I’ve spent the last few weeks interacting with a lot of people for work. And, strangely, that seems to help me interact with people outside of work as well. Which makes me wonder, is that all it takes to cure the social anxiety epidemic we keep hearing about?

I gotta say, I’m not socially anxious, but I usually assume there is no reason to talk to people, and either do my own thing, or eavesdrop on other people. But having lots of reasons to talk to people means I carry that mindset with me all day, all week, and I make small talk with literally everyone around me, including people I’d usually just nod at and move on.

And, not writing means I’m not so much in my own head. It only hits me now how incredibly isolating it is to write — people around me have no idea what I’m working on, and it’ll take me too long to explain, and they might not even be that interested, and I don’t even want to talk about my writing that much, it feels so self-indulgent. So that used to make me much less talkative. And that got into a vicious cycle.

As I unravel the mysteries of social interaction and how it affects our psychology, here’s some great links for you this week.

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Onto our links!

Revolutionaries releases Sep 11 on Prime

The TV show based on Sanjeev Sanyal’s book Revolutionaries is releasing on Prime on September 11. It seems to be covering the 1910-1920 era of the revolutionary movement, given the main characters seem to be playing Sachin Sanyal, Rashbehari Bose, General Dyer, and Bagha Jatin.

Revolutionaries was a breakneck book that tried to contain all of the revolutionary movement in 250 pages, so you need multiple seasons to cover it all. This series seems to cover some of the most exciting parts of the book (and the history).

I’m excited to watch it, but I will take some time to complain about the trailer. It doesn’t quite seem to set a sense of time or place other than ‘freedom movement’, I suppose. Granted, most people don’t know all the stories this will cover, but tell us what happens. Give us an idea of who is who and how they differ from each other. I understand this era seems to be highly covered in Bengali literature, which have been made into a lot of movies, and everyone just follows that same aesthetic… but it would be nice if people tried something different. Oh well, who am I to complain? I’m just glad I’m getting to watch this at all.

Here’s my review of the book Revolutionaries in Swarajya.

A Medieval Baby named ‘Diot Coke’

A British archivist researching medieval names stumbled on a baby in 14th Century Yorkshire named Diot Coke.

Coca-cola was still 5 centuries away, much less the diet version of anything, so whence from did that name come?

Turns out, Diot is short for Dionysia, which would over time evolve into Denise. And Coke was how they wrote Cook back in that day. We don’t know what happened to Ms. Diot Coke, but it seems like Denise Cook is quite a popular name today.

8th Century Mayan Astronomer’s Office Whiteboard

There was a bustling Mayan city named Xultun between 250CE and 900CE, in present-day Guatemala. The Mayans had a very advanced calendar, to calculate which they needed to do some very complex mathematical calculation.

Xultun was excavated in 1915 for the first time. In 2010, they found a set of offices in the site that dated to about 780 CE, which seems to have been where the folks who made the calendar did their work. And on one of the walls, there found a preserved calculation that uses the Mayan 20-day month, the 260-day year, the 360-day year, and the orbital period of Mars to calculate the LCM between the 365-day year and the orbital period of Venus.

I should really read more and try to figure out what the formula was trying to do, but the interesting part is this formula is quoted with “So says Sak Tahn Waax”, which seems to be one of the astronomers who worked there.

His name translates into ‘white-chested fox’. He seems to be the only named Mayan astronomer we know of.

First Indian PhD at Harvard

Writer unearthed this short piece in the New York Times from sometime in the early 1900s:

It mentions that Subburama Swaminathan of Madras became the first Indian PhD at Harvard. I googled for “Subbarama Swaminathan Harvard”, and once Google stopped autosuggesting “Subramanian Swamy Harvard”, it turns out… this was the father of noted danseuse Mrinalini Sarabhai and noted INA soldier Captain Lakshmi Sehgal (and the husband of noted freedom activist Ammu Swaminathan). Imagine being the first Indian at Harvard, finishing your Law PhD in SIX MONTHS, and still being the least well-known person in your family today.

Mrinalini Sarabhai writes about this part of his life in her book. The whole thing is worth a read, he came from horrible poverty, and got by his education tutoring wealthy kids and skipping meals.

What year was Mr. Swaminathan at Harvard? I’m not able to find the NYT piece to date it. But Ms. Sarabhai says Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, congratulated his brother personally… and Lord Curzon’s tenure was 1899-1905 (after which he went back to London, had an extramarital affair with a romance novelist and cavorted with her on the Amalfi coast, which saved him from being assassinated by Savarkar’s merry band of revolutionaries). Also, in 1906, he lost all his money in the Arbuthnot bank crash, so this has to have been at least a few years before then.

Anyway, he seems to have led a decent-enough life as a high-profile lawyer, his kids grew up to be exponents in dance (Mrinalini Sarabhai), war (Capt. Lakshmi Sehgal who was part of Subhash Bose’s INA in the Rani of Jhansi regiment), and law (Govind Swaminathan was Advocate-General of TN), and all his grandkids seem to be communists, in the style of well-off people in post-independence India. That’s how it goes.

Artifact: “I went to Rome, and all I got for you was this stylus” stylus

In 2013, when the London office of Bloomberg was being constructed, they unearthed a set of 2000-year-old Roman-style metal styluses. These would be used to wax-covered wood. These date back to about 70 AD.

Most of these seem locally made, but one seemed to have been a souvenir from Rome. It is inscribed, and the inscription says:

‘I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift
with a sharp point that you may remember me.
I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able (to give)
as generously as the way is long (and) as my purse is empty.’

Basically saying “I went all the way to Rome, and all I got for you was this cheap stylus.”

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It’s been a crazy week on social media, what with Jason Arday’s sudden death and that woman killing her kids while psychotic. I’ve personally been thinking a lot about the role of parenting in ensuring children are well-adjusted and learn well. There’s a lot I could write about, but somehow, I feel less and less like the person who can write social media crap explainers. I’m also yet to watch the Operation Sindoor declassified documentary, so maybe I’ll have a take on that next week.

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Either way, history is forever, and there is plenty of stuff from a long time ago to keep us intrigued. Onto our links!

The Cochin King Who Outlasted Hyder and Tipu

In my posts that covered Vikram Sampath’s book about Tipu Sultan, I talk about the horrors in Malabar inflicted by the father-son duo, including the Nair Genocide.

In this excellent post, the author talks goes into how Shaktan Thampuran, the ruler of Cochin, with no big army to speak of, under pressure from the English, the Dutch, and Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, somehow persisted through guile and cunning, and preserved his kingdom.

With his diplomacy, he managed to convince the irregular forces of Hyder Ali to not destroy the Vadakkunathan Temple. But when Tipu Sultan went to war against Travancore, he set fire to the Guruvayur Temple (which was magically extinguished by a miraculous downpour), and occupied Thrissur for a month during which they slaughtered cows and threw them into wells and into the Vadakkunathan temple. Many died in hunger and famine that followed.

As the Travancore Army beat back Tipu Sultan, he was being attacked by the English in Mysore, so he ran back to save his capital. Shaktan Thampuran declared that he would no longer pay tribute to Mysore, seeing what the troops of Tipu Sultan had wrought onto his people and his temples.

Tipu Sultan was killed soon after, but the temples still stand, and the Thrissur Pooram is conducted with much grandeur year after year.

Alpha School Makes Kids Worse At Math Somehow

I’d written a post summarizing all that we know about Alpha School, the school that ‘has no teachers’ and claims to compress all learning into two hours a day, and still somehow have kids learning 2.5x faster — everything makes it sound like a stupid person’s idea of a smart kids school.

Now they started ‘Unbound Academy’, which is a chain of charter schools in Arizona that follow the Alpha School model. Alpha School has a laundry list of admission criteria which selects for their ideal kind of student — able-bodied, neurotypical and well-behaved to start with (and they kick him out if he stops being as ideal), but with Unbound Academy, they can’t filter the kids for admission as much, and they can’t kick kids out as easily.

The numbers are in, and it seems like Alpha School got the kids going from 40% being at grade level for reading and 34% in math, to 28% at grade level for reading and 10% for math. Which is horrifying.

The thing that bothers me so much is, if you’re filtering kids for being able-bodied, well-behaved and neurotypical, and you pay six-figure salaries to credentialed teachers with a 1:5 student-teacher ratio, you can quite literally teach your way into the kids being several grade levels ahead. A lot of schools with tracking have the smartest tier of kids being taught 6-7-8 curriculum right in 6th grade, leaving them at least two grade levels ahead, and not all of those kids even are well-behaved or neurotypical.

This post paints a full picture of how egregious this is.

Mark Zuckerberg’s “Castle”

In the same month as closing down a school he’d been running near the Meta campus, Mark Zuckerberg has bought Strancally Castle in Ireland.

My castle-crazy husband took one look at that castle and said “It’s not a castle, it’s a big stone house”.

Apparently, it’s only a ‘castle’ if it’s a private residence that has been fortified and armed to withstand enemy attacks and sieges. That has not been the case for Strancally for a while.

The original Strancally Castle was indeed built as a castle, during the Anglo-Norman invasions of Ireland, by a river, over a large rock. But apparently, the lower levels were used as a horrific prison, with the bodies of tortured prisoners being cast into the waters. Apparently it was so horrific that the government ordered the castle to be blown up with gunpowder in the late 1500s.

The present structure was built for an MP in 1830. I don’t think it has been built with fortifications, and it has only been used as a private residence.

Big stone houses are pretty cool TBH, but castles with fortifications are cooler.

Zapote or Mexican Sapota

Quiz Question - Connect chewing gum and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

My family is all fruitaholics. To the extent that my mom is underwhelmed by everything American except the farmers markets in California. So, I’d been really missing several fruits, especially sapota (We had a sapota tree at home).

Imagine my surprise when I was looking through archives of Indian slaves in Acapulco, and found that a lot of fruit we take for granted as Indian are actually from Mexico! And sapota/chikoo is one of them!

Yet, I hadn’t managed to find sapota in any of the Latin markets I occasionally check (they had jackfruit, though). But this past week, I found a vendor selling them in a Home Depot parking lot, of all places. Each fruit was gigantic, and a princely $10. I got it anyway.

