by Hartosh Singh Bal Lost to history, a number of cities of classical antiquity once existed along the banks of the river Narmada in central India. Many of these cities date back to the 3rd century BC, to the time of the emperor Ashoka, who united the subcontinent into an empire whose extent was never…

by Hartosh Singh Bal Time Magazine declared it the year of the protester, clubbing together what was happening in regions as different as the Arab world, the US and India. While it is easy to find commonalities among the young, urban and largely middle-class protesters who came out on the streets, in some cases they…

by Hartosh Singh Bal The West came to know him in the sixties. The children of parents who had lived through a world war wanted no part of the old answers. With their disdain for everything their parents stood for, they searched for easy answers elsewhere. Among those offering such answers was this man named…

by Hartosh Singh Bal Two recent events, the removal of an essay on the many tellings of the Indian epic the Ramayana from the curriculum of Delhi University and the firebombing of a French newspaper for printing a cartoon of the Prophet in an edition devoted to a satirical look at the Shariat, share a…

by Hartosh Singh Bal Sixty-five years or so after India’s independence, conflicts that question the idea of a constitutional republic do not show any signs of dying down. A few deservedly get some attention, such as the one in Kashmir. The others, for instance the events in the northeast, hardly get noticed in the rest…

by Hartosh Singh Bal In 1977 an Australian media tycoon changed the world of cricket. His name was Kerry Packer, but in his approach to life and business there was little to separate him from Rupert Murdoch. Before Packer intervened, a game of cricket lasted five days, was played by players wearing white and required…

by Hartosh Singh Bal Somewhere near the town of Renala Khurd in Pakistan is a patch of land (a morabba to be exact) that once belonged to my family. In lieu of this land, through a series of land transfers, complicated but no more complicated than the history of the division of the subcontinent, my…

by Hartosh Singh Bal For a tradition that seems to extend back to the Harappan civilization, our lack of knowledge of some key aspects of Indic religions continues to be baffling. One problem, of course is our inability to unlock the world of the Harappans. Signage and seals are available in large number but so…

by Hartosh Singh Bal At a recent lunch with a writer from the US, discussing our common interest in rivers, I asked him what had led to his new project. He told me that he had first visited India several years ago and had toyed with several ideas, one involved travelling through the forested areas…

by Hartosh Singh Bal Like so many others in India, I grew up on tales from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and the books of Enid Blyton. Well produced children’s books with an Indian context were rare, and now looking back I’m not sure as children we needed such a context. Most children’s books are…

by Hartosh Singh Bal The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column, is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler would have been…

by Hartosh Singh Bal Over the past month there have been two separate reasons to return to the story of Srinivasa Ramanujan. The first was the result of an astounding piece of mathematics by Ken Ono and his colleagues on the theory of partitions, bringing to a conclusion some of Ramanujan’s most interesting work in…

Last month, late at night, searching for a painkiller for my wife I came upon an old stock of tablets I had been prescribed for a muscle injury. It was a combination peculiar to India, and among other drugs it included Paracetamol and Diclofenac. Since she was still breastfeeding I took care to check the…