Amitav Ghosh's Blog, page 2

Ben Ehrenreich’s ‘Desert Notebooks’

It’s been a long time since I read anything as exciting and illuminating as Ben Ehrenreich’s superb new book, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2020). Very few writers have addressed the current planetary crisis as powerfully and insightfully. Ehrenreich’s book is extraordinary as much for the rigor of […]

‘A Burning’ by Megha Majumdar

Megha Mazumdar’s soon-to-be published A Burning is the best debut novel I have come across in a long time. In telling the story of a young Muslim girl whose life is undone by a single social media post, it creates a kaleidoscope of contemporary urban India, with its internet-driven hysteria, religious fanaticism, rampant corruption, poisoned […]

Letter from an 11th grader

Sir, this is to let you know that as a reader and a lover of arts, I am so glad to have read this piece of work by you. ‘The ghat of the only world’ is a part of my 11th grade English curriculum, and in my few years as a student, I have never […]

Bathsheba Demuth’s ‘Floating Coast’

In 2018, I heard Bathsheba Demuth deliver what is possibly the best talk I have ever listened to. It was on whales and the indigenous peoples of Beringia (the region around the Bering Sea).             Demuth has now written a book: Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. Having read an advance copy […]

Letter from a Reader

Dear Sir,A decade and a half back, my elder brother (a voracious reader) gave me (an occasional reader, at best) The Hungry Tide and told me in an offhand way, “ney, pore dekhte parish“. He had an impish smile on his face and a glint in his eye. I started reading the book somewhat reluctantly. At that time, […]

Sugata Ray’s ‘Climate Change and the Art of Devotion’

Over the last couple of decades a deepening awareness of human dependence on climatic stability has created a surge of interest among historians in earlier eras of climatic disruption. Much of this interest has been focused on the so-called Little Ice Age that peaked in the 17th and early 18th centuries. This fascinating, and rapidly […]

Jnanpith Address

For me, as for anyone who has grown up within an Indian literary milieu, the Jnanpith is an award unto itself, possibly because it recognizes something that goes beyond literary achievement: it acknowledges also the trust and affection that sometimes arises between writers and communities of readers. This bond – which one might almost describe […]

David Wallace-Wells, ‘The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming’.

David Wallace-Wells’ 2018 article The Uninhabitable Earth became a sensation almost as soon as it appeared, quickly becoming the most-read piece ever to appear in New York magazine. Since then it has been read by millions more, giving the lie to the belief that climate change is of negligible interest to the lay reader. But […]

Ashok Alexander’s ‘A Stranger Truth’

    In 2003 Ashok Alexander left a top job at McKinsey & Co. and took on the task of setting up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s India AIDS Initiative. Under Ashok’s stewardship the Initiative soon became the world’s largest privately sponsored HIV prevention program; it is credited with having played an important part […]

‘Swerving to Solitude’

Nice to receive a copy of the poet Keki Daruwalla’s new novel, ‘Swerving to Solitude: letters to Mama.’ It’s an interesting and idiosyncratic meditation on history with some evocative scenes of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Forthcoming, Simon and Schuster India.