The one I got was what is called a Mamey Zapote. It tastes like a regular sapota, maybe even sweeter, but the texture is more like an avocado. Even the seeds were like avocado seeds, but they had the characteristic white line of sapota seeds. There are other varieties, including Black Zapote and the small brown one we are more accustomed to in India.

Maybe this one was not ripe enough, but it kept drying up my mouth, so I made it into a very thick smoothie. Given those in India treat avocado like a fruit and put it in smoothies instead of making guacamole, they should try growing this variety of sapota instead.

More interesting sapota facts - the bark of the tree is where chicle comes from — the precursor to chewing gum.

Even more interesting — the first person to import sapotas into India was Sir Dinshaw Manekji Petit, who also founded the first textile mills in India (though honestly I can’t seem to find a source for this). Sir Petit’s granddaughter was Rattanbai Petit became — you got it — Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s wife.

Artifact — 4000-year-old Math Mistakes

There are tons of tablets from Babylon that show their math, apparently — clay tablets survive pretty well. And one of them is a student messing up his calculation of the area of a triangle. This tablet was found in Kish in present-day Iraq, and is at the Ashmolean museum at Oxford.

The Babylonians used the sexagesimal system, and wrote in cuneiform. This student was given the base and height of a triangle and asked to calculate its area. And like any of us who has been in a hurry to get to the next problem, he apparently wrote one sexagesimal place wrong in his steps, and ended up with the wrong answer.

Apparently there’s a whole set of these tablets that paint a picture of who was working on these math problems and what the curriculum was. Kids in Babylon and Sumer were sent to scribal schools where they learned writing, literature and math. There are tablets with times tables written on them, with names and dates. They seem to have found multiple tablets with the same name and through following the dates, they have figured out the curriculum these kids studied.

So I’m assuming the kids working on these tablets were between 5 and 12-15, as has been the case in Ancient Rome as well as India. And they were doing roughly a similar curriculum to what we have today. I wonder if they had their own version of the Pythagoras theorem, given they seem to have been working with right triangles?

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It’s back to school week! We’ve been taking in the last few sighs of summer break, and shopping the back-to-school sales. It seems like lunch box styles in America are tending towards Indian lunch carrier styles - it’s a perfect design to have stainless steel tiered stackable boxes that snap together to be leakproof.

I’m just marveling at the wide variety of water bottles and travel mugs available these days. The fanciest thing there was when I was growing up was this one:

The strap was somehow always wet, and the cap chain had a flavor to it, but the water always quenched your thirst so well. Plus, in a fight, you could swing it around by the strap like a weapon and it could break teeth. And maybe even some skulls.

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Onto our links!

The Egg Rush during the Gold Rush

I spent some time during the summer in the Gold Rush sites around Sacramento. I was quite excited to explore old gold mines and ghost towns as my husband rolled his eyes, because these had been the subject of nearly every field trip he took in school. We panned for gold and gems in the American River, and netted quite a bit of Fool’s Gold, clear quartz (which is the most common mineral in the world, apparently), and many hues of jasper. The most precious thing I found were bits of carnelian, but since it’s not the bronze age, it’s not very valuable. We have shinier things now.

But back in the 1850s, another round thing was very valuable — eggs!

I started reading up on the Gold Rush and found this really cool article in the Smithsonian about the Egg Wars.

The population of San Francisco exploded in the 1850s thanks to the Gold Rush, and existing supply chains couldn’t keep pace with the demand for food. If you think eggs are expensive today at $11 a dozen, they were $1 per egg back then, which is about $30 in today’s money.

Entrepreneurs began going to the Farallon Islands nearby and getting seabird eggs. Now, these are treacherous rocky islands with sheer graninte cliffs, covered in fog for most of the year, so this was a very daring venture. But it was extremely profitable. Soon, the Pacific Egg Company was established, and they began claiming exclusive rights over the Farallones.

But this was the Barbary Coast, where might was right. So for about 30 years, there were literal egg pirates, hijacking ships carrying eggs from the Farallones. Captains helming an armed crew went to the Farallones to collect eggs, only to find armed men from Pacific Egg shooting at them. They shot back. Many died, many went to prison.

Pacific Egg was mad enough that they lobbied the government for a monopoly. The government granted them the monopoly. They started doing monopoly things, like saying that lighthouses in the area shouldn’t use the foghorn because it spooked the birds. Remember, these islands are part of very foggy, treacherous waters. They started getting oil and blubber from sea lions, which involved leaving out cut-open corpses of sea lions as flies took them. Then finally they lobbied to ban lighthouse keepers from collecting eggs for personal consumption… which was crazy given they literally couldn’t eat much else over there. Finally the US Military kicked them out of the islands in 1881.

They might have fought that, but by that point, other people opened chicken hatcheries in Petaluma, and eggs became reasonably priced once again. And they used to break older eggs (which tasted so foul it took three months to get the taste out of one’s mouth) so that the seabirds would lay fresh eggs, so the population nosedived eventually, making it much less profitable.

The Farallones are now protected islands, but the population of the seabirds are still not back to pre-Gold Rush levels. Isn’t that crazy?

Buy this book - A Fate Worse Than Drowning by Sarah L. Hawthorn

Talking of lighthouses and lighthouse keepers, my friend Sarah’s much awaited book is out now! A Fate Worse Than Drowning is her debut novel that is a Gothic historical fantasy thriller set in a lighthouse on a desolate island off the coast of her native Halifax, Nova Scotia.

It’s really amazing how well-loved this book has been, with it being Barnes and Noble’s Editor’s Pick and undoubtedly more accolades coming its way, and I’m proud to say I’ve seen part of Sarah’s journey to get to here. She has worked (and continues to work) so hard and so consistently week after week, month after month, year after year, iterating on her process and finding ways to be her authentic writer self through all the curveballs life throws, and optimizing metrics she controls that help her persist through the uncertainty of the writerly life. It’s been great to struggle alongside Sarah and feel reassured that it’s okay to persist even if success doesn’t come along right away.

I’m very proud of Sarah’s success and wish many more come her way. Do buy the book, it’s great!

The Godforsaken Kennedys

I came across these two posts on the Substack about the Kennedys and…. wow.

The first:

Old Money Luxury

The Secrets of Ethel and Robert Kennedy's Marriage Are More Disturbing Than We Thought

Ethel Kennedy was three months pregnant with her eleventh child on the night her husband was shot in a kitchen pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles…

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25 days ago · 925 likes · 113 comments · Old Money Luxury

The second:

Old Money Luxury

The Secrets of Jackie and Aristotle Onassis' Marriage Are More Shocking Than You Think

By the time the photographers caught the bride walking out of the small white chapel on Skorpios on October 20, 1968, every bad thing about the marriage had already happened…

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2 months ago · 1781 likes · 229 comments · Old Money Luxury

Sure, the titles seem clickbaity, but OH IT DELIVERS.

Whenever I come across something set in postwar/cold war America, I immediately feel the need to write a whole book on that era through Indian eyes, and these articles definitely triggered that impulse.

I realize there’s something very unique about the famous people of that era - they come from backgrounds that have no good role models for success, so they lose everything just trying to hold on to it. If anything, the impulses of both Aristotle Onassis and all the Kennedys stem from a scarcity mindset, so that makes them sell their very soul to achieve success, and when they get there, they are surrounded by everything negative, and find their success unsustainable. Like, sure, they have enough to afford 11 kids, but they don’t actually enjoy parenting 11 kids, and resort to womanizing and abusing alcohol to cope, and the kids grow up to fill a ‘rap sheet disproportionate to their numbers’.

And knowing some baby boomers myself, I gotta say, the emotions felt weren’t unique! They were even broadly acceptable, I’d say! The Kennedys just had a lot more money to make things worse.

Marshmallows and Root Beer

On the lines of the West somehow taking good things in their culture and totally ruining them, we have Marshmallow and Root Beer.

I’ve only known marshmallows as a stretchy confection made from sugar and gelatin. But it turns out, the original sweet was made from the marshmallow root. The marshmallow plant is ornamental and the leaves and flowers are edible too. The root was used as a vegetable from ancient times, and it was also medicinal — it is full of mucilege and was used to soothe sore throats or ulcers anywhere in the alimentary canal.

This root was boiled to release all its mucilege, which was then whipped with sugar to make a fluffy confection - marshmallows.

I somehow found an Etsy seller selling marshmallow made the old way, and I gotta say, it tastes like Root. I understand why they wanted to ditch the original recipe and just go straight to corn syrup and gelatin, but it’s pretty sad that this here is a medicinal root native to Europe and it’s become a byword for a sugary sweet that has no medicinal value.

The story of root beer is similar — the ‘root’ is the root of the sassafras plant. The plant literally seems miraculous the way Tulsi is to Indians or the coca leaf is to Colombians. It’s used to cure meat, the leaves can be rubbed into a wound to heal it, and all the different parts can be used to treat coughs, fevers, urinary infections, acne, you name it. It hit me, maybe this is why cough syrups are flavored with the root beer flavor.

But then the FDA found that the sassafras root extract is carcinogenic in lab animals, so you can’t use it to commercially brew root beer anymore. So all we have now is sugar and artificial flavor.

Artifact: Goqing

This is a Chinese musical instrument on display at the Met. It’s a lotus leaf carved out of dark nephrite jade. It is used as a gong to announce visitors, as well as to announce a pause at the end of a musical performance. I tried to see if there’s a clip on Youtube or something about what struck jade sounds like, but all I find for ‘goqing’ seems to lead back to this artifact at the Met.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I really admire shaped/carved details on historical pieces I post on here, but if I see that same kind of detail in a piece I find in real life, I find it cheesy and tacky. If I came across a ceramic bowl with patterns of Mickey Mouse on it, I wouldn’t find it elegant or anything, and I’m sure neither would you. I wonder what makes the difference. Maybe it’s how much the art resonates with you personally? Our world is full of random art from ads and other things that are marketed to us that most of it doesn’t resonate anymore. Maybe that’s what it is.

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Then I had some extremely unexpected stress that triggered a whole bunch of other issues some of which scared me quite a bit. I went off of all the apps for a short while, because the pathological scrolling that I’d developed to deal with stress was making everything worse.

