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Hindustan Times - HT Smartcast
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The Road to Zanskar
"Even in winter, twice a month, the first postmen in Zanskar in the 1980s climbed rock faces and crossed frozen rivers -- if you fell in, you could die -- in a journey that took three days, to…
Slow and steady wins the race
"The fossil fuel age gave us speed. This, on the one hand, allows us to think, 'I'm going faster', but it never defines 'faster to where, and to what?' You become a victim of speed -- always trying…
The quiet pull of the Pune police procedural
"The way I look at it, whydunnit is actually more important than whodunnit. There are only so many permutations and combinations you can think of in terms of whodunnit. It's finite whereas whydunnit…
A return to the land
"We went in with urban confidence and rural reality hit us in the face at every turn! Establishing a farm is probably the most difficult thing I've done. I think everybody should do it."- Arti…
Using stick figures to demolish dubious politics, doublespeak and more
"You may try to believe that you are living in a First World country and that your reality differs from that of a poor person in your vicinity. But, at the end of the day, you will face the same…
A fight against forgetting
"Comics and literature allow us to enter worlds through our imagination; it is a medium of not-saying. We read because we want to get into the interior worlds of say, a family living in a room in…
A people willing to sacrifice their lives to save nature
"The Salman Khan story reached the headlines and people thought, well, if the Bishnois can go for him so effectively, it's not safe to poach there. It has actually reduced poaching. So many Bishnoi…
Jewellery: Of ornamentation and adornment
"I don't think you will find anyone in India who doesn't wear a piece of jewellery [of some sort]. The Amrapali Collection is a pan Indian one. The jewels in this book are worn by pastoralists, the…
Tatti tales: The things you can learn from animal poop
"Poop acts like social media for many herbivores. Besides, the droppings of whales tackle climate change, while elephant waste helps regrow forests. Wild animal poop is helping science and…
From poffertjes to perad and pepper water
"I used to be very possessive of my recipes. I didn't want to give them away until a senior chef told me, "Listen, even if you give the recipe, everybody's hand is different; it will not be the…
Reading, writing, rocking
"The thing about being a writer is that we write from a sensitive, empathetic place but we are also ruthless in that when we are grieving, we take notes of our grief. Ruskin Bond told me that the…
On journeying through life
"To be alive is, in many ways, to travel; it's to journey through time. We tend to think of travelling as something that involves space or place or geography; moving from one place to another. But…
Space operas, dystopias, and the perfect worlds of the far future
"Science and speculative fiction has always been about responding to the preoccupations of the time. I was attracted to the genre by the imaginative possibilities it offers by allowing the creation…
Train through India
"Trains in India are public sites and they are sites for social exchange and its a collective identity but what the smartphone has introduced is not only the private sphere into the public one, but…
Irony, 'influenza', and Internet mythology in contemporary India
"I don't take the usual dystopian view of the Internet. I see it as a unit of society and use it to understand the self, the nation and politics. So, I didn't want to look at caste from the usual…
Jagat Murari & the FTII: art, argument and institution building in young India
"In my father's view, the making of a filmmaker wasn't just about teaching the art, craft, and science [of filmmaking], but also about allowing the filmmaker to find their own unique voice and have…
On the multi-storeyed tower with no staircase and no entrance
"What I wanted to say about the global dimension of caste was to look at it from the subjectivity of its victim. So Dalit as a subject takes a central place in this text, and this Dalit subjectivity…
Things that go bump...
"Some call them ghosts but I look at them more as energies that coexist with us. In many ways, like the Buddhist and other Indian philosophies say, we are on a continuum of Time and many souls can go…
Going with the mighty flow
"We travel on the river but the real traveller is the river, and to understand it one has to make a substantial effort" - Sanjoy Hazarika, author, River Traveller; Journeys on the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra…
Fraud, fear and loathing from Jamtara to Sihanoukville
"I wanted to use fraud as a way to look at our society today. We have a fraud underworld industry that employs multitudes. If you have such a large number of people who will readily go over to the…
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Books and Authors has published 348 episodes since October 2019, covering topics in Arts, Books.
Books and Authors is currently sporadic with new episodes weekly. Average episode length is 43m.
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