"Trains in India are public sites and they are sites for social exchange and its a collective identity but what the smartphone has introduced is not only the private sphere into the public one, but also a flagrant abuse of the public sphere by making it totally private! This includes the watching of shows at a loud volume and having conversations like that too."- Amitava Kumar, author, The Social Life of Indian Trains, talks to me on the Books & Authors podcast about how train travel has changed, the people he met on his journey from Kashmir to Kanyakumari on the Himsagar Express, memories of earlier train journeys in childhood, lost loves, how caste plays out in our lax attitude to the disposal of waste, the famous train scene in Satyajit Rai's Pather Panchali, and how the vast mass of Indians who are not affluent are subdising luxury train travel for the few.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Books and Authors

Train through India

"I don't take the usual dystopian view of the Internet. I see it as a unit of society and use it to understand the self, the nation and politics. So, I didn't want to look at caste from the usual Dalit-Savarna perspective - a different kind of system is playing out on the Internet. Many middle castes are anxious to move up the ladder. No one can become a Brahmin but the Kshatriya space is open so many communities can claim they are Kshatriyas -- that is happening all over north India. And it's amazing how they are doing it by creating their own digital mythologies through songs and reels."- Anurag Minus Verma, author, The Great Indian Brain Rot, talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from the profitable conspiracy theory industry that grew around the Sushant Singh Rathod episode, the weird seduction of cringe content and Puneet Superstar to Emraanism, the ineffable charm of Rakhi Sawant, influencers and mental health, and his own enduring interest in "misfits, lovers and losers".  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Irony, 'influenza', and Internet mythology in contemporary India

"In my father's view, the making of a filmmaker wasn't just about teaching the art, craft, and science [of filmmaking], but also about allowing the filmmaker to find their own unique voice and have the confidence to be their authentic self." - Radha Chadha, author, The Maker of Filmmakers talks to Manjula Narayan about Jagat Murari, who played a key role in the emergence of the FTII, the conflicts that effected the DNA of the institution, Indian New Wave cinema of the 1970s, the tussles between proponents of arthouse and commercial films, and the many debates about the kind of films that India needed to make in the post-independence period.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jagat Murari & the FTII: art, argument and institution building in young India

"What I wanted to say about the global dimension of caste was to look at it from the subjectivity of its victim. So Dalit as a subject takes a central place in this text, and this Dalit subjectivity travels to nearly 15 countries with us [the diaspora]. These constituents are similar but the geographical,political and local [elements] that interact with it give a new dimension to caste. Though it is a global story, it is also a very particularly localised form of caste that we see operating in different parts of the world. So, there's no blanket statement that caste the way it operates in India operates the same way in Trinidad, US, UK... Every situation is different." - Suraj Milind Yengde, author, Caste; A Global Story talks to Manjula Narayan about Dalit activism abroad, how the first celebration of Ambedkar Jayanti in the US was held at the historically Black college of Howard, the Punjabi Buddhists of UK, the idea of 'Brahmin by boat' among Indians in the Caribbean, the othering of Dalits within Indian organisations even at elite universities in the US, the triple diasporas of Fijian Dalits, and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the multi-storeyed tower with no staircase and no entrance

"Some call them ghosts but I look at them more as energies that coexist with us. In many ways, like the Buddhist and other Indian philosophies say, we are on a continuum of Time and many souls can go back and forth, in some sense. While you never really get used to it (ghosts and supernatural elements), you get used to the fact that not everything is ordinary. I have very acute hearing and maybe that's why I am able to hear a frequency that's somewhat different from everyone else. It's more animal-like, perhaps. Places absorb energies at different points and then it's a question of how do you deal with it? Do you deal with it by getting an exorcist and thinking this is not right or do you deal with it by thinking that they are there and we are here and we all coexist and it's okay - that's a liberal sensibility. We may not understand it as we don't understand other dimensions but it's not that they don't exist because we can't scientifically prove it. You can make much drama or you can accept it and say we don't know everything about the way the world works, which we don't." - Sanjoy K Roy, author, There's a Ghost in my Room; Living with the Supernatural talks to Manjula Narayan about encountering disembodied spirits and ectoplasm and experiencing ESP and paranormal activity in places as far apart as Spain, Delhi, Jerusalem and New York.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Things that go bump...