After just not doing anything for two weeks other than listening to audiobooks about and by comedians, I figured out the solution — I needed to limit how sedentary I was. The longer I sat down, the worse I felt. I’m not sure standing desks really change things.

Some amount of sedentary was non-negotiable, because of the nature of my work. But any chance I got, I have to be on my feet. I’ve to be out in the sun. I’ve to be out talking to people. All the things everyone says are good for you, but this time for real.

Which meant — I couldn’t write. I couldn’t even entertain the possibility of writing. No more sitting at my computer for hours, trying to figure out what word comes next. And definitely no editing! It took HOURS to get even the most basic editing done, and it had no end.

So, I’ve been not-writing for a little over a month. I’ve done the Monday Cup Of Links posts, but something’s gotten in the way of even that the past couple of weeks. I haven’t read through all the stories you guys sent over for the Prompta Prize. And I haven’t been able to do the final edit of my novel.

I’m figuring out how to write more, and sustainably. But while I do that, I’ve had a bunch of thoughts on all of this:

• I had really misunderstood what ‘rest’ means. I guess I’d never really seen anyone around me really rest for real. Everyone around me is always working, and the only ‘rest’ they take is to sit down and talk with friends, or take naps. I feel like that’s impossible for me to do unless my friends are my neighbors (and they are all busy too for whatever reason), so I don’t ‘relax’, ever. I do activities considered ‘relaxing’, like watching TV or reading. But my body isn’t actually at rest, even if I’m vegging out. And not putting your body in a state of calm is so bad for you.

• Procrastinating while vegging out is the worst - I think I’m relaxing, but I’m actually not. Procrastinating is really bad for health.

• Yoga is actually a superior form of exercise compared to literally everything else. Like, I’m not saying Yoga will develop muscles for you, but it seems to focus a lot on flexing your body, and then actually calming it down. I feel like most types of exercise, at least as commonly understood, don’t focus on calming your body down after. And there seems to be a lot of benefits that come from just the recovery. The breathing parts of the asanas seem key to this.

• All the discourse about protein, fat, carbs, exercise improving your mental health, salt, sugar, acid, fat….. all of that seems like such garbage when the rubber hits the road.

• There’s been so much happening in India, and I only check social media for a few minutes a day. This way, the only thing I get about the CJP protests are the memes. And, that seems sufficient. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from following news in real time in detail. Literally just read the newspaper the next day to get news devoid of rumors and speculation.

• Most people posting on any topic are not actually well-versed in what’s going on. If you try looking at your feed through the lens of ‘what new information am I getting from this post?’, you’ll quickly realize you’re not getting much. Previously when I’d see someone posting ‘Gen Z is done for’ or ‘The TFR is shot forever’, I used to have a small mental reaction to these. But not going on social media much makes you realize these people don’t have access to any info you’re not privy to, and you can safely ignore all these takes.

• Not all books are great. Most are garbage. But a book is like a complete thought, at the very least. Or following an idea to its logical conclusion to the author’s best ability. In comparison, internet posting feels very shoot-and-scoot. And we need to be able to sustain our attention enough to listen to a complete thought, or to follow an idea to its logical conclusion. The solution is better books, but discovery seems like a hard problem in this market of plenty.

• My interest in history can just be GONE if I spend time on other stuff. It still persists as a niggling feeling of curiosity, but without access to feeds that give me an idea of all the cool things happening in history or great people digging up stories from obscure books, that curiosity has very little to hang on to.

• Life is SO MUCH better if I’m not writing day-to-day, and SO MUCH WORSE long-term. I didn’t realize how much of my life centered around writing. I now have enough time to learn quilting, or take up day-long hikes, or reorganize my kitchen. Which are all nice, but I just feel like my head is full of incomplete thoughts now and I really need to write. Journaling doesn’t cut it enough. I need to sit down with my thoughts and organize them and tell a story, otherwise I don’t feel quite right.

I guess I feel the need to justify my continued focus on writing even if life’s so much better if I’m doing literally anything else. I suppose any normal person hearing about how hard it is for me to make time to write would say “Then don’t write, no one’s asking you to”. And it’s true, no one’s asking me to. I’m just inflicting my writing on all of you. And I actually did stop writing and everything in my life got better in every way.

So why would I go back to this? I don’t actually care about fame, and at its best, I doubt I’ll be getting paid a whole lot to write. I wish I could say stuff like “there are stories in me dying to get out”. Like, there are, but sometimes they’ll just stay happily in there as I walk through a forest of coast redwoods and sew clothes for my kid’s dolls.

I guess the only thing is I sometimes feel like I’m suppressing this part of myself, like when I don’t make an appointment to go to the Ghadar museum in San Francisco or avoid a trip to Angel Island because I know I’m going to come back from that and write for days.

And that feels big enough that I need to make more time to write anyway.

I was expecting this would be a very hot summer in the Bay area, but it has been nothing close to that and it is already mid-July. I just hope my words don’t bring upon us a searing August.

How are you enjoying the FIFA World Cup? I’m expecting an England vs France final. What do you think will happen?

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Onto our links!

Philly used to be a Swedish Colony!!

I came across this piece that said Sweden had colonies in America!

I know, I was shocked too, so I double and triple checked it, and turns out, it’s true! It was the shortest-lived and least-populated colony in America, but it existed for 17 years.

The British and the Dutch were all over the Northeast. Peter Minuit was the governor of New Netherlands who had purchased Manhattan. But he was abruptly dismissed in 1632, and wanted revenge. So he went to the Swedes and said “Look, you’re the only ones without a colony, so get in on the action. I’ll help”.

Though the Dutch claimed they owned all of Delaware river, they had only bought one side of it from the Lenape, and they weren’t even focused on it because they mostly cared about Manhattan. So the Swedes showed up and bought up land from Native groups, and built a fort. They tried doing it secretly, but like, the Dutch found out stat. Minuit knew the Dutch had no manpower to spare, and ignored the Dutch. The Dutch considered the Swedes to be squatting on their territory, but they just let it be.

Then Minuit drowned in the Caribbean, so the 25 Swedes under his command would have probably died in the woods. But the Natives helped them a lot, and the Swedes respected them for their comfort with nature.

The Swedish Government DGAF about New Sweden, so it had like 400 people tops, and they were mostly criminals unwillingly there to serve out their sentences. So when in 1655, Governor Stuyvesant of New Netherlands got mad and sent troops down to their excuse for a fort, and they all surrendered without a single bullet being fired. That was the end of Sweden’s attempts at colonialism.

The Swedes remained in this area, and were an important part of Philadelphia when it was established. They also brought the log cabin to America, which then went on to be an iconic part of Americana.

2000-year-old Thai gold rings with Brahmi lettering

The Thai government have excavated some 2000-year-old skeletons, as well as gold earrings, rings and other objects buried with them. One of the rings has writing on it in Brahmi, which can be read as ‘Pushyarakshita’. That would translate to ‘One who is protected by Pushya’, where Pushya is a star in the sky.

(Side note: I don’t quite understand the 27 Nakshatras. How is it said that you were born under this star or that? Why is it a certain star’s day today?’ I can look, but nyeh.)

I suppose this is not surprising, given that in Mauryan times, businessmen went everywhere, and Ashoka sent Buddhist missionaries far and wide.

Agatha Christie’s pet unsolved mystery

Agatha Christie seems to have been obsessed with the 1876 unsolved mystery of the death of Charles Bravo, and kept dropping references to it in many of her books. She even tried to investigate it herself.

How did Charles Bravo died, and why is it an unsolved mystery?

Charles Bravo lived at the Priory, Balham, with his wife, Florence, and her live-in companion, Jane Cox. On Tuesday 18 April 1876, the threesome sat down to dinner as usual – a meal of roast lamb, poached eggs and fish paste on toast. They all ate the same food. The women drank sherry and Charles had burgundy wine, as was his custom.

Later that evening, Charles fell ill with violent stomach cramps. He took to his bed and, despite the attentions of six doctors, including Sir William Gull, he passed away three days later.

Agatha Christie mentioned this mysterious death in at least three books — The Clocks, Elephants Can Remember, and Ordeal By Innocence.

And in 1968, she published a letter in The Sunday Times Magazine, saying that the doctor, Sir William Gull, had killed Charles.

According to Christie, Gully fell “violently” in love with Florence and became obsessed by her, even moving house repeatedly to remain close to her. Florence, on the other hand, decided that she wanted “a young and attractive husband”, and Gully was discarded.

Although he appeared to accept this, Christie believed he concealed his true feelings: “But I don’t think he ever did accept it.” Rather than moving away – which would have been understandable – he remained in “this humiliating position”. Christie further surmised that Gully might have had a hand in the death of Florence’s first husband, Alexander Ricardo, and that he had never relinquished hope of reclaiming her affections.

Christie also considered the possibility that Dr Gully had administered a prescription to Charles, which had caused his death, and that Jane may have acted as his agent. Describing him as the ‘perfect planner’ and ‘a person of great ability’, she maintained that he was capable of devising a way to remove his rival. She ended her letter with a verdict of her own: “The man who was never found out. But I’m quite sure he did it.”

I wonder if she kept cuttings of all the breathless coverage this mystery would have got in its time and had a Charlie Kelly style suspect board in her closet.

Maybe once I’m a famous author, people might dig out my Facebook posts speculating about the Aarushi murder.

Bees on marijuana (among other things)

Researchers at Southern Medical University in China have been researching bee expressions by giving them stimuli and then recording their reactions with slow-motion cameras. They claim that bees react differently to sweet stuff, like sticking their tongue out, vs unpleasant stuff, where they wipe their mouth and rub the gross stuff off their hands(?)

But are they expressions or reflexes? The researchers are still not sure.

They also altered the bees’ mental states with dopamine, which made them even more eager for sugar, and then cannabinoids that made them less inclined to seek out sugar, but they liked it more.

I watched this video they put out…. and it seems pretty clear to me what’s going on. The ‘tongue sticking out’ is the bee basically trying to get more as the researcher takes away the sugar water (or it’s over), and the ‘wiping face’ is literally them wiping the unpleasant taste away from their mouth.

But then, why are the researchers convinced they are facial expressions, like how we’d smile or frown? I don’t know!

