Namit Arora grew up in the Indian cow-belt city of Gwalior, famous for its fort and the first epigraphic evidence of zero. After IIT Kharagpur he obtained a Masters in Computer Engineering from Louisiana, followed by a great escape in 1991 to Silicon Valley, where he played a cog in the wheel of Internet technology at three failed startups and at Nokia, Cisco, and McAfee. This didn't make him wise but enabled him to attend lectures of dubious practical value at Stanford and to live, work, or travel in scores of countries, including yearlong stints in London and Amsterdam. He quit this profession in 2013 and moved from California to Delhi NCR. Namit’s essays have appeared in venues like the Humanist, Philosophy Now, the Times Literary Supplement, the Caravan, the Kyoto Journal, the Philosopher, Himal Southasian, and four college anthologies in the U.S. His review of Joothan won the 3 Quarks Daily 2011 Arts & Literature Prize. During a two-year break (2004-06), Namit traveled across India and created a photojournal. Over 15 museums, 30 academies, and 50 publishers have licensed his photos. His videography includes River of Faith, a documentary film about the Kumbh Mela. Contact him via email, blog or website.
by Namit Arora The cryptocurrency movement may be a mainstream media story but confusion about it is widespread. It evokes deeply polarized opinion, what with daily stories of scams, speculative booms, crypto billionaires, and government bans amid tall claims about how cryptocurrencies (and blockchain) are about to transform life and society as we know it. I…
By Namit Arora On being transgender in India and glimpses from The Truth About Me, a powerful memoir by A. Revathi. It aims to introduce readers ‘to the lives of hijras, their distinct culture, and their dreams and desires.’ Most Indians encounter hijras at some point in their lives. Hijras are the most visible subset…
by Namit Arora A cloying veneration of army men is yet another pathology of nationalism that’s more pervasive than ever in India today. Army men are now widely seen as paragons of nobility and patriotism. Whether their deaths are due to freak accidents or border skirmishes, they’re eulogized for “making the supreme sacrifice for the…
By Namit Arora The highs and lows of identity politics, and why despising it is no smarter than despising politics itself. Our identity is a story we tell ourselves everyday. It is a selective story about who we are, what we share with others, why we are different. Each of us, as social beings in…
On the ethnic history and politics of Sri Lanka and a review of Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War.
by Namit Arora A review of Odysseus Abroad, a novel by Amit Chaudhuri. Ananda Sen, the young Bengali protagonist in Amit Chaudhuri’s sixth novel, Odysseus Abroad, is an aspiring poet, singer of ragas, and seeker of the romantic spark in London, 1985. Raised in Bombay but with ancestral roots in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Ananda has been…
by Namit Arora What to make of the verdict in Delhi’s Assembly elections this month? After a dismal show in the national election last year, when many had written it off, the Aam Aadmi (‘common man’) Party achieved a crushing win in Delhi with 67/70 seats. Delhi may be electorally small but being the capital…
By Namit Arora On how caste patriarchy in urban India hijacks and distorts the reality of gender violence. Delhi now lives in infamy as India’s ‘rape capital’. In December 2012, the gruesome and fatal gang rape of a young woman, named Nirbhaya (‘fearless’) by the media, unleashed intense media and public outrage across India. Angry…
by Namit Arora Former changing rooms in the Birla Industries Club ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,’ wrote Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, ‘for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’ Some also say this about ‘home’, making it less a place, more a state of mind.…
By Namit Arora On Arundhati Roy’s introduction to Dr. BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste. A few weeks ago, the Indian publishing house Navayana released an annotated, “critical edition” of Dr. BR Ambedkar’s classic, Annihilation of Caste (AoC). Written in 1936, AoC was meant to be the keynote address at a conference but was never delivered.…
by Namit Arora A review of Unclaimed Terrain, a book of short stories translated from Hindi, and a conversation with its author, Ajay Navaria. “Indian writing” is often equated in the West with its small subset: the work of a tiny class of Indians that thinks and writes in English. Salman Rushdie fueled this folly…
by Namit Arora A two-part review of The Indian Ideology, October 2012, by Perry Anderson. Part 1 is here. Perhaps no single event has had a greater impact on the politics of modern South Asia than Partition, which created the nation-states of India and Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. The genocide it triggered forced the migration…
By Namit Arora A new documentary film about the Kumbh Mela 2013, Prayag, Allahabad. 56 minutes. The Kumbh Mela is an ancient pilgrimage festival that happens once every three years, rotating across four locations in India. The largest of these riverside fairs happens every 12 years in Allahabad at the confluence of two rivers, Ganga…
By Namit Arora A two-part review of The Indian Ideology, October 2012, by Perry Anderson. Part 2 appeared on April 22. ‘Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm. Precursors to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration…
by Namit Arora A few years ago, my partner and I spent twelve days in Uganda. We visited two national parks to see chimpanzees and other animals, the Ssese Islands of Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile, the town of Jinja, and Kampala. As far as possible, we used the average citizen's mode of…
by Namit Arora A review of Pankaj Mishra’s “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia”. A few hundred years ago, a powerful cultural force arose in Western Europe that would later spread out and overwhelm much of the world. Fueled by a new spirit of individualism, inquiry, and innovation, it furthered personal…
by Namit Arora Some years ago in a Montana slaughterhouse, a Black Angus cow awaiting execution suddenly went berserk, jumped a five-foot fence, and escaped. She ran through the streets for hours, dodging cops, animal control officers, cars, trucks, and a train. Cornered near the Missouri river, the frightened animal jumped into its icy waters…
by Namit Arora It is often said that humans are the only animals to use symbols. So many other claims of human uniqueness have fallen away—thoughts, emotions, intelligence, tool use, sense of fairness—what's so special about symbols, you ask? I share your skepticism, dear reader, and in the next few paragraphs I'll tell you why.…
by Namit Arora Some travel impressions prompted by the living and the dead of Varanasi, India. In early 2006, I was on a train to Varanasi when my mother called from Jaipur. Terrorists had just hit Varanasi with explosions at multiple sites, including at the train station; many had died. Since I was going there…
by Namit Arora Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core. This is part two of a two-part critique (Part 1 is the appetizer with the Gita’s historical and literary context. This is the main course with the textual critique).__________________________________ The Bhagavad Gita, less than one percent of…