"We travel on the river but the real traveller is the river, and to understand it one has to make a substantial effort" - Sanjoy Hazarika, author, River Traveller; Journeys on the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal talks to Manjula Narayan about his earliest memory of seeing dolphins dance in the river in Guwahati, following the great stream through Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Bangladesh and the people he met along the way, the Chinese government's plans to build the massive Medog dam that will destroy Tibet's permafrost and its ecological wonders and have a devastating effect on the whole stretch right down to the Bay of Bengal, being chased by pirates, the Ahom kings and their search for the perfect place to grow wet rice, the need for a migration law in South Asia, and the boat clinics that treat people living on the chars of the Brahmaputra  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Going with the mighty flow

"I wanted to use fraud as a way to look at our society today. We have a fraud underworld industry that employs multitudes. If you have such a large number of people who will readily go over to the ethically grey zone -- they join to help family and then they find there's no coming back -- they are an incredible asset not just for someone running a scam in India but anyone anywhere in the world who is trying to target any demographic. The story of fraud is the story of globalisation and to my mind, more vice versa. It's a workforce that has also come to the attention of these very sophisticated transnational scam cartels, proper cyber crime mafias from China. They can see that people can be very easily lured into migrating to some of the scam cities being set up in South East Asia where there is very little regulation and the political class is complicit. Those who are lured, some younger than 20, are kept in closed compounds and they could lose their lives if they refuse to scam. In India, decades of inequality has pushed some people to the point where they feel they have nothing to lose. It is a matter of survival. The human trafficking part of this is grisly and the truth is it's continuing at a very large scale."- Snigdha Poonam, author, Scamlands; Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud that Preys on the World talks to Manjula Narayan about the scam ecosystem powered by a transnational workforce from low income countries that's leaving a trail of devastation from Delhi to Manchester, Texas and Melbourne.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fraud, fear and loathing from Jamtara to Sihanoukville

"I have my own history. I was evicted from Kashmir like many thousands of others. But when I went to Bastar and when I looked at other conflicts and what it was doing to other people, my own misery faded in comparison; because even in the worst of my situation, I had not touched the kind of pain and marginalisation I touched while travelling in the hinterland of India"- Rahul Pandita, author, Our Friends In Good Houses, talks to Manjula Narayan about drawing from his journalistic work in his first novel, points of similarity with Neel, the book's protagonist, the vibrance of his female characters including the Maoist guerilla Gurupriya, who stays with the reader long after the book is put away, and how, besides being a study of one man's search for home, this is also a snapshot of contemporary India with its great dreams and unfulfilled yearnings.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ache of a phantom limb

"In India, we don't use the word 'cult' but the photo of a godman hangs in every other home and it's all placed under the umbrella of culture. Cults go after the most vulnerable, those who are not thinking with their rational mind. That's exactly what happened with my parents. When they saw death, they gravitated towards what gave them most certainty. The majority of people going to such gurus are going for something related to their health; they are going in the hope of getting better. It could be related to disease, addiction or poverty. When you don't get answers from anywhere, you go to someone who gives answers as the guru did in my parents' case. People won't get healed but they are hooked by the continuous promise that if they sustain on this path, things will change.  When you become part of a cult, there is manipulation, fear and guilt. In my case, everything got attached to my mother's wellbeing; that if you don't follow the rules, she will lose her life. You start getting manipulated because you don't want her to die. I see my parents as victims too. Within the cult, you are only allowed to do certain things like watch the guru's sermons or listen to his mantras. After a while, from disuse, your brain starts to atrophy and you lose critical thinking because you are not allowed to question anything, These cults may be born from any religion; the thing is they distort the teachings of that religion to suit their own narrative. This is possibly the first book by an Indian about being influenced by a cult. I'm trying to create awareness so people can spot when this happens. You need mental health professionals to deprogram victims because indoctrination changes your brain wiring. There has to be a larger systemic change with the creation of proper programmes so victims can be led back into their lives."- Priyamvada Mehra, author, The Cost of a Promised Afterlife, talks about how her family was drawn into the fold of godman Rampal after her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour, the blind belief that led to the deterioration of her condition, the proliferation of religious charlatans who prey on those who have lost hope, and the mental abuse that being part of a cult entails  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grip of a godman

"Life is uncertain, which many of us tend to forget, and there are many things we can't explain; for those things that are inexplicable, we have stories. I was born into conflict, and growing up in Shillong in the 1990s, literature was a lifeline. It allowed us to see that, whatever the past we had inherited, there were other possibilities. Literature gives clarity to the messy parts of life, even if it doesn't have all the answers. Stories tell us to not let life wear us down. A lot of the creative nuances of the storytelling from the northeast come from the oral context, things that are not readily available in print. It influences style and gives the sense that the narrator is talking to you, the reader. Oral traditions have a way, especially with storytelling, of not being fixed, of being fluid. They can move from context to context and generate a new meaning from each of these contexts. This is because they take the reader into account in terms of delivery and register. In the stories from the northeast, orality and print play off each other and what emerges is a hybridised writing where you have both traditions feeding into the new writing. I wanted to represent diverse perspectives; so representation was one of the things that drove me to these stories."  - Jobeth Ann Warjri, editor, The Greatest Stories from the Northeast Ever Told, talks to me about the black humour of people from conflict zones, the rich oral traditions of storytelling being threatened by globalisation, and the task of putting together a volume of stories from an area as diverse as the northeast of India,  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stories from the Seven Sisters+1