Artifact: Burmese Crocodile-Zither

This is a Mi-Gyaun, a Burmese musical instrument that’s shaped like a crocodile. Mi-Gyaun literally seems to mean crocodile. Apparently the amphibious nature of crocodiles makes the Mon people of Burma revere it, and this instrument is supposed to mimic the mating call of crocodiles.

This instrument seems to have inspired other similar zithers in Cambodia and Thailand, which don’t keep the crocodile shape, but have names that mean ‘crocodile’, like chakhe in Thai and krapeu in Khmer.

This specific instrument that is on display at The Met Museum seems to have been part of gifts presented by a contingent of Burmese musicians to the Tang dynasty court.

You can listen to a contemporary one played here:

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Happy American Independence Day for those celebrating! I’m enjoying the vibe of unbridled love for America all around me from even the most cynical cynics. It’s a good thing to love your country. I’ve always felt like we do this better in India, with our parades and speeches and songs and kids dressed up as Gandhi and Bose and Bhagat Singh, so it’s nice to see Americans put in the effort.

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A 1776 Copy of the Declaration of Independence from a Captured Privateer Ship

Just weeks before the 250th year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a British volunteer at the National Archives stumbled upon an old copy of the Declaration, that had been printed in Exeter, New Hampshire in the second week of July 1776.

So, soon after the Declaration was signed, Congress produced copies and such, but there weren’t large newspapers capable of disseminating such big news to all the corners of the colonies. They were smaller with limited circulation, often only in the big cities like Philadelphia and Boston. So local printers printed these broadsides and pamphlets for quick distribution. These would be read out in town halls and churches, stuck on walls in public places, and reprinted by newspapers. News was slow to travel back then.

How this ended up in the British national archives is interesting. An American privateer (government-licensed pirate, much like Blackwater today) ship, the Dalton, was captured by the British navy in December 1776, and among the ship’s papers was this declaration. One of the historians quoted in this article imagines the captain reading this declaration emotionally to his crew, making it the raison d’etre for doing what they do (attacking the British navy).

So it has a near-perfect provenance - it has been in the British archives since 1776, and came to them through an official capture. And that’s meant it’s been perfectly preserved, unlike many other broadsides from that era that have disappeared. It’s one of the few documents that captures the Declaration as breaking news, which is what makes it unique. And it is the only one found outside the US.

What did the Founding Fathers eat?

I came across this great article that looks at some of the oldest restaurants in Maryland, and tries to figure out what people in Washington DC ate 250 years ago.

It seems like seafood was a big part of their meals, with rockfish, crab, calamari and shellfish being popular through the ages. And terrapin might have been common back then, but I suppose it’s fallen out of fashion now. There was all this fresh seafood in unpolluted waters, and that felt like a luxury to someone from Europe.

But recipes and cooking methods were all European. Though they had declared their independence from the UK, the high culture was still British and French. Thomas Jefferson liked French food and wine, but John Adams preferred simpler food and was annoyed with Jefferson’s fanciness. Washington was known for his decadent dinners, and whimsical food, like cream decorated with slivered almonds to look like a hedgehog, or parmesan icecream, but always tried to make sure he didn’t seem decadent like a king.

The food was cooked, of course, by enslaved men and women. Jefferson even trained his slave in France to cook the food he liked (which seems to include a lot of macaroni).

Common people had a lot of the same fare, but simpler, like they didn’t have white flour or sugar. We’re now so prosperous that you’ve to be really wealthy to avoid those things.

Celina Jaitley as Sister Nivedita?

I was going to keep this strictly ‘Murica, but I just had to weigh in on news coming in that there’s going to be a movie made on the life of Sister Nivedita, where she will be played by Celina Jaitley.

For the uninitiated, Sister Nivedita is an Irishwoman who moved to India, became a devotee of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, and was a long associate of Swami Vivekananda. She committed herself to social upliftment and opened schools for girls in Bengal. She was also close with the scientist JC Bose, and inspired him to prove that plants have life, which he did with the crescograph and resonant recorder.

Long-time readers of this substack will remember that it is likely that Sister Nivedita got the Jugantar revolutionaries into JC Bose’s lab at Presidency College, where they experimented with bombmaking. Here’s a chapter from my novel where we get a glimpse of Sister Nivedita.

I have nothing against Celina Jaitley, but Indian film industries are obsessed with female leads being pale as snow. Katrina Kaif is white and they invented an Indian father for her to be acceptable to Bollywood audiences. Amy Jackson is white British and plays characters named ‘Shruthi’ and ‘Sita’. This was the one chance they had to cast an actual deathly-pale white woman without trying to Indian-wash her…. and then they didn’t.

On the other hand, it seems like Celina is Bengali and this movie is a Bengali director’s project, and I’m not sure if the Bengali film industry is as focused on pale-skinned heroines. Can’t fault that.

Yet, it feels like Sister Nivedita’s origins are a big part of her legend, and add to the impact. Imagine making a large-scale Indian-Irish production with Saoirse Ronan as the lead. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Alexander Graham Bell almost didn’t debut the telephone at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (but his fiancee and an Emperor helped him do so)

I read this really interesting article about Alexander Graham Bell and the 1876 Centennial World Fair in Philadelphia, where he debuted the telephone.

So, Bell ran a school for the deaf in Boston at this point, and moonlighted with electronics. His fiancee used to be his student, and his father-in-law was his benefactor. Their wedding was constantly getting postponed because they were struggling financially. Bell’s father-in-law suggested he enter the Exhibition at the Centennial World Fair, where a committee was going to judge innovations in telegraphic technology, and show his telephone. In a move familiar to anyone who knows a technical creator, Bell said “But… it’s still work-in-progress”, and said he was too busy with his exams to go to Philly. His fiancee, Mabel, though, wanted him to listen to her father so he’d pay for their wedding, and pushed him to go.

Grumbling about this waste of time, probably, Bell went. By the time he got there, there were 20,000 inventions. And by the time the judges got to him, they said they were tired, please go home. He probably felt vindicated AF.

But then, Bell was friends with King Pedro II of Brazil, who had been very interested in Bell’s father’s work about phonetics and speech, and he already knew Alexander as a ‘smart boy’, I suppose. So even if the judges wouldn’t see his telephone, Dom Pedro did, and since he was showing interest, the judges did too.

Being as his friend was asking him what he was working on, Bell was in his element showing how everything worked.

In a demonstration of his invention, Bell hastened to the gallery’s far end to transmit while Sir William Thomson, the renowned Scottish electricity expert who helped design the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, took up the receiver. (Thomson later became Baron Kelvin, for whom units of absolute temperature are named.) As a fellow Scotsman, Bell particularly wanted to impress Thomson. When Bell sang into the telephone, Thomson couldn’t believe his ears.

Dom Pedro was eager to try. From the receiver, he heard Bell utter the ghostly words of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be, that is the question …” The emperor was shocked. “My God!” he cried. “It speaks!”

The astounded audience became frenzied, jostling for a chance to use the telephone. Even Gray stepped up to listen. “Aye, there’s the rub,” he repeated to the cheering crowd what he’d heard over the wires.

From nothing, it became like the debut of ChatGPT.

Do read the whole article, it’s engagingly well-written and has a great overview of the whole telegraphy landscape of that era, and Bell’s life until then.

Artifact: ‘No Stamp Act’ Teapot (Made in England)

By the 1760s, English potters were highly dependent on the American market to sell their goods. So, a lot of their earthenware was designed for American tastes.

In 1765, the Stamp Act was passed, which required that a lot of paper use in America — for newspapers, degrees and diplomas, licenses, and even playing cards — was on stamp paper. If you’re Indian, you recognize this as the type paper we used for land transactions and stuff, with the design at the top that says a tax has been paid on this paper.

The reason England implemented this indirect tax was because they wanted to raise money after all the wars they fought in America and to fund the troops stationed there.

This led to wild protests, which led to the repeal of the Stamp Act on March 11 1776. But soon after, the British Parliament passed the Declaratory Act, which stated that the Parliament had absolute power to legislate on everything related to the colonies. And then they increased taxes, and troop presence in the thirteen colonies, which led to the Boston Massacre. Though they repealed all the higher taxes after the massacre, except for the one on tea, the anger was already seething and simmering and led to the Boston Tea Party, and the rest is history.

During the protests against the Stamp Act, the English potters ended up making merch for the Colonists (those who lived in the American colonies) which went against their own government.

One such is this ‘No Stamp Act’ teapot.

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I can only explain my random posting schedule as ‘Life Happens’. And it’s been happening a lot to me of late. I’m just glad I eventually find my way back to posting on here.

Among other things, I’m trying to keep away from using my phone, so I’ve deleted social media from my phone. It’s nothing remarkable of course. But I’m appalled at how much it helps my mental and physical health.

It’s got me reflecting on what I value. I realize I’ve always prioritized deep knowledge over applause and being well-known, and the times I prioritize being known, it seems to rebound on my mental health. I just need to accept that I’m a nerdy person who focuses on digging deep and it won’t always be compatible with communicating that to people on a schedule, and I’m always going to have two things going on (three if you count parenting), and they’ll conflict with each other.

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And, the Prompta Prize for Short Fiction is still on — a short story contest where AI use is allowed as long as you tell me how you did it.

The original deadline was June 19th, but I haven’t been able to get the word out as much as I intended, so I’m extending it to July 28th.

Submit your short story here.

Onto our links!

Chinese Survivors of the Titanic inspired Jack and Rose on a door

There were six Chinese men on board the Titanic who survived its sinking. Unfortunately for them, the moment they landed on Ellis Island, they were all deported. They went to Cuba, and then the UK, where they found jobs as sailors, given most sailors were enlisted in WW1 and there was a shortage of sailors.

One of them, Chang Chip, grew increasingly ill thanks to the harrowing experience on the Titanic, and passed away in 1914. The others worked in the UK until about 1920 when anti-immigrant sentiment had them get deported.

Ah Lam was deported to Hong Kong, while Ling Hee boarded a steamboat heading for Kolkata (Calcutta) in India.

Lee Bing immigrated to Canada, while Fang Lang, after sailing between Britain and Hong Kong for years, became a citizen of the country that once rejected him - the US.

Fang Lang’s son was born in Milwaukee fifty years after the sinking of the Titanic, and his father never told him anything about having been a Titanic survivor! Fang Lang passed away in 1985, having never told anyone about having been on the Titanic.

