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2 May, 21 tweets, 12 min read
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
20. Great talk w/ Sir Ian Kershaw - on "evil" as analytical category, challenges of psychologizing Hitler, would there have been Holocaust without him, & how did he go from being a life's loser to a colossal monster? & more.
1. sphinx.acast.com/the-rest-is-hi…
2. sphinx.acast.com/the-rest-is-hi… ImageImage
21. A fun conversation with the novelist & essayist Tariq Ali on the French historian Maxime Rodinson's 1960s biography of Muhammad, the world of empires he was born into, Islam in Spain, & challenges of writing a 'materialist' book abt a religious figure. sphinx.acast.com/londonreviewpo… Image
Tariq Ali's wonderful quintet if novels
22. If you have heard, read or have been puzzled by Cassirer's writings, an instructive conversation with Samantha Matherne on how Cassirer reworks Kant to formulate critical idealism, the Marburg school, & our "lived experience" in a cultural world. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN5696862214.… Image
23. Excellent talk w/ Arunabh Ghosh on how Chinese statisticians abandoned Soviet-style exhaustive enumeration, learnd about random sampling thru exchanges with Indian statisticians, & during Great Leap Forward, they began using ethnographic approaches. traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN8744757684.… Image
24. On a monumental editorial project to construct a critical edition of Skandapurāṇa - now edited by Peter Bisschop (Leiden U) & Yuko Yokochi (Kyoto U) -- which began in 1996-97 with a different set of editors.
The project is now half way at volume 5! 🙏 traffic.megaphone.fm/NBN6313468212.… ImageImage
25. Who were the first Indians? An enthralling talk w/ Tony Joseph which leverages the fast paced developments in paleogenetics to construct a most plausible narrative of how India was peopled & a system of endogamy & hierarchy was sacralized. Fascinating.
traffic.libsyn.com/seenunseen/E11… Image
26. Is "China" really 5000 years old or is it a national myth? Bill Hayton argues that “China” was cooked up by few intellectuals who imported ideas of sovereignty, citizenry etc from Europe a century ago. But what abt Chinese historiographical traditions? traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/a7b4f8… Image
27. On ibn Khaldun's famous book, Muqaddimah and the lessons it has for us on philosophy of history, economics, biology, sociology, and political theory. cbc.mc.tritondigital.com/CBC_IDEAS_P/me… ImageImage
an unexpected link:
28. "The most painful part for me or any other Kashmiri Pandit going to Kashmir is that when you go there you have to live in an hotel, which is probably very close to your erstwhile home."
A measured (but moving) talk on Kashmir & more by @rahulpandita traffic.libsyn.com/secure/brownpu… Image
29. When thinking about Chinese student protests, we think about Hong Kong or Tiananmen. But there's one that kicked it all off in modern Chinese history. Rana Mitter on the May Fourth Movement of 1919. And the idea of Mr. Science! audioboom.com/posts/7745485.… Image

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More from @KS1729

Keerthik Sasidharan Profile picture
19 Jul
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
Keerthik Sasidharan Profile picture
28 Feb
Kind of surreal to take a photo of the singularly inspiring Bhagat Singh -- a revolutionary voice in 1920s India, who was hung by the British in 1931, at the age of 24 -- run it through the Heritage AI algorithm, and see him reanimated.
Swami Vivekananda probably would have laughed at such algorithmic efforts to reanimate photos, but as a great believer in the powers of science to improve material aspects of human lives, he would have probably wanted to understand the details of how it all works.
It was hard to find a quality photo of Lokmanya Tilak, but this worked. Tilak urgently deserve a new reappraisal as one of the founding fathers of the modern Indian mind. A reformist & revivalist of traditions, a believer in the power of mass media before most Indians could read.
Read 6 tweets
Keerthik Sasidharan Profile picture
6 Feb
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
Read 20 tweets
Keerthik Sasidharan Profile picture
13 Jan
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
Read 21 tweets
Keerthik Sasidharan Profile picture
3 Jan
For 2021, a new thread of sentences, I have found of interest/provocative/moving
Read freely, quote happily, attribute with caution. For a similar thread from 2018-20, see below:

“I’d never say this in public – I still love beautiful books and believe in them.” -Jacques Derrida
“I have sometimes been troubled by a doubt whether what is true in one case may not be true in all. Then, when I have reached that point, I am driven to retreat, for fear of tumbling into a bottomless pit of nonsense.”

– Socrates (Plato, Parmenides)
“I perceive that in Germany as well as in Italy there is a great struggle about what they call Classical and Romantic, terms which were not subjects of Classification in England – at least when I left it four or five years ago.”

— Byron, 14 August 1820
Read 14 tweets
Keerthik Sasidharan Profile picture
13 Dec 20
Farewell John le Carre, thank you for all the extraordinary books and the immortal George Smiley. It was no doubt very hard work, but you made it look so effortless, made it all so human.

[proofs of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy']
Read 20 tweets

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