We are so used to seeing the fun Republic Day parades since childhood that we hardly pause to think where and how exactly all of that came to be. The bare minimum we are told is that the revered Constitution of India came into effect on January 26 1950, and…

Over the past few months I have worked on a podcast on the history of medicine and healthcare in India in collaboration with Suno India and the Thakur Family Foundation. Last month we released an episode focused on the idea/s of Orientalism. In this brief essay I intend to introduce…

The discipline of paleogenomics — extracting, cleaning, and analyzing remnant DNA from people who lived thousands of years ago — is phenomenal science. The 2022 Medicine Nobel to Svante Pääbo basically honors this new discipline. For at least a decade now, this science, paleogenomics, has made waves in popular media…

[This post is an essay version of a Twitter thread of mine, which can be found here.] Among the books on healthcare I have found most helpful is “The Body Multiple” by Annemarie Mol. It primarily discusses how hospital medicine works despite its inherent messiness. The complexity and messiness of…

Five years back, on Independence Day, I wrote this for the Wire. Reproducing it here considering that the bigoted nationalist context in which I wrote the essay has only gotten worse and uglier. Am I proud to be an Indian? The fact is that neither I nor any other Indian…

Last week I came across an opinion essay by Kishor Patwardhan, a Professor of Ayurveda. I liked reading it, and was particularly impressed by the courage Patwardhan displayed in saying that there were some ideas and beliefs which he held to dearly in the past, and that over time he…

Lack of exposure to great and smart writing is hurting India’s kids and teenagers — Idiosyncrasies make people highly interesting, and each person generally harbors some or the other ‘superpower’ in the garb of an idiosyncrasy. My English teacher from primary and secondary school (Mr H), for example, has the first page of philosopher Bertrand Russell’s autobiography fully memorized. …

And how the history of Ayurveda intersects with the history of caste — In 1991 historian and Sanskritist Kenneth Zysk, currently affiliated with the University of Copenhagen, published a book titled Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery. This was a ground-breaking book at the time, offering several new, fascinating insights into the history of Ayurveda and the history…

“Being civilized means making and liking beautiful things” — Philosopher Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad’s The Story of Civilization, written in 1931, is one of the best examples of the cliched line that great things come in small packages. All of 94 pages in big font, it packs in some profound philosophy in eloquent, relatable language. I first read it…