Books and Authors

Updated: 11 Jan 2024 • 236 episodes
books-and-authors.simplecast.com

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

Show episodes

11 Jan 2024 • EN

Keepers of the sacred fire

"The community of corpse burners or Doms take pride in their ability to give moksh but it's also a way of justifying their place in a society that otherwise shuns them, humiliates them and treats them as untouchables. They believe they have religious capital. But at the end of the day, there are no privileged caste peo

53 min
00:00
53:43
No file found

I keep thinking of all the other writers who also have these sorts of protagonists. The cops of Karen Slaughter, Ian Rankin and Peter James are not exactly happy guys who are at peace with the world; their relationships are in shambles; they are eccentric. It's probably like taking the mad genius idea and remoulding it

40 min
00:00
40:33
No file found
15 Dec 2023 • EN

The good poets society

"Poetry is not instant coffee; that is undrinkable. What is slow brewed coffee or a tea ceremony? Everything is slow, which means you can appreciate the nuances of the sounds, the cadence of the language, the content of the poems. The good young poets and the good older poets are not very dissimilar. That's because the

63 min
00:00
01:03:16
No file found

"Within Rajasthan's Raika culture, camels are raised in a system that's cruelty free - the calves are not separated from their mothers, camels walk around and choose their own diets and have a close relationship with humans. It's an alternative model of livestock and food production that has great value. The Raika demo

54 min
00:00
54:13
No file found

"Nehru and Ambedkar represented two very different visions of the way Buddhism could be imagined. Buddhism is a full-fledged revolution for Ambedkar and Nehru's government was not comfortable with that sort of vision of Buddhism. [Similarly] there is a fracture between the Ambedkarite vision of Buddhism and SN Goenka's

60 min
00:00
01:00:32
No file found

"In our family, whenever anyone goes out, they don't ask him, 'What did you see?' The first question is 'What did you eat?' So, food is paramount. In my childhood, if ever I wanted to have good food at home, I'd ask my father for it. Funnily enough, it was the men in the family who took on that role. My father is a ver

48 min
00:00
48:48
No file found