Tamil non-vegetarian cuisine two millennia ago
From K T Achaya’s wonderful little book, The Story of Our Food (pages 78-79):
Many animal foods are described with great relish in the early Tamil literature.
Even Brahmins did not lack relish for the meat and toddy served to them at feasts held by the chieftains and princes of the [...]
The geopolitical implications of Xuanzang’s round-trip
The Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang’s journey to India and back is well-known (see Samanth Subramanian’s review of Mishi Saran’s book in Pragati). What is not so well-known is that his trip led, unintentionally, to a diplomatic spat between the China and India that ultimately resulted in the first Chinese military [...]
The costly refusal to see beyond itself and the subcontinent
An extract from Sardar K M Panikkar’s Annual Day address to the Indian School of International Studies on 13 February 1961:
The study of international relations is fundamentally a study of power relationships. This, of course, has to be interpreted in terms not only of military power [...]
US power is bound to decline if it continues to rely on a trans-Atlantic alliance
Henry Kissinger injects a strong dose of strategic wisdom into the squabbly-wobble that is being passed off as an Afghanistan policy review on by the Obama adminstration.
Concurrently, a serious diplomatic effort is needed to address the major anomaly of the Afghan [...]
Why Uncle Sam needs Pakistan (“Because of the Gurkhas” edition)
“Ignorance about India”, Narendra Singh Sarila writes, “was the reason why the Americans came to rely on British advice on questions concerning the subcontinent after its independence.” He quotes an anecdote to illustrate this:
In those days, the Americans’ understanding of India was extremely limited. To take [...]
History, current affairs & books
JK joins us on INI today. Longtime readers will know that Varnam has been illuminating the blogosphere on Indian history interspersed with incisive commentary on current affairs since, as he puts it, the Pre-Cambrian era of Indian blogging. It’s great to have him on the INI platform.
Do update your bookmarks and [...]
People are.
From a liberal nationalist perspective, it is impossible to agree with Jaswant Singh’s judgement that territorial integrity of pre-Partition India was worth preserving at the cost of having “Pakistans within India”. His praise for Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his criticism of Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel is based on this notion. Yet a [...]
Can you stomach the truth?
Most people—most of all South Indians—react to this with shock and denial. Some go on and come to terms with it.
Well, the fact is the idli—a dish that is almost synonymous with South India—was probably an import from what is now Indonesia (and what was then the Sri Vijaya empire). This [...]
It’s not funny, actually
Richard Rhodes writes in Arsenals of Folly—The making of the nuclear arms race:
…during years of the high Cold War, there was always political capital to be earned from exaggerating the dangers or benefits of any particular nuclear strategy or weapons system. But even for those within the two governments with the best [...]
It’s been a hundred years since Rudrapatna Shamasastry published the English translation of Kautilya’s Arthashastra
The Star of Mysore has an article (linkthanks JK) by A V Narasimha Murthy marking the centenary of the publication of the very first English translation of the Arthasastra:
Around 1905 there was a librarian by name Rudrapatnam Shamasastry (1868-1944) who hailed [...]
Recent Comments