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It has been a while since I last wrote anything for the blog. Not for want of things to write about, certainly, but because life, with its peculiar talent for filling every available hour, has kept me occupied. The past few weeks have been particularly eventful on the professional front. I had the pleasure of organising two academic gatherings: the second edition of the TOK Compendium and the second edition of the Language and Literature Meet Up. Both brought together some of

We are taught that death demands a certain dignity. Whatever our feelings about a person, the conventional response to their passing is restraint: condolences for the family, a moment of silence, perhaps an acknowledgment of the good they did. Yet this convention breaks down spectacularly when a deeply polarising public figure dies. Instead of grief, there may be laughter; instead of Rest in Peace, there may be Good riddance; instead of sympathy, there may be an almost celebr

There are places we visit and places we merely pass through. The distinction becomes apparent much later. I had passed through Santiniketan in 2010, on a motorcycle, during a long ride aimed at the mysterious and beautiful North East of India. I remember the journey more clearly than I remember Santiniketan itself. There was a certain restlessness to those days. I was young enough to believe that travelling meant moving from one place to another, collecting landscapes, roads,

Every year, on 5 September, India celebrates Teachers’ Day in memory of Dr. S. Radhakrishnan, the former President of India who is widely remembered as a great teacher, philosopher and academic. This post, however, is not about Dr. Radhakrishnan. It is about the tens of thousands of teachers across the country who walk into classrooms every day, prepare lessons, read, research, assess, give feedback, attend meetings, respond to parents, manage adolescents, negotiate instituti

There is something wonderfully suspicious about a painter who writes a poem called “Bimbo’s Pome.” The spelling is deliberately wrong. The poem is written in the voice of a cat. Its subject is a violin, a master, smoking, scratching and irritation. It is only a handful of lines long, and yet it immediately tells us something important about Paul Klee: he was not particularly interested in keeping the world in its proper categories. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimente

Long post alert. Blame my whiskey, it was too potent for a weekend! There is an interesting game being played in the booming educational market. Curricula have become brands, schools compete through claims of innovation, and pedagogical frameworks circulate rapidly through conferences, consultancy programmes, professional networks, books and social media. In this environment, adopting something new can itself become a sign of leadership. A new framework, lesson structure or

There is something deeply disturbing about a government that sees students as a threat. Every democracy has been shaped by student movements. Every single one. Students were part of India's freedom struggle. They stood against the Emergency. They marched for transparency, against corruption, for social justice, for better education, for the rights of marginalized communities, and whenever they believed the Constitution was being betrayed. Whether one agreed with their politic

"The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."— Often attributed to Plato. Or someone like that... History rarely advances in straight lines. It moves in waves of crisis and renewal, periods of complacency followed by moments of extraordinary civic awakening. Political systems often appear immutable until, quite suddenly, they are not. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of military dictatorships in Latin

The first copies of Tea and Tombs: Poems on Hyderabad arrived today. A speed post parcel from Kolkata. Brown paper. Fresh ink. Crisp pages. A cover I had only seen on screens until now. I held the book for a long time before opening it. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing your own poems in print. These were once loose sheets tucked into diaries, forgotten notebooks, computer folders, and Google Docs. They belonged to years that had already passed. Suddenly they

There are photographs that are taken because something looks beautiful. Then there are photographs that are taken because they preserve a feeling. This was the latter. I clicked this photograph while leaving school for the day, standing on the stairs of the Nalanda Library, looking across at the IB flagship building of Manchester Global School. Above it hung a sky heavy with monsoon clouds, dark enough to promise rain but patient enough to hold back for a little while longer.

Literature is full of characters who discover that being loved and being understood are not the same thing. Some spend their lives standing at the edge of their own family's narrative, present but unseen. They are spoken to but not listened to. Remembered, but not considered. Included in the language of belonging yet excluded from its practice. Perhaps that is why certain characters remain with us long after we close their books. Among them, Ivan Ilyich has always lingered

Yesterday was International Reading Day. I thought about it for a while and realized that I had a problem. I have never had a reading year that felt so fragmented. When the year began, I was reading philosophy. Considering it was my birth month, that was perhaps an unusually gloomy way to celebrate being alive. Yet it made sense. Over the last few years, my reading has increasingly shifted toward philosophy, politics and history. Somewhere along the way, those three areas qui

Well, he liked cats too! Poets who like cats are statistically good poets. :P Joseph Brodsky occupies a curious position in twentieth-century literature. Unlike Neruda, Plath, Ginsberg, Heaney, or even his fellow Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, he has never become a poet of popular quotation or public affection. His reputation among poets and critics has always been immense, yet he remains strangely absent from the wider reading public. The paradox is striking because Brodsky

When the latest confrontation between the United States and Iran escalated into open conflict, much of the world expected a familiar outcome. For decades, the United States had been regarded as the uncontested military power of the international system. Israel was viewed as possessing one of the most sophisticated security and intelligence architectures in the world. Iran, by contrast, was often portrayed as an isolated state weakened by sanctions, economic pressure, diplomat

Post-2000, no filmmaker has influenced me quite like Clint Eastwood. Those who follow me on Facebook and X probably already know how much I admire him. Those who don't, well, this is as good a day as any to confess my addiction. Today, Clint Eastwood turns 96. And yes, I am one of those people who will stop whatever they're doing if an Eastwood film appears on television. My story with Clint Eastwood begins somewhere around 1993. I was spending my summer holidays at my grandf

Last evening, while gazing upon the Hyderabad skyline from my window, I found myself momentarily arrested by the sight of a crescent moon suspended delicately above the city. It was one of those rare evenings when the heavens briefly forgive urban planning. The moon floated there with old world serenity while beneath it rose the contemporary ambitions of mankind in concrete, glass, and questionable architectural confidence. Cranes stood like mechanical giraffes. Apartment tow

The recent political storm around Udhayanidhi Stalin’s remarks on Sanatana Dharma once again exposed how impossible it has become in India to separate religion from ideological performance. His earlier speech, where he compared Sanatana Dharma to social diseases that needed to be eradicated, triggered outrage across the country, especially among Hindutva organizations and North Indian political commentators who immediately framed the statement as an attack on Hinduism itself.

There is something quietly unsettling about opening David Markson’s Collected Poems. Not because the poems are obscure in any fashionable or performative way, but because they seem to have already abandoned the expectation that they should make themselves legible to you. They do not unfold. They sit there, almost indifferent, like objects recovered from a mind that has stopped negotiating with clarity. Even the foreword admits, with a kind of shrug, that some of these poems a

I have always found History fascinating. Not in the dry, date memorisation sense that school sometimes reduces it to, but as a way of making sense of how people lived, thought, fought, and imagined their worlds. At one point, I was quite certain I would pursue it seriously, maybe even take it up for my master’s. That plan didn’t survive a conversation with my father. Practical as always, he asked me, half amused and half concerned, “Who wants to know when Ashoka planted a bad

I didn’t expect a pedagogy book to linger in my head the way Teaching and Learning English Literature by Ellie Chambers and Marshall Gregory did, but here we are. It is one of those books you pick up thinking you will borrow a few ideas and quietly move on, only to realise later that it has been rearranging your thinking without asking permission. The reason why I am writing about this is that I stumbled upon it again after I first read it in 2010. This time, as a serious rea