Why would he want to do that? Because while most survivors of the Titanic were feted, the Chinese survivors were pilloried:

In a report filed days after the sinking, for instance, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called the Chinese survivors "creatures" who had sprung into the lifeboats "at the first sign of danger" and concealed themselves beneath the seats.

[…]

Other media coverage at the time accused the Chinese men of having dressed as women in order to get priority to board the lifeboats.

A documentary was made on these survivors, called The Six, where the researchers investigated these claims and found that these were all made up.

They found that Fang Lang had lashed himself to a door or a table and stayed afloat until a lifeboat that was searching for survivors in the debris found him. He then went on to row the lifeboat to safety.

This, it turns out, was what inspired Jack and Rose’s final scene together in The Titanic.

Cultural genocide of Native American children in boarding schools

I got to read this report from 2022 commissioned by the US government about Native American boarding schools.

I had been familiar with the results of this report, but reading it in its entirety drove home the absolute intentionality of the US government to destroy Native culture. Here is an excerpt:

[O]n the whole government practices may be said to have operated against the development of wholesome [Indian] family life. Chief of these is the long continued policy of educating the [Indian] children in boarding schools far from their homes, taking them from their parents when small and keeping them away until parents and children become strangers to each other. The theory was once held that the problem of the [Indian] could be solved by educating the children, not to return to the reservation, but to be absorbed one by one into the white population. This plan involved the permanent breaking of family ties,[…]

The whole report is heartbreaking to read, especially when it talks of how the children were starved and how many children died in the boarding schools.

But several sections pertaining to the cultural genocide of Native American practices read extremely familiar to me. For example:

"Systematic identity-alteration methodologies employed by Federal Indian boarding schools included renaming Indian children from Indian names to different English names; cutting the hair of Indian children; requiring the use of military or other standard uniforms as clothes; and discouraging or forbidding the following in order to compel them to adopt western practices and Christianity: (1) using Indian languages, (2) conducting cultural practices, and (3) exercising their religions."

This unfortunately seems too much like schooling in India, in a way that’s recognizable to me, who wasn’t born until 40+ years after independence.

Those who intend to reform education in India must absolutely read about Native American boarding schools and realize what was done to us, and worse, how we have internalized these practices as ‘discipline’ and ‘promoting unity’. Without this, no decolonization is possible.

Maldivian remakes of Indian movies

I found that there’s a whole bunch of Indian movies that got remade in the Maldives!

I had no clue that there was even a Dhivehi film industry. I assumed a place as tiny as the Maldives might not care to make their own movies. I assumed wrong.

Not only do they have a film industry, but they have remade several very popular Bollywood movies (and some not-so-popular ones as well) — They’ve remade Dhadkan, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, RGV’s Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya, Vikram Bhatt’s Raaz (which itself is a remake of What Lies Beneath), and also Judaai (which itself is a remake of a Telugu movie), and Angoor (which is a remake of a remake of an adaptation of a novel by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar).

It seems like the Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya remake also ripped off all the songs — mind, this is an unofficial remake, so they should ideally not be ripping off all the songs. But well, the original soundtrack ripped off the tune of Kambakht Ishq from Afro-Celt Sound System’s Eireann, so who are we to judge.

I tried watching the Dhivehi Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and it’s a scene-by-scene remake, but made with a Maldivian budget and aesthetics. And of course, the actors aren’t yet so obsessed with western beauty standards, so they look like regular people. I wondered since everyone’s wearing a hijab in that country if they’d change up the scene where Anjali prays in a hijab into some other religion, but I couldn’t make it all the way to that scene.

There’s also a Sinhala Drishyam if you’re interested. It’s a better watch.

Artifact: Translucent mouse-shaped blue glass flask

This is a Third Century Roman glass flask shaped like a mouse. I didn’t know glassblowing was a thing so early.

This is a really beautiful little flask, with four little mouse legs on which it stands, and it’s decorated with a design they call ‘snake thread’.

I’d personally find it gross to be drinking out of anything shaped like a mouse, but I really wonder how the Romans perceived pieces like this. Was it supposed to be cute? Edgy? Funny?

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A quick reminder that the Prompta Prize for Short Fiction is still on — write a 1500-word or shorter story that pleases ME, to win the princely sum of $50. AI use allowed, but must be explained in detail.

Submit to the Prompta Prize

My thoughts on the Prompta Prize and why I instituted it.

I finally watched Ponniyin Selvan II on Amazon Prime. It was nice to be able to show my daughter an Indian princess movie that had epic visuals. I do feel a touch sad that she now knows Aishwarya Rai as a villain.

I gotta say, the second half of the movie is quite underwhelming. This is mostly because they rush and simplify the events of Book 5 of Kalki Krishnamurthy’s series, Thyaga Sigaram/ Zenith of Sacrifice, and remove a vital twist. It reduces the ‘epic’ feeling quite a bit.

And, as I felt about PS-1, it would have been a much better movie if they had cast a younger cast, not stars in their forties and fifties. It’s nice though to see all the big stars come together in this movie — Prabhu, Parthiban, Sarathkumar, Nasser, Nizhalgal Ravi, Mohan Ram, and Aishwarya Rai and Trisha. Nandini is supposed to be very young in the book, but with a cast this starry, you need someone like Aishwarya Rai to hold her own against them.

However, I am glad it exists. It’s a visual treat, and full of intrigue and action even if it feels like they cheaped out on some war scenes.

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A Baby-Making Contest during the Great Depression

I just had to share this piece. It’s the most Internet Discourse thing you’ll read, though it’s from a 100 years ago.

Charles Vance Millar was a wealthy Toronto lawyer and financier. He never married, had no kids, and was a real-life troll all his life. He’d do stuff like leave money on a sidewalk and hide and watch how people reacted to it.

Understandably, since he had no close relatives when he died in 1926, he used his will to troll and prank the public.

He left brewery shares to Protestant ministers who supported Prohibition. He gave joint ownership of a vacation home in Jamaica to three lawyers who hated each other. He gave shares in the Ontario Jockey Club to the people who most steadfastly opposed horse racing.

And, as a final troll, he left the remainder of his fortune, like 500,000 Canadian Dollars, to “the mother who has since my death given birth in Toronto to the greatest number of children, as shown by the registrations under the Vital Statistics Act”.

$500k is a colossal sum TODAY. Imagine how much it would have felt like a hundred years ago. Especially since it was the Great Depression not long after, and people were desperately poor.

His relatives tried to get the will thrown out, but a court decided it was fine. Now that the contest was actually legal, the Media was off to the races.

At that point, big families were considered gauche, especially since Eugenics was raging and people thought poor and other ‘unfit’ people ought not to have children. Throw in some discrimination as well — the WASPs didn’t like large immigrant Catholic families.

In 1932, newspapers pitted Grace Bagnato, a second-generation Italian-Canadian who already had given birth to 20 kids against Florence Brown, who had 26 births, of whom 13 were living, and 6 had been born since Millar’s death.

This led to a bunch of Discourse — were unregistered children to be counted? What about stillbirths? Should only living children be counted? What about legitimate vs illegitimate children? I so wish was around in this era. She’d have had the funnest takes.

Eventually, in 1938, the winners were announced. Florence Brown was already in her 40s and got ‘out of the running’. Grace Bagnato had two unregistered children and was disqualified. Another contender had six kids deemed ‘illegitimate’ and was cut out; she later got an out-of-court settlement. There were four winners, who each had 9 kids in the 12 years following Millar’s death. The money seems to have changed the lives of the families.

Amazon Shufflebox

Amazon has this paper on Resilient Network Graphs that I found quite interesting.

Wired covered this paper and went into some detail, which didn’t help me understand things much better, so I dug into it. It seems pretty groundbreaking.

So, data centers are Amazon’s bread and butter. The servers in data centers are organized hierarchically. Like you could have a rack of 48 servers, which are connected to one switch, and then a bunch of these switches could be connected to another switch, and so on, with one core node at the top — a hierarchical organization of servers. So now if server A wants to communicate with server B, the message has to go up the hierarchy and then get routed down. This is called a fat tree, because as you go up the hierarchy, the amount of links/switches/capacity/bandwidth increases.

So if a switch dies, multiple racks could lose connectivity. The higher you go in the tree, the more expensive a failure becomes.

Mathematically, a random graph can provide much better connectivity than a tree. Unlike a hierarchical network, it has no obvious choke points, offers many alternative paths between any two nodes, and continues to function well even when links or switches fail.

But how on earth do you do this in a data center, where you connect switches randomly to each other instead of in an organized way? Randomly connecting thousands of switches to one another would create a cabling nightmare that would be difficult to install, operate, and troubleshoot.

Amazon's solution is something called a ShuffleBox. Switches connect to ShuffleBoxes using optical fibers, but instead of wiring every switch directly to every other switch, the ShuffleBoxes perform a carefully designed optical "shuffle" that makes the resulting network behave like a random graph while keeping the physical cabling structured and manageable.

They then built SprayPoint, a routing system that takes advantage of the huge number of available paths and spreads traffic across them.

With both of these, they seem to have reduced server costs by 45%, lowered power consumption, and made it more fault-tolerant while having equal or better performance.

I wonder what this means for data centers as a whole.

The TINA approach to solving picky eating

There’s a new book out called Picky: How American Children Became The Fussiest Children In History by Helen Zoe Veit. I haven’t read it, but I came across it through this video interview of the author.

She seems to have gone through historical accounts of children’s eating in America to figure out where picky eating came from. Is it an evolutionary adaptation as some people say?

She finds that kids used to basically eat the same food as grownups (as they do in most of the rest of the world), and the reason they did was because there were no other choices typically. Right now, we have a lot of choices in food and we’re never out of anything, so a child can eat the same thing at all meals if they so want. She says her children are not picky because she never gave them alternatives.

I don’t know how much this is true for diets, but I do find it true for a lot of other things. I was forced to develop a good taste in comedy because there was nothing else I was allowed to watch. I came across someone’s kid who was struggling with vocabulary, and I suggested she ‘just read the dictionary for fun so she understands words in their context’… before it hit me the only reason I had read the dictionary was because I had nothing else back then, and a child today might not make those choices. If you have endless Youtube slop at your disposal, you’re not excited by the Magic Schoolbus.

