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keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
@KS1729
Jan 13, 2021 • 21 tweets • 12 min read • Read on X
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Podcasts for 2021 -- a running thread:

[For a similar thread on 2020 -- see here: ]
1. If you love cricket or have admired the writings of C. L. R. James -- a wonderful first of a three part series abt his life.

Derek Walcott on CLR James: "sentences of a great prose writer contain light, natural light...the feeling of approaching dusk." cbc.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_IDEAS_P/me… Image
2. On the extraordinary & violent rise Chinese intelligence and counterintel capacities under Mao (& Zhou en Lai) to the present when State Security divisions try to hoover up CPU/GPUs for supercomputers on American export control lists.

Fascinating.

chtbl.com/track/65FD73/t… Image
3. On an understudied poem of Indian literature -Tirukkovaiyar - a 9th-century Tamil poem dedicated to Shiva. Leah Comeau on thinking about a world of devotion in early medieval Tamil which goes onto birth new worlds, cognitive space & material sensations. traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1560305965.… Image
4. The CIA is a vast organization with many of the problems that vast organizations face: how to manage employees, recruit talent, reduce attrition, think abt competition, innovate. Great talk with John Brennan, former DCI, who once wanted to be a priest! traffic.libsyn.com/secure/cowenco… Image
5. What little I have heard of Wagner, I have often enjoyed: erotic, dangerous, like finding oneself in the embrace of a lover you know you should keep away from.
But his genius is soiled by his anti-Semitisim & Hitler's fantasies. How should we hear him?
podtrac.com/pts/redirect.m… Image
6. 'The U.S. was once a manufacturing leader in semiconductors. That's no longer the case, given rise of contract manufacturing & outsourcing, dominance of Taiwan Semiconductor, & Intel's own design stumbles. But how did it come to this?'

Fascinating!
podtrac.com/pts/redirect.m… Image
7. In Dec 1999, if we were asked who would be the most influential political figure over next 20 years, unlikely we would have picked a shy & quiet understudy of Yeltsin. On the extraordinary power & money grab that has followed & the return of the KGB! meduza.io/audio/16113995… Image
8. What is the inner world of blue-collar Chinese workers in mega factories like? What is their understanding of art? Why do some of them write poetry? How does one translate them?

Excellent conversation w/ Eleanor Goodman on translating Chinese poetry.
chtbl.com/track/47257E/r… Image
9. If you are an American or a friend of America -- this conversation with the former head of Operations at MI6 is as explicit in threat assessment as it is fascinating on how the Chinese CCP went about becoming a technology hegemon from a backwater. sphinx.acast.com/intelligencesq… Image
10. What is the nature of trauma that amid conscripts of a colonizing force? An illuminating talk with Raphaëlle Branche [what a great interviewer Adam Shatz is!] occasioned by her book, Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? (Daddy, What Did You Do in Algeria?) sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo… Image
11. I have often struggled to understand how various factions and demographics operate in Burma. A really useful chat with Thant Myint-U sheds light on that along with various open questions including the singular and complex role of Aung San Suu Kyi. sphinx.acast.com/talkingpolitic… Image
12. Who was Jacques Derrida?

A great conversation with Peter Salmon (who talks admirably fast!) on his wonderful biography of Derrida's works & public persona that has metastasized & fragmented, often disallowing for any meaningful coherence to emerge. traffic.libsyn.com/secure/philoso… Image
13. On Daya Krishna, who per Daniel Raveh was one of the most interesting philosophers (not just Indian philosophers) of the 2nd half of 20thC. A book that distills DK's last decade & his efforts to read through Indian texts imaginatively and critically. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5587148690.… Image
14. At age 80, veteran China scholar Orville Schell has published his first novel. My Old Home: A Novel of Exile -- a bildungsroman from the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen in 1989. On the worlds fiction can open & change in modern Chinese history.  chrt.fm/track/47257E/p… Image
15. Adam Phillips, who I read like a student reads his master, writes 'Conscience, in its all too impoverished vocabulary & its all too serious & suffocating drama, needs to be overinterpreted. Underinterpreted it can only... be propaganda'. sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo… Image
16. On Toussaint Louverture’s revolutionary life with Sudhir Hazareesingh -- kind of remarkable how little of this great anticolonial figure is known beyond the immediate Haitian-French-Carribean milieu. A more extraordinary life is harder to imagine. sphinx.acast.com/historyextra/t…] Image
17. 'There are 2 kinds of animals in the world: animals that bring their mouths to their prey (eg lions) & animals that bring their prey to their mouth (eg salamanders).'

Wonderful talk w paleontologist Neil Shubin on Nature as a lazy baker & much more. media.blubrry.com/thejoyofx/d2r5… Image
18. I recently read an essay by Edward Said on Joseph Conrad; later about the life of Sir James Brook (Rajah of Sarawak) who was an inspiration for Conrad's 'Lord Jim'. A fine talk b/w Patrick French & Maya Jasanoff on Conrad, imperialism & other conceits.
audioboom.com/posts/7282876.… Image
19. An illuminating talk on two chapters from 'The Making of the English Working Class' with John Bohstedt -- on the history & logic of riots in early modern England: why were they so frequent? what did it mean for civil liberties & popular radicalism? media.blubrry.com/jacobin/conten… ImageImage
an aside: E. P. Thompson seems to have been a fun guy too. Capable of salty & sly reappraisals delivered without malice. One line in a letter: “My only affinity to Marx is that I get boils on my neck.” He was a tank commander in North Africa/Italy!
And a poet! People forget that. Image

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More from @KS1729

keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
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
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
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
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
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
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
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
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
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
keerthik śaśidharan Profile picture
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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