In 2020, I wrote 40+ book sketches (1100 words each) every week for the Malayalam language magazine, Mathrubhumi (Motherland). Mine is the only English column in that venerable magazine which began in 1928.

In print, each ‘markings’ appeared thus.

A thread of those books:

1. “Many growth evangelists have led us to believe that technology will save us by breaking the linkage between linearity of inputs and outputs—to which, Smil persuasively argues: “knowledge is not always the cure”.” [filed: Jan 6th]

2. “We finish this book thinking that Iran is a country of great dissatisfactions, one that is eager to break free from the control of the clerics who govern many aspects of public life. This is true but also incomplete.” [filed: Jan 13]

3. “Thus, we learn of little heard projects, utopian dreams, and mavericks from the 1920s for whom the true unit of value was not human labor as Marx said but rather a unit of energy spent. Money in these utopias are laws of thermodynamics by other means.” [filed Jan 21st]

4. “Machiavelli famously says that Romulus killed Remus ‘not [to] benefit himself but rather the people.’ This has often been interpreted as Machiavelli arguing that the ends justify the means. But Boucheron astutely notes that Machiavelli is subtler:...” [filed Feb 2nd]

5. “We can only read with melancholy when a Japanese farmer poignantly notes in his diary, ‘Keishiro caught a cold & is coughing, so he went to visit the divine image of the Stop-Coughing Priest south of Kannonji village, to pray he would get over the cough.’” [filed Feb 11th]

6. “Despite the sacralization of the State as the apotheosis of rationality or the singular role of Materialism as the moving force of history, Lefebvre bravely (for a Marxist in the 1960) borrows from Nietzsche to argue it is culture that can remake mankind.” [Feb 18th]

7. “Of late, capitalist titans have spoken of endowing capitalism with compassion & meaning, to assuage & calm us who might otherwise rebel. Zizek mirthfully asks, why are capitalists warning us about the end of capitalism when capitalism *really* will come to an end?” [Feb 25]

8. “At 45 kilograms of weight, Gandhi ate little but actively experimented & thought a lot about that which he ate and how it allowed him to be in this world.  We do the opposite. We eat a lot, often with little restraint, but think little about that which we eat.” [March 2nd]

9. “In 1988, a TV show called River Elegy (He Shang) asked the Chinese to abandon the ‘yellow’ of the Yellow River (metaphor for feudalism & conservatism) & embrace the ‘blue’ of the ocean (metaphor for trade & vitality). In 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres followed.” [Mar 11th]

Will continue tomorrow...

10. “Two lessons are well learnt by an Indian reader. One, climate change appears often as violent regime-shifts social order; & two, our historiography needs to account for climate better. After reading Fagan, one wishes for a cultural history of Indian climate.” [filed Mar 16]

11. “A ranking is a ‘complete, asymmetrical, & transitive’ relation, where ‘complete’ means that rankings compare b/w two things; ‘asymmetrical’ tells us that each object is more or less than another along a criterion; ‘transitive’ tells us if A > B, B > C, then A > C.” [Mar 25]

12. “A Pali text describes the Buddha as having “wandered alone like a rhinoceros”. For Montaigne, who is Batchelor’s go-to guy often, solitude was the handmaiden to his intellect; for the Buddha, solitude was an ontological reality, the nature state of being alive.” [Apr 1st]

13. “To the simple question of how did the people residing in an enclosure between Spain and Germany on its west and east, and England and North Africa on its north and south become ‘French’ — the answer is less than obvious.” [Apr 7th]

14. “There is another sort of conservative —‘negative’ conservatives — who periodically appears to warn about the decline of society.  In contrast, there are ‘positive’ conservatives, who imbue conservatism with qualities and attitudes towards living..” [Apr 14]

15. “The Therigatha is therefore that rare sort of text which is both a private testament and a representation of a collective struggle of fellow women who try to carefully tend to their own selves while being a member of a religion that insists there is no self.” [Apr 21st]

16. “Magris is a great observer of people, of their small frustrations and resentments. And he is also a shrewd reader of human self-deceptions and he writes: “we all are, so sensitive to the pain of others that we shove it aside so that it won’t ruin our appetite.” [April 27th]

17. “What exactly was Mendeleev’s periodic table in the annals of knowledge? A theoretical construct, an empirical discovery, or merely an organizing principle — or was it something even less respectable: an approximation that largely works?” [May 4th]

18. “If Kierkegaard had a kindred spirit in his own age, it was Dostoyevsky who was his younger contemporary.  The two of them didn’t know of each other but as Walter Kaufmann wrote, ‘Kierkegaard confronts us as an individual while Dostoyevsky offers us a world.’” [May 12]

19. “Midway through Donald Sassoon’s doorstopper of a book — I was struck by how many contentious debates over the years were packed into that innocuous subtitle — ‘a global history of capitalism, 1860-1914’.   What does ‘global’ really connote here?” [May 19]

20. “In the hands of a lesser author, the narrative could have easily slipped into some sort of lecture on multiculturalism and anti-Orientalism.  But instead, Enard gracefully pivots the novel from the burdens of history to a study of illicit loves & bonds between men.” [June 9]