But in an era of relative abundance, how do you even curate your life so you value the right things?

Artifact: The Art of Emily Eden

Emily Eden lived in India between 1836 and 1844 as the sister of Lord Auckland, who was Governor-General of India. She made a lot of drawings and paintings of what she witnessed. This was still the era of the East India Company. Lord Dalhousie hadn’t yet snatched several kingdoms. Relations between the British and Indian kings were still somewhat pleasant, if uncomfortable.

She has a portrait of Maharaja Ranjitsingh at his Durbar in 1838, close to the end of his life. Apparently at this point, he was partially paralyzed, and had lost the use of one of his eyes, and communicated mainly with his forefinger. He apparently had this way of peppering people with desultory questions, and among all the casual conversation that has your guard down, he’d bring up the thing that he wanted to know most about.

She also has this sketch of the Hunting Cheetahs of the Nawab of Awadh.

These cheetahs were used in hunting. How, I don’t know. But I’m sure the robe the cheetahs are wearing probably cost more than my whole wardrobe.

This is on display at the Asian Art museum in San Francisco. What rankles me is this in the description:

As the use of the rifle in South Asia became increasingly popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these once-prized hunting animals themselves became the object of hunts; in fact, they were hunted to extinction in this region. In 1947 the last three cheetahs in India were shot by a maharaja.

This gives the impression that cheetahs were hunted solely by Indian royals. But that was absolutely not the case. The British did way more hunting at all levels, didn’t follow any of the rules for hunting and hunted many animals to extinction or near-extinction in India.

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Here’s wishing you a meaningful Memorial Day!

I watched the Theodore Roosevelt documentary on Netflix. There’s a lot to be said about how it’s a little too propagandized, but I had the strangest takeaways:

• Current parenting experts tell you you oughtn’t be your child’s best friend, but Theodore did actually consider his father his best friend and confidant.

• Theodore was sickly and was babied by his family, especially his father. As a result, didn’t go outside and play very much. This, again, is something you’re told explicitly is the cause of all our society’s problems. Somehow, it wasn’t a problem for Theodore Roosevelt.

• The thing that seemed to help him a lot was to keep reading stories of brave young children who lived on the frontiers and took big risks. It motivated him to become strong, take up boxing, and cultivate a love for nature and the outdoors.

So… it’s okay to coddle your kids as long as you tell them cool stories embodying the values you want to inculcate, I suppose.

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Happy birthday, Ruskin Bond!

Somehow, I had forgotten all about Ruskin Bond. His stories were a huge part of my childhood. The good news is, he’s still kicking at 92, and just brought out a book of stories about friendship!

As a parent looking for great stories to show my children, I’m glad to see that Mr. Bond’s fun stories are still in print, 60-70 years on.

Here’s his recent interview with Prannoy Roy, which was so nice to listen to, talking about friendship, relationships, and solitude, as well as growing old.

The Prompta Prize (Submit your short story!)

Inspired by what happened with the Commonwealth Prize story that was published in Granta, I announced the Prompta Prize for Short Fiction last week.

People are using AI in their writing and there’s no way to conclusively prove it. And they seem to use it in ways that make fiction worse. With contests like the Commonwealth Prize, the hallucinatory phrases of an LLM are attributed to cultural differences.

Well, enough of that. Here is a contest, where you can use your Moleskine, or an army of Claude bots, but the goal is to 1) Keep me reading 2) If you used AI, describe how you did it.

I want to figure out if AI use can help writing at all. I personally don’t think AI use helps writers, but I’m willing to be surprised.

So, submit your stories HERE — under 1500 words, which you think will entertain ME, for a $50 prize.

My thinking behind this contest and AI use in writing fiction:

Alchemy works — lead can be turned into gold!

Medieval alchemists were heavily driven by the motivation to turn metals like lead into gold. They didn’t succeed, of course. But this captured enough imagination that I remember a Nancy Drew novel, The Mystery of the 99 Steps, which had this as a central plot.

Well, turns out, all the alchemists needed was a Large Hadron Collider. Researchers at CERN recorded fleeting moments where lead particles turned into gold. When the lead nuclei zip around the LHC at the speed of light, they create powerful electromagnetic fields. These fields can cause light particles (photons) to strike the nucleus and knock out protons. Gold is at 79 protons and Lead is at 82, so when three protons are knocked out, lead can transmute into gold. I imagine protons keep getting knocked out, so then gold transmutes into other elements.

It’s pretty cool that we can observe such minute changes in the Large Hadron Collider!

The First Brit in Space went there on a Russian spacecraft (while the USSR was disintegrating)

I didn’t realize that the first Brit who went to space only went there in 1991. For comparison, Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian in space, went there in 1984. Both were passengers on a Russian craft, so it didn’t have much to do with the space program in their respective countries.

Helen Sherman was a 27-year-old food scientist at the Mars Bars factory in Slough, driving home from work, when she turned on the radio and heard an ad — ‘Astronaut wanted. No experience necessary’. She decided to apply.

She got in, as four successful candidates picked from a pool of 13,000, and was taken to Star City in Russia, the secret cosmonaut training base, and trained in zero-gravity and other astronautery as part of Project Juno, a UK-USSR collaboration. During the reforms of Perestroika, the USSR government was facing high criticism over the cost of space race, and decided it would try to have private money fund space travel. Project Juno was part of that backdrop.

She went to the International Space Station and spent a week there before returning to earth. Sergei Krikalyov, who went to space with her, stayed on for a year. When he came back, the country he was from didn’t exist anymore — the USSR had disintegrated, and he was the ‘last Soviet citizen’.

Artifact: Indonesian betel nut bag

Chewing betel leaves is such a feature of Indian life that I didn’t know the betel and areca plants are actually native to Indonesia — I gathered that from Sanjeev Sanyal’s excellent book, Ocean Of Churn.

This is a bag for betel supplies (chopped areca nuts, lime, and other flavorings) from Timor, Indonesia, that’s currently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. There are probably much more decorative boxes for these things, but this reminds me of the little waist-pouches that older women in India with an incorrigible betel habit would carry.

The listing says betel is a “mild stimulant and psychoactive substance that may have antidepressant qualities”. I didn’t know about the psychoactive part, but my tongue always feels numb after a paan, and we were told having too much paan makes you stupid (you would sound stupid speaking with a numb paan tongue, so it tracked). It can’t be too bad, because nursing mothers are given paan with a lot of lime, because the lime is pure calcium.

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Something — well, many things — about the story screamed AI. Phrases like:

• The grove remembered.

  The house remembered.

  The boy remembered.

• Some stories pull buckets of bone.

  This one pulled a woman.

• She had the kind of walking that made benches become men

Plus, the main character is improbably named Vishnu Mohammed, and his wife is named Sita.

The author, Jamir Nazir, has a LinkedIn full of posts about AI that seem obviously written by AI.

Circumstantial evidence is strong here, but according to the Commonwealth Foundation, “All shortlisted writers have personally stated that no AI was used and, upon further consultation, the Foundation has confirmed this {…}”.

I wonder if the judges were so out of touch that they couldn’t tell when something was AI-written. Or, did they themselves use AI to evaluate the entries? We cannot rule out that possibility!

AI use in writing is only increasing, as is lying about it.

Earlier this month, Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Literature Nobel, talked about how she uses AI for preliminary research for her next novel.

Short of gaining access to someone’s ChatGPT account, it’s impossible to assert with confidence that someone did or didn’t use AI in writing a piece. AI checkers are themselves AI and are notoriously bad at their job. The only way to know if someone used AI is if they admitted to it.

Organizations like the Author’s Guild offer a ‘Human-Authored’ certification, where you provide a legal undertaking that none of the words you’ve used have been generated by AI.

Sure, there’s the risk of opening yourself to a lawsuit if you lie there, but… it does seem like most people can just delete their ChatGPT logs and memory after the fact, and keep going their merry way. I don’t consider such a certification to be anything more than a marketing strategy.

Plus, this does nothing to indicate that the author didn’t use AI to brainstorm, research, or come up with the plot. Most people who would be appalled at AI use probably don’t want AI use in those aspects of writing either. And, what IS AI use? Would Grammarly's suggestions for phrasing be AI use? They technically are!

What’s really the problem with AI writing?

My aunt used ChatGPT to generate a two-minute speech about Sarojini Naidu that she had to give for a speech contest in her retirement home. She’s never given a speech in her life, and if it weren’t for AI, it would be me overthinking it and writing her a two-hour rant about Padmaja Naidu’s tumultuous personal life and Sarojini’s part in it. ChatGPT helped her take part in a short activity with her friends and be in the running for a gift card to a cake shop.

I somehow don’t have a problem with this.

But more recently, I was in a WhatsApp group where one person would post huge walls of text arguing their position that were clearly AI-generated. I’m not intimidated by walls of text, and am famous for my own. But when you need a robot to generate your sociopolitical rants, you’ve lost the plot. Most people write walls of text because they feel super strongly about a topic. But your AI writing walls of text doesn’t give me any indication that you care about the topic in question, or even know anything about it.

Why, then, should I engage with you?

I suppose this is the Amish perspective — does LLM-generated writing help bring us closer, or push us further away?

The Amish, BTW, seem to love LLMs and use them to manage their family businesses. But they aren’t typically in the business of writing literature, so we don’t know their approach to AI writing.

The point of writing is to communicate an idea. The point of literature is to show people how you see the beauty and ugliness in the world using just the power of words. LLMs ruin both of these in a few different ways.

• AI writing is horribly overwritten, full of repetition, and too long to read, typically.

• It masks the level of thinking and writing style of the author, subsuming them into the AI-style.

• Most people who post on social media with AI are posting low-effort content, which makes us mark a piece as low-effort if it has any of the tells of AI writing.

• Many of the similes, metaphors, and other figures of speech that are AI-generated don’t connect with people. We could wonder what an author meant when he wrote ‘The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.’ But if we know it’s AI-generated, it becomes clear there was no feeling behind writing something like that, and it doesn’t mean anything.

• There’s no coherent, unified feeling behind an AI-written piece that drives all its different parts. It feels chaotic to read or edit.

