Recently, I read William Dalrymple’s Age of Kali, and one particular section caught my attention.

The railways are now so much part of the everyday life of the subcontinent that it is difficult today to take in the revolution they brought about, or the degree to which they both created and destroyed the India of the Raj. Before the arrival of the railways in 1850, travel in India meant months of struggle over primitive dirt roads. Just fifty years later, tracks had been laid from the beaches south of Madras to the Afghan border, more than twenty-three thousand miles of railway in all. It was the biggest, and most costly, construction project undertaken by any colonial power in any colony anywhere in the world. It was also the largest single investment of British capital in the whole of the nineteenth century.

In a world plagued with misinformation, alternate facts, and whitewashed histories, William Dalrymple has done a fantastic job presenting a much needed nuanced picture of history/politics in the 18th century India. Today, the colonization of India is either glorified as a blessing or spoken as evil, depending on whom one talks to, while the Mughal rule is looked upon as evil. In this book, Dalrymple presents a nuanced history of the time, showing the politics that were played out, eventually giving rise to the British colonial project in India.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind/ by Yuval Noah Harari, aims to “..explore[s] the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be ‘human.’” A rather ambitious goal to fit in less than 500 pages.

The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple, an excellent piece of research into the time that, in many ways gave birth to the nationalist movement in India. The book recreates the one of the largest mutinies of the modern word, the 1857 uprising. Starting from the events that led to the uprising, the book covers in detail, both sides of the story. Using both European as well as Indian sources, translating the mutiny papers for almost the first time.

  On November 5’th this year India took a giant leap into space exploration by launching the PSLV C 25 to inject Mangalyaan Orbiter (Mars orbiter). Officially, this is supposed to scan for presence of methane to detect the possibility of life on mars.

The successful launch of this project has sparked a debate around the world: “How could India, with all its poverty support a $75m project”, being the gist of the debate. Here in this post I share my thoughts on this.