Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 19

M.V. Ramana on the Future of Nuclear Energy in India – Part 2 of 2

      The most disturbing sections of M.V. Ramana’s  Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India are those that relate to safety. Ramana describes two incidents that came fearsomely close to disaster. One occurred at the Narora reactor in Rajasthan on March 31 1993: ‘Early that morning, two blades of the turbine of [...]

M.V.Ramana on the Future of Nuclear Energy in India – Part 1 of 2

  On December 3, 2011 I wrote, in a post on this site: ‘I met M.V. Ramana in 1998 when I was writing Countdown, my essay on the nuclear situation in the Indian subcontinent. He was one of the most knowledgeable of the many experts I sought out (he has a PhD in physics from [...]

Letter from a composer – with a theme for ‘Sea of Poppies’

    Received on Oct 4, 2012   Dear Mr. Ghosh, I have been an admirer of your work, ever since I read The Circle of Reason. The Ibis Saga has deeply moved me not just as a reader, but also as an amateur composer. The yet to complete trilogy inspired me to create a [...]

Murali Ranganathan does it again – an amazing new find!

  Visitors to this site will know that I have corresponded with Murali Ranganathan before. In an earlier post I had this to say about him: Murali Ranganathan is among the most interesting of the many people who have come into my life through book releases and readings. I met him at the Mumbai release [...]

Links to ‘Imagining Europe’ in Amsterdam

  Links to the European Cultural Foundation’s ‘Imagining Europe’ in Amsterdam, including my talk and appearance on the Dutch TV show ‘Buitenhof’:   http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/news... http://www.facebook.com/pages/Europea... http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?art... http://soundcloud.com/ecf_sounds/imag... http://www.viceversaonline.nl/events/... http://www.partyearth.com/amsterdam/s... Buitenhof http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaLA-y... http://www.ecflabs.org/resource/narra... http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/site...      

To my Romanian readers

    Today the Romanian edition of River of Smoke is to be released in Bucharest. I had hoped to be there for the occasion but sadly it was not to be. Romania is not yet a part of the Schengen area, so Indians need visas to enter the country. In August this year I [...]

Synchronicities in Amsterdam

    It was nice to be back last week in Amsterdam’s  Ambassade Hotel,         twenty years after my wife and I first stayed there .               with our daughter, who was then less than a year old.                 [...]

India in Prague

      Martin Hribek     teaches Bengali at the Faculty of Arts in Charles University in Prague. Martin has spent a total of three years in Kolkata, living at various times, in Shibpur, Jodhpur Park and New Alipore.     He speaks fluent Bengla and even uses the right words for things that [...]

Angelo Ripellino’s ‘Magic Prague’

      ‘Ancient folio of stone parchments,     city-book in whose pages there is                       “still so much to be read, to dream, to understand”,   city of three peoples (Czechs, Germans and Jews)                   [...]

When The Rivers Run Dry

    When The Rivers Run Dry is about water, especially fresh water – where it comes from, how it flows and what happens to it. The news is not good, but it needs to be listened to, especially in Asia – and nowhere more so than in the Indian subcontinent, which may be heading [...]