But then, it’s not going to go away. What, then, is the solution?

Introducing the Prompta Prize for Short Fiction

The point of a story is to make the reader think, feel, and connect with the writer.

Humans will always be hungry for a good story.

And I want to read a good story, AI use or not.

There seems to be no point in saying AI is not allowed. So I’m taking the opposite path — Use AI or don’t, but label it accurately and explain your process.

But most importantly — write me an entertaining story!

I’m putting my taste, my time, and $50 of my own money on the line.

Enter the Short Story Contest

This contest has a simple brief:

Submit a story, under 1500 words, that I’ll enjoy reading.

The best one gets $50.

Deadline: June 19th 2026. As long as it’s June 19th or earlier somewhere in the world, the contest is open.

Get there how you like - Write it in your Moleskine, dust off a story from an old Word doc, have ten Claude agents argue their way into a plot. I don’t care. I just want to be entertained.

Rules:

• One entry per user, only.

• You must hold copyright on the story.

• 1500 words or fewer.

• No hate speech, illegal content, or explicit sexual content.

• All AI use must be disclosed.

• By submitting, you allow me to publish your story (with credit) on lila.substack.com

• All decisions are final and subjective.

Judging criteria:

• I should be able to read all 1500 words without tuning out.

• I should enjoy it enough to want to reread it.

• If it reads too much like AI, I’ll tune out.

• If it’s overwritten, I’ll tune out.

• I tend to enjoy comedy, romance, cozy mystery, and light action, but I’m open to anything that works.

• I’m especially interested in OwnVoices stories (where the author shares identity with the protagonist), particularly from writers connected to former colonies.

• If English isn’t your first language and you use AI to bridge that gap, more power to you. It still has to read well, though.

I’m a middle-aged Indian mom. That will absolutely affect my taste.

Click here to submit your entry

You have 1500 words to entertain me and find a place in my brain. Make them count!

My bias here is that I think human-written stories are going to read better and connect with me more. But I’m open to surprises, and open to being impressed by innovative prompts that make writing better.

I see there is a surge of new readers this week. I expect many of you have come from my Twitter posts with Indian history facts that sound completely made up. I was down sick with no energy to do anything except phone, so it was fun to share nuggets that I’d spent a lot of time accumulating.

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Welcome here! This substack is basically like those tweets, but I try to go deeper.

I’m a mom trying to figure out how to raise my kid, and on this Substack, I analyze exciting bits of Indian history and how they relate to us today, alongside engaging with our culture as it stands today.

Typically, I publish a post on Monday like this, which is a roundup of all that I’ve been reading this past week. You can read past editions of Monday Cup Of Links here.

Sometimes, usually on Wednesdays, I dive deep into the chapter of a book everyone wants to read, but no one has read. So far, I’ve covered The Beautiful Tree, All The Prime Minister’s Men, Vikram Sampath’s Tipu Sultan, and CHAOS - Charles Manson, The CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties.

Sometimes, usually on Fridays, I write a book or movie review, or talk about some aspect of culture or education I find myself thinking about. But more typically, I deep-dive into a historical topic that I find interesting. Often, this involves Vinayak Savarkar and his revolutionary friends.

And that’s because I’ve been writing a novel about Savarkar and his revolutionary friends. It’s a swashbuckling adventure that takes you from Pune to London to Calcutta to Paris to Pondicherry, has you meet Savarkar, Madame Cama, Gandhi, Churchill, Tilak, and Subramanya Bharati, as well as Aurobindo and Barin Ghose, Prafulla Chaki, and Khudiram Bose. There are Scotland Yard spies, Russian bomb doctors, Abhinav Bharat eavesdroppers, Anushilan Samiti gunmen, and plenty of dirty double-crossers.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my final draft, but you can read an earlier draft here. The fiction is paywalled, but the facts behind each chapter are not, and they are very very exciting to read. I’m hoping to have a release date soon, and until then, keep reading!

Onto our links!

Understanding the Bhadralok Bengali through the Bengali Renaissance

The Bengali Intellectual has had reams of literature written about him, a good portion of it by himself. I’ve never been to Bengal, but thanks to the preponderance of Bengalis in literature, politics, film, newspaper columns, and even blogging, I seem to know everything about Calcutta institutions, stereotypes, and culture.

The ‘Bhadralok’ is often mocked in other parts of India as deracinated and disconnected from Indian roots, despite celebrating Durga Puja or singing Rabindrasangeet. And the phenomenon is understood as them having been colonized first in the country.

But this long piece titled Classical Culture in British India, Part I: The Bengal ‘Renaissance’ paints a more interesting picture. It talks about the environment in Bengal in the 19th and 20th centuries, which created some of the foremost classicists who were experts in Greek and Latin. While Macaulay’s idea of education was to create compliant drones for the Empire, the Bengalis who passed through the system ended up using the same framework to critique the Empire and create their own alternative visions for an independent India.

This piece is mostly an introduction to Michael Madhusudan Dutt (ancestor of tennis player Leander Paes) and his intellectual legacy, but in exploring the world that created a man like him, it gives us a great insight into the facts and movements that led to present-day stereotypes.

An MIT Fiction Prof weighs in on AI writing

I came across this intriguing piece by Micah Nathan, who is a professor of fiction at MIT. He realized his students were using AI to write their prose pieces for his class. He tried shaming them into compliance, but that didn’t work. Once he showed empathy and understanding while reassuring students they weren’t in trouble, it led to an interesting discussion about what LLM-generated writing does to a fiction workshop class.

The students had questions — is it bad to use AI if the story is based on their own ideas? How is using AI to edit different from using a human editor? Why are these things to be debated in a university that’s a pioneer of AI?

The consensus they arrived at was that a piece of fiction is created through the process of friction, and if AI removes all the friction associated with their thoughts, it’s hard to offer feedback, and it’s hard to work through the kinks, figure out the core of what the author is trying to say, and help them tell it better.

This mirrors my own experience writing the novel. I’ve been writing this for five years while navigating several major life transitions. On my third draft, I was curious about how AI would help me write, and fed a rather dull chapter into ChatGPT. I said ‘punch it up!’. ChatGPT obeyed and duly ‘punched it up’. The prose felt elevated, exciting, alive, and it was all redone so I didn’t even know where to start wtih reviewing it. I just copied it into my manuscript as an alternative treatment for a chapter and moved on.

The fourth draft duly came along. I read the AI-edited chapter and realized I HAD NO IDEA HOW TO EDIT IT. The words sounded smart, but there was no consistency to the language, the narrative, or how it was elevated. When I edit a chapter, typically, I can tell what the core idea is. I then decide if I want to make that core idea come out better, or if the core itself is mistaken and I ought to recycle the chapter into a stronger idea. But with AI writing, I don’t even know what the core idea is. I have no clue where to begin! The solution was to just go back to an earlier draft and work from there.

I use Codex all the time to code. It’s easy and effective to do this if I split my task into the smallest logical units and then give each unit to AI. But with coding, I have my primary motivation in front of me all the time in my JIRA task. I don’t look at the code that I haven’t written and get confused about what on earth is going on. Seems like that’s a big issue with AI writing — if you haven’t written it, you have no clue of the landscape within it.

Why Indians Only Watch Cricket

Last Friday, I wrote this piece about what makes India cricket-crazy, and whether the same can be replicated for a sport like badminton.

TL;DR: Gulf money in the ‘80s fueled a rivalry with Pakistan, which timed well with the TV and advertising boom. But the reason the ‘rivalry’ mattered was that it was part of the story that we felt to be true, and we only pay attention to narratives in the media that help us navigate our everyday life.

If we are to market a sport for mass consumption today, those old narratives are dead, because that old India is gone. We don’t see ourselves as Pakistan’s rivals anymore. We hold our government more accountable, and we’re not going to expect battles that ought to be fought on the battlefield to be fought on the sports field.

Our narrative now is of a people on the rise, holding our own everywhere in the world. And leaning into that will make sports easier to market.

Pahari Princess in the French Riviera

History writer Bhuvan Lall (who has written, among other books, one on Lala Hardayal) has a piece on an Indian film festival in the resort town of Saint-Tropez. In a town that is popular with Hollywood stars and avant-garde movies, why is there an Indian film festival?

Turns out, in 1822, Jean Francois Allard, a decorated soldier and an aide of Napoleon at Waterloo moved to Lahore, and asked Maharaja Ranjit Singh for a job. He was tasked with creating the Fauj-i-Khas — elite infantry drilled in the French manner, uniformed in the blue and red of Napoleon’s Grande Armée, commanded in French terminology, marching beneath tricolor standards inscribed with the Sikh invocation “Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh”

Soon after, he met Banno, the daughter of Raja Menga Ram of Chamba, Himachal Pradesh, and they married in 1826. They had seven children. In 1834, he moved his wife and children to an opulent mansion in Saint-Tropez, his hometown, and returned to Lahore. Not long after, he died of a heart attack in Peshawar, where he is interred.

Today, Saint Tropez celebrates this Indo-French connection with marble busts of Banno, General Allard, and Maharaja Ranjit Singh at a prominent location, as well as Nirvana, an Indian film festival.

Artifact: Mughal-era watercolor/ink of a European woman

I came across this watercolor in the Smithsonian's archives.

To my untrained eye, this looks like an ink sketch, but apparently it’s a watercolor. It is attributed to Nar Singh, who apparently was a court artist of Akbar. This piece is dated to the 1580s. Not sure what the woman has in her hands, but she seems to have a cape of some sort, and a fascinator, much like British women at fancy events today.

I suppose it speaks to Europeans becoming common across India in this era — the Portuguese were already in Goa at this point.

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Recently, India got the bronze medal in the Thomas Cup, the premier doubles badminton tournament. A pretty amazing achievement!

But what followed was our doubles players, Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, giving interviews about how no one received them at the airport, and no one recognized them, or understood the magnitude of their achievement.

Some quotes from his interview with India Today:

"In Hyderabad, my only stress relief is that I go for dinner with my friends. When I ask for a table, I am told, ‘sir, no seat is available’. I tell them who I am, what I have done and they do not budge. But the next moment, some Instagram fame person will come, and they will be ‘ma'am, please go, Table is free for you’."

