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Jun 18, 20235 min read
Who’s the Boss?
N Kalyan Raman Ever since Rajinikanth, the superstar of Tamil films, announced his intention to make a formal entry into the political...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
'Sarpatta Parambarai’ and the cinematic exploration of Dalit subjectivities
N Kalyan Raman The setting is North Madras, specifically the harbour area and its hinterland of a few square kilometres. Residents of the...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
Who Killed Perumal?
N Kalyan Raman The brutal harassment and silencing of Perumal Murugan, a leading Tamil writer, on the basis of certain passages in his...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
The delicate poetry of ordinary life
N Kalyan Raman A Town That Laughed by Manu Bhattathiri, Aleph Book Company, 2018 Manu Bhattathiri’s first novel, The Town That Laughed,...
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Jun 18, 20237 min read
Life in the Details
N Kalyan Raman The Hills of Angheri by Kaveri Nambisan, Penguin India, New Delhi, 2005 , 392 pages, Rs. 350/= Kaveri Nambisan’s novel,...
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Jun 18, 20235 min read
The Art of Losing
N Kalyan Raman Low a novel by Jeet Thayil, Faber & Faber, 2020 It’s not by accident that Dominic Ullis, the name of the protagonist in...
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Jun 18, 20236 min read
Poets in their time
N Kalyan Raman The Book of Chocolate Saints, a novel by Jeet Thayil, Aleph Book Company, 2017 raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
The way we were
N Kalyan Raman Plastic Emotions by Shiromi Pinto, Penguin Viking, 2019 Starting from the late 1940s, newly decolonized counties in Asia...
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Jun 18, 20233 min read
The Tamil Mind
N Kalyan Raman Tamil Characters: Personalities, Politics, Culture by AR Venkatachalapthy, Pan Macmillan India, 2018 We have existed as a...
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Jun 18, 20235 min read
Can Scientists Be Religious?
N Kalyan Raman Science and Religion in India: Beyond Enchantment, Renny Thomas, Routledge, 2022 While religion has had, and continues to...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
Palm Tree Tappers to Sickle Makers
N Kalyan Raman Nine Rupees an Hour: Disappearing Livelihoods of Tamil Nadu, Aparna Karthikeyan, Context, Westland Books, 2019 A world...
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Jun 18, 20233 min read
A City Has Many Names
N Kalyan Raman Madras, Chennai and the Self: Conversations with the City by Tulsi Badrinath, Pan Macmillan, 2015 Rapid and uncontrolled...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
The Last Scriptwriter: An empathetic portrait of Karunanidhi
N Kalyan Raman Karunanidhi: The Definitive Biography by Vaasanthi, Juggernaut Books, 2020 In her recent biography of Muthuvel...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
The Last Scriptwriter
N Kalyan Raman Karunanidhi: A Life in Politics by Sandhya Ravishankar, HarperCollins, New Delhi, 2018 Though the Dravidian movement is...
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Jun 18, 20235 min read
The Man behind the Icon: AK Ramanujan’s Diaries
N Kalyan Raman Journeys: A Poet’s Diary (Eds) Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodriguez, Penguin Random House India, 2018 “The value of...
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Jun 18, 20233 min read
In Search of New Frontiers: The brains and blood behind ISRO
N Kalyan Raman Ever Upwards: ISRO In Images VP Balagangadharan, PV Manoranjan Rao, BN Suresh, Orient Blackswan, 2019 It was only in the...
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Jun 18, 20233 min read
Smell the Kapi
N Kalyan Raman Degree Coffee by the Yard: A Short Biography of Madras by Nirmala Lakshman, Aleph Book Company, 2013 The book under...
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Jun 18, 20236 min read
How do state governments sustain the illusion of governance even when they fail their people?
N Kalyan Raman Despite the State: Why India Lets Its People Down and How They Cope by M. Rajshekhar, Westland Books, New Delhi, 2021 With...
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Jun 18, 20234 min read
Discovered in translation
N Kalyan Raman Culture, Language & Identity: English-Tamil in Colonial India 1750-1900 CE Language, Culture & Power: English-Tamil in...
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Jun 18, 20235 min read
Blindness and insight: K.R. Meera’s ‘The Unseeing Idol Of Light’
N Kalyan Raman The Unseeing Idol of Light, novel by KR Meera, translated from the Malayalam by Minishty S, Penguin Random House India,...
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