Latest Ias exams Podcast Episodes
Of Jaws 3, Rat Curry and Diamonds on Snake Heads
Books and Authors - July 04, 2024 10:26 - 49 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Last year, when Anita Mani of Indian Pitta Books contacted me and asked if we could update Snakeman (1989), which was about Rom Whitaker and his exploits with reptiles and about our life after we got married, I had to laugh a little bit. I said, "You know, it's a bit odd for a divorced wife to b...
Masala Chai, Magic and More
Books and Authors - June 27, 2024 10:30 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The history of drinking spices is older than the history of drinking tea, which is more recent in India. Drinking spices in hot water and in milk comes from the Ayurveda. As to when the marriage of these two happened, that's lost in history somewhere. In the West, people's palates are getting ...
Masala Chai Magic and More
Books and Authors - June 27, 2024 10:30 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The history of drinking spices is older than the history of drinking tea, which is more recent in India. Drinking spices in hot water and in milk comes from the Ayurveda. As to when the marriage of these two happened, that's lost in history somewhere. In the West, people's palates are getting ...
Women, Dalits and Contextualizing the Manusmriti
Books and Authors - June 21, 2024 07:05 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The general greater acceptance of reservations in India as compared to the US comes from the acceptance of a karmic world view, the principle that you can't escape the consequences of your actions. Therefore, if your actions have been evil, then it is better to own up and do something to correct...
The social and cultural evolution of the Indian Foreign Service
Books and Authors - June 14, 2024 07:46 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The problem of studying history is that we often think of history from today's point of view. When we look at history we must always look at the physical reality that existed at that particular time. The main reality of Nehru's time wasn't the threat from Pakistan or China or India's relations w...
Of guilt lit and suffocation by morality
Books and Authors - June 07, 2024 11:30 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 1 rating"It's very easy to criticise the BJP government or the Mamta government for censorship. What we don't realise is we are doing the same thing on social media without allowing a certain kind of freedom of speech that is in disagreement with what we feel. But it is disagreement that produces culture...
Not a fraction but a whole
Books and Authors - May 30, 2024 08:48 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The book is about my story as somebody of mixed heritage. In many ways it's just the story of somebody trying to figure out who they are in a world that likes to separate and divide. the story of the book is about how, through discovering the origins of ideas, through discovering history, I disc...
Of rose beds and avenues lined with amaltas
Books and Authors - May 23, 2024 09:19 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"If you look at late 19th century photographs or sketches of Delhi, it is empty and treeless. It's a historical fact that the city's greenery has come with the development of urban settlements... My favourite Delhi garden is Sundar Nursery because there are always new trees to discover there" – S...
Magnetic women, Oxbeas accents, and 1980s Bombay and Delhi
Books and Authors - May 16, 2024 10:34 - 42 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Social comedy usually has a very short span because it gets dated. For people to laugh at the same silly jokes, for social comedy to survive means that it's hit some enduring spot. I was trying to write a literary novel. It was a take on the Gothic novel and was about the relationship between Pa...
A promoter and a patron
Books and Authors - May 09, 2024 15:35 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"As a writer and art critic Rudolf von Leyden was able to mentor artists in a certain capacity but for artists to live, to sustain a life as an artist, they need to sell their work. They need patrons. Because of his corporate job, Rudi was able to support the work of the artists he liked – Ara, H...
The story of a family; the story of a nation
Books and Authors - May 03, 2024 04:40 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 1 rating"You can't leave caste behind but you can change religion so why won't you get attracted to another religion for whatever reasons? We are now paying too much attention to religious conversions. There are so many histories which run parallel within this one big history of the country and that's wh...
Of rasa, Raja Ravi Varma, and Raza
Books and Authors - April 25, 2024 10:30 - 58 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"In 2010, I totally got wedded to Indian aesthetics. I decided to view art through the lens of the rasa theory. I went back to the Natya Shastra because that is where it all starts. When I look at art, I find a sense of immediacy, through emotion, through rasa. When you look at the work of Manjit...
Different stories about India
Books and Authors - April 18, 2024 14:22 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The mytho-epic imagination is an integral part of the structure of our culture. The religious character of the mytho-epic imagination in the Indian subcontinent provides a shared collective unconscious," Manoj Kumar Jena, editor, 'Ways of Being Indian; Essays on Religion, Gender and Culture' tal...
Of passportism and pseudiscovery
Books and Authors - April 12, 2024 06:02 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The history of tourism is intricately connected to colonialism. Travel writing is a direct descendent of colonial exploratory writing and even today, modern tourism has that DNA. Modern tourism, in its internal logic, has a colonial gaze. This idea of "discovering" other places is built into the...
Refreshing retellings of traditional tales
Books and Authors - April 04, 2024 10:43 - 58 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Stories leave a deep impact on how our thinking is shaped. These stories are challenging some very traditional ideas that still exist heavily in society. There is a power in terrible representations. Somehow, we have representations where the disabled woman is a burden to family, to society, and...