"I was picked to cover Punjab in 1984 and that's how my journey began. After that, I was sucked into the lives of people living with everyday violence. For me, it was about being a storyteller and about the sociology and the psychology of violence and why it had taken root in the different conflict zones that I've mapped. I'm talking about conflicts that are still relevant. I've tried to trace them from where they started, how they started, and why it's still so easy, four decades later, to stoke the embers. What makes young men turn their bodies into missiles? This has kept me going for 41 years. I've never been pulled by the force of religion. I don't question other people's faith but I've seen religion play a part in fuelling violence. I've never wanted my face to be my calling card. So, except for two years when I worked with TV, I've always been a print journalist. I enjoy the anonymity of print. All I've ever tried to do is be an archive. This book is part of that archive. Along the way, I've learnt it isn't just conflict which is murky; politics makes it murkier." - Harinder Baweja, senior journalist and author, 'They Will Shoot You, Madam' talks to Manjula Narayan about the conflicts she's covered including Punjab, Kashmir, the Mumbai attacks and Afghanistan, the people she's encountered from Chhota Rajan and KPS Gill to Yasin Malik, and about the fascinating and still unknown backstories that set her book apart.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the record

"I love travelling and I was sad to leave my dogs all the time. I had to find a way of travelling with them so Indian Railways came into the picture. Our first journey was from Nizamuddin in Delhi to Madgaon in Goa and the dogs were really well behaved. They really took to it. Tigress fell in love with the pantry! Since then we've done over 75 train journeys across India and by the end of it there was me and my husband and son and three dogs! When you travel with your dogs, you have to chart your own course, make your own map and do it at your own pace and you can really do that in India on the railways. Also, Indies are so much fun and so intelligent, I really hope more people rescue and adopt them. We live in a very hypocritical society. If a pandit says feed a dog or a cow to get something, only then will people do it because it means they will gain somehow! Otherwise, we don't care about anything beyond our own unit; we don't care about the immediate surroundings, the trees, the garbage... These animals too are invisible to most people and many view them as a nuisance. To change this we have to raise kind kids. I hope this book will change the way people view Indian dogs. I wanted to write a very positive, very funny book about them." - Divya Dugar, author, Chaos in a Coupe talks to Manjula Narayan about the great joys of rattling around the country with her family, the magic of Indian railways and slow travel, and the unconditional love of canine companions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A desi love story: adventures with Indies

"Humans don't really know what we are doing. Mostly, we are blundering along. A lot of animals that were once looked upon favourably and bred - like the pigeon for sending messages - are now considered as pests. It is really because of human intervention that many of these animals and birds have become abundant"- Deepa Padmanaban, author, Invisible Housemates, talks to Manjula Narayan about familiar creatures found in and around our homes like geckos, rats and ants, stuffing her book with amazing factoids about everything from incest-averseness among cockroaches to how India once exported rhesus macaques for scientific research, and how the elimination of sparrows in China was one of the factors that led to the Great Famine  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of birds, bees and educated fleas

"As a child I lived in a hostel away from my parents and I was always scared so my parents told me to recite the Hanuman Chalisa. That's how the text entered my life. Recently,  I met a delegation from Trinidad and Tobago who said that the one thing they desperately needed was a singable translation of Indian spiritual texts as they can no longer read the original Awadhi or Hindi. So then I decided to do a translation that was not only literary but could also be sung with music. The Hanuman Chalisa teaches us ultimate humility; to approach everything with the notion that you do not know anything. Everytime I read it, it has a fresh angle. That's the beauty of Tulsidas' work. It's a tool for mindfulness and focus and it's also a text of diplomacy. It is amazingly condensed and layered and I'd like people to explore it not only as a spiritual text but also as an introduction to Indian sutra traditions."- Abhay K, poet, diplomat, translator of The Hanuman Chalisa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hymn to Hanuman

"When we write about music history, we are mostly talking about artists. There are also fewer biographies, autobiographies and memoirs by instrumentalists. But can the instrument itself become the protagonist to tell us our story? This has been one of my concerns as a practitioner. The ghatam is present in music across the country. It is an instrument with personality and has a central role in folk music. But, in classical music, it takes a back seat. My quest was to foreground a lot of things that are not spoken about in writing about music. This is an attempt to make visible things that are not visible to readers and listeners. These microstories would be good for people to know. This book also comes from a strong conviction that women need to write their own stories; otherwise they don't get written. Difficult things come back to you while writing a memoir but you also make many beautiful discoveries on the way. For me, my ghatam embodies everything that has gone before. My entire life is held in the pot now; it holds my singing as well. All the things I used to express a singer, I now express on the matka," says Sumana Chandrashekar, author, Song of the Clay Pot; My Journey With the Ghatam, Here, she talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from her relationships with her guru Sukanya Ramgopal, her guru's guru Vikku Vinayakram, and master ghatam maker Meenakshi Amma to how appearance plays a big role in the image of a performing artist, misogyny in Carnatic music circles, and the effect of unplanned urbanisation on instrument making. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following her own beat

In this podcast, National Books Editor Manjula Narayan tells you about books, authors and their journeys. This is a Hindustan Times production, brought to you by HT Smartcast

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Books and Authors

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