Naipaul.

A short thread.
In 1864, Charles Darwin had been very sick for weeks. (He suffered various ailments for much of his adult life.)

To "see how I stand change", he and his wife, Emma Darwin arrived at 4 Chester Place in London where his sister-in-law Sarah Wedgewood lived.

[Charles & Emma]
It was a convenient location for Darwin because despite being sick, he could walk over to the Royal Botanical Society and the Zoological Society. In those months and past few years he was writing a book/monograph on climbing plants then.
Read 12 tweets

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