On the complex Indian village
Books and Authors - March 28, 2024 10:13 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Villages are complicated entities. There's always a power game. Now, money values have come in and villages are also changing. The lives between the village and the city are starting to merge. I don't know what that means for the country. Villages and cities are both equally important for us. ...
No last words in history
Books and Authors - March 21, 2024 12:07 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"While we must read histories produced by historians who have different perspectives on the past, it is very important not to get trapped in any particular ideological framework. For me, it is important to move beyond them" - Upinder Singh, author, 'A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India',...
A word to the wise
Books and Authors - March 14, 2024 15:30 - 52 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Strangers matter online. We tend to put a lot of weight on reviews. But it is difficult to tell which ones are fake and which are not. Computer scientists are still working on it. But they have figured out certain characteristics of fake reviews – like the use of lots of exclamation marks and qu...
Of carpets and memories
Books and Authors - March 09, 2024 07:12 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingI'm not an expert but I am a connoisseur and most of the carpets in this book are part of my collection. Carpets harbour a lot of stories but we seldom read about them because books on carpets usually focus on things like the knots used and how they were made. My idea was to keep the stories" - J...
Sex and the Indian woman: It's complicated
Books and Authors - February 29, 2024 04:03 - 53 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Every culture's sexual values get imbued into all parts of their thinking, not just into how they think about the bedroom. Under patriarchy, mothers are given this special role of restricting their daughters as sexuality is tied up with the sense of social pride or izzat – the mother's value as ...
Big tech, profit, loss, and AI
Books and Authors - February 22, 2024 07:36 - 47 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"AI doesn't create; it reproduces. AI doesn't know what is good or bad; even in art, it doesn't know. People want to know whether we'll reach a level where AI is as smart as we are. The kids are always asking me that. We won't reach that level the way we 're going because the intuition is just no...
Detective fiction and the search for justice
Books and Authors - February 16, 2024 04:37 - 50 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingCrime fiction seems to have a steady presence because of the way in which it is able to address contemporary issues of law and order relating also to the absence of justice, which is a key problem we all face. The attempt is to make amends, sometimes even outside the system, and to deliver justic...
By hook or by book
Books and Authors - February 08, 2024 09:59 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The thrill of the hunt is what fuels all collecting probably and it's certainly so for book collecting. But here the interest is bibliographical so there's a scholarly component to it as well. It's a very thrilling experience to see that you are a part of a long tradition of book collecting and ...
A Himalayan feast
Books and Authors - February 01, 2024 18:26 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingLike the pizza, momos are traditional, ethnic, and are loved worldwide" - Rohini Rana, author, 'The Nepal Cookbook; 108 Regional Recipes', talks to Manjula Narayan about the magic of eating with your fingers, the humble potato, magical momos in their many avatars, the flavours of fermentation and...
Birds, bees, blinding fog and scorching sunshine
Books and Authors - January 25, 2024 17:49 - 59 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Dr Salim Ali told me, if you're not a scientist, don't show off your secondhand scientific knowledge. Just write simply and share that. So that's what I've done" - Bulbul Sharma, author, 'Sunbirds in the Morning, Grey Hornbills at Dusk' talks to Manjula Narayan about the variety of birds and tre...
Journey to the End of the Empire
Books and Authors - January 18, 2024 13:35 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"I've heard its changed but when I was first in Tibetan regions, it was illegal to have a photo of the Dalai Lama. There's a lot of propaganda against the Dalai Lama and other lamas in China and I've actually heard Tibetan people there parroting that propaganda. There's also tremendous ecological...
Keepers of the sacred fire
Books and Authors - January 11, 2024 17:12 - 53 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"The community of corpse burners or Doms take pride in their ability to give moksh but it's also a way of justifying their place in a society that otherwise shuns them, humiliates them and treats them as untouchables. They believe they have religious capital. But at the end of the day, there are ...
The mad genius within the flawed cop
Books and Authors - January 04, 2024 10:11 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingI keep thinking of all the other writers who also have these sorts of protagonists. The cops of Karen Slaughter, Ian Rankin and Peter James are not exactly happy guys who are at peace with the world; their relationships are in shambles; they are eccentric. It's probably like taking the mad genius...
The good poets society
Books and Authors - December 15, 2023 10:40 - 1 hour ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Poetry is not instant coffee; that is undrinkable. What is slow brewed coffee or a tea ceremony? Everything is slow, which means you can appreciate the nuances of the sounds, the cadence of the language, the content of the poems. The good young poets and the good older poets are not very dissimi...
Lessons from Rajasthan's camel herders
Books and Authors - December 07, 2023 07:57 - 54 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 rating"Within Rajasthan's Raika culture, camels are raised in a system that's cruelty free - the calves are not separated from their mothers, camels walk around and choose their own diets and have a close relationship with humans. It's an alternative model of livestock and food production that has grea...
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