Which then leads to

Sometimes I think I will leave badminton and just do Instagram. I do not see the point in this sometimes. I have nice reach as well, I will dance, sing etc and earn money. There was no support and recognition earlier, there is none of it now, and it might not be there for the future generation also

And there’s this very obviously AI-generated line in the article:

Satwiksairaj Rankireddy isn't asking for the moon. He is asking for the basic dignity of being recognised in a restaurant in the city he represents.

I don’t think any human writer would consider that a definition of ‘basic dignity’.

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There was a few days of discussion on social media, of course. Everything from ‘you tied for Bronze, win gold at least’ to ‘This is the tragedy of India’. And then we scrolled on to being experts on Tamil Nadu politics.

Now, these focused athletes have moved on to the Thailand Open and are busy doing what they do best. We hope they bring back medals and attain personal bests.

Meanwhile, let me do what I do best, and ruminate and analyze week-old news.

Is the complaint valid?

Now, I’ve rather liked Satwiksairaj and Chirag as players. I don’t really follow sports, but I do try to watch badminton. They are like 25, from middle-class families, and spent years following the strict regimen of Gopichand Academy to get to where they are now. I don’t hold their statements against them.

If anything, it reminds me of an interview with Saina Nehwal, when an interviewer was trying to skewer her about walking the ramp at a fashion show. Gopichand, who was right there with her, stepped in to say, “She’s a teenager, she’s going to be excited about modeling. But she knows enough to bring her focus back to badminton.’

It’s the same thing — he’s young, he wants to be known for what he’s doing. His point of comparison is social media influencers, and he’s disappointed they are more recognized than he is.

But all the complaints seem like they ought to be directed to his badminton federation — they should have designed their kits, they should have celebrated them at the airport, they should have gotten the hype going so people watched and cheered.

As a player, he’s probably quite limited in what he can say about the badminton federation in public. Maybe that’s something we can help with - pressuring the BAI to treat the players better.

But also, some of the complaints seem like obvious comparisons to cricket.

"Thomas Cup 2022 win was supposed to be our 1983 World Cup moment," Satwik says slowly. A deep sigh follows.

That gold medal didn’t lead the BAI to do what happened with the BCCI. And this is not a new complaint.

Back in 2024, Satwik's partner Chirag Shetty snapped at the Maharashtra government for announcing Rs 11 crore reward for four Indian cricket team members who won the T20 World Cup.

The cricket comparison makes sense — Satwik and Chirag obviously only saw cricketers while growing up, and assumed that once they reached a level of success, they’d be treated like Gods the way cricketers are in India — fans rushing them at airports, restaurants giving them free tables.

Why didn’t that happen?

Why Indians are cricket-crazy

I recently watched an episode of Peppa Pig, where Peppa goes to Australia to meet her friend, Kylie Kangaroo. Peppa, despite being British, asks Kylie, ‘How do you play cricket?’ Kylie teaches Peppa all about Cricket.

Daddy Pig, while being a record-breaking puddle-jumper, is shown being part of a soccer team and coaching children in basketball. Nowhere is cricket mentioned, despite other very British things being prominent on the show, like the Queen and London landmarks.

So, there’s nothing inherent about cricket that makes it a popular sport. It’s not even popular in its country of origin.

Then why did cricket explode after India’s 1983 World Cup win?

Short answer: Pakistan.

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The world cup was won in June 1983. In 1984, Sharjah opened its cricket stadium and hosted its first Asia Cup. And Asia Cup didn’t even involve the UAE as a nation despite it being in Asia; it was just India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.

Sharjah also hosted other cricketing tournaments — there was the Austral-Asia Cup, apparently. And the Coca-Cola Cup. And I’m sure there were even more events that don’t make it to Wikipedia.

Why were these events hosted in the first place? Because the Emirates were full of Indian and Pakistani expats, and they’d pay to watch sporting events with their home teams. These would then be telecast on Doordarshan, which was starting to think deeply about its programming, as the general population had started buying more TVs and didn’t have much to watch.

I’m sure the popularity of these events, especially on TV, is what led to the 1987 World Cup being hosted jointly by India and Pakistan.

India and Pakistan could, at that point, have a serious rivalry, I suppose. Cross-border terrorism hadn’t yet started, our per-capita GDPs were comparable, and there was still some kind of ‘We are the same people’ vibes…. which obviously wouldn’t survive internet videos of Paki kids saying “My dream is to destroy India and die for Pakistan’.

And that tapped into the thing in every Indian’s psyche — Sure, we can defeat West Indies and Australia, but the real goal is to use that might to destroy Pakistan.

This persisted throughout the ‘90s, especially as cross-border violence spiked. Sure, our governments were incompetent with fighting back, so all people could manage was watching a victory on the cricket field.

If it was only this hate behind it, though, cricket wouldn’t have gotten very popular. There was a lot more bhai-bhai vibes back then — narratives that we have the same culture and it’s only politicians who seek to divide us were very, very popular. Scenes like this were very common:

That’s popular filmstars including Raj Kapoor, Anil Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna sitting around Dawood Ibrahim (circled) and Chota Shakeel in Sharjah watching an India-Pakistan cricket match.

Sure, this might have been mildly disrupted by the 1993 Bombay blasts orchestrated by Dawood from Dubai, but by then, a whole ecosystem had developed around cricket and none of that was stopping anytime soon.

Besides, after the 1991 economic reforms, many global brands wanted to advertise in India. Advertising in India was already going crazy. This Pepsi ad starring a pre-fame Aishwarya Rai apparently caused 5000 people to call Prahalad Kakkar (the admaker) asking ‘Who is Sanjana?’ and it made people question Ash’s participation in the 1994 Miss India contest, because she was already so famous. Some newspapers claim it caused a surge in people naming their babies Sanjana, but that feels like an exaggeration.

The most memorable ad campaigns in India have been tied to cricket, be they zoozoos or SRK pretending to be Sachin to get a Pepsi.

The money was pouring from everywhere, and cricket just happened to be a great destination for it. And BCCI was happy to play ball, organizing high-TRP events, which were almost always India-Pakistan matches. And we were happy to watch.

But this isn’t just about a rivalry or ad money. It’s about the story they told that got people watching and invested.

Story Genius

The book Story Genius by Lisa Cron totally changed my perception of the world. In it, she says people pay attention to stories that might give them tools to navigate their own lives.

That’s why women love true crime, that’s why middle-aged moms bought Fifty Shades of Gray in droves, that’s why men love war movies, and that’s why everyone loved The Martian.

We aren’t actively choosing to do this. We just get invested in narratives that seem relevant to us. It isn’t just movies or books that this applies to — it also applies to Reddit posts (Remember Jenny who met up for kisses?), Twitter threads, news about a little boy falling into a well, and so on.

And that applies to what sports we choose to follow as well.

In India, we started following cricket because it showed us a path where the dominant India narrative of that era made sense — we were able to keep up with the best out there, and that meant we could consistently beat Pakistan. Beating Pakistan was also relevant to us in our everyday lives — I was only eight, but there were kids in my school who would support Pakistan in India-Pakistan cricket matches, and we would come to blows about that. We could get suspended for coming to blows over other things, but this, this was a socially acceptable way to bring out these deep tensions. Worse, I thought this was just kids in my school being edgy, but many people grew up in areas where entire neighborhoods celebrated when Pakistan beat India in cricket.

So, the ‘rivalry’ with Pakistan had real relevance to our lives, and hence we followed cricket.

Plus, Steve Bucknor ruled Sachin out on an lbw at The Gabba, and it tied in to the bias we faced around the world. Six Indian players were suspended in a test series with South Africa in 2001, and Jagmohan Dalmiya, head of BCCI, exploded at referree Mike Denness for racism. He even threatened to call off the match if Denness wasn’t replaced. South Africa backed down, because they didn’t want the series cancelled, but the ICC declared they wouldn’t recognize the match as official. The battle raged on, and it led to changing ICC rules for who could lay disciplinary charges on players. Andrew Symonds could complain of racism saying Harbhajan Singh called him a ‘monkey’, and Harbhajan, backed by Sachin, defended himself saying he was only saying ‘Teri Maa Ki’, which was insulting his mother, not his race. And further, the Indian team manager, Chetan Chauhan alleged the Australians had sledged Kumble and Dhoni, calling them ‘bastards’. The Aussies said this was a term of endearment. In the 2000s, this mirrored our own idea of ourselves, as being assertive of our rights in a new world.

And then came IPL, which has its own drama, storylines and points of interest, including local team pride, catchy chants and promos, and auction drama that are easy to get into.

At this point, cricket has gotten enough momentum and critical mass that anything can be spun into an interesting narrative. The BCCI being an absolute bulldog for decades has been vital to this.

Can other sports get to where cricket is?

Let’s take the case of a recent athlete who won many hearts — Neeraj Chopra.

Neeraj Chopra had been competing internationally in javelin throw since about 2013. He broke the World Junior record in 2015, which probably was a headline for about a day. But until he won the Olympic gold in 2021, I’m not sure he got much attention from the general public.

The reason Neeraj Chopra got so much attention was because he was the first Indian to get an individual gold in athletics. Plus, his story about being an obese child who got sent to the track to lose weight, finding the javelin, and sticking with it makes him very aspirational. And he had a few more wins and medal finishes after that so he got cemented in our minds as an athlete, and now if he’s in a tournament anywhere, I’m sure the average person wouldn’t mind tuning in. I’d say his attention lasted pretty long because he came off as graceful, humble, salt-of-the-earth and everything we liked about ourselves.

It did seem like there was an attempt to manufacture an India-Pakistan storyline there between Neeraj Chopra and Arshad Nadeem. But Indians weren’t in the mood for this nonsense anymore in 2021. If anything, the most criticism he seemed to receive was for his positive comments about Nadeem, who had pictures and videos with UN-designated terrorists.

Rivalry with Pakistan as a narrative is dead, thankfully. We as nations are now worlds apart and the very thought of any equivalence between us is icky. The whole country, with the exception of Mani Shankar Aiyar, would be mad if there was any attempt at creating this ‘rivalry’ in any other sport.

Each sport needs to find its own narrative. But that’s not necessarily hard.

Take chess. Players like Koneru Humpy, Praggnanandha and Vaishali have been playing since they were small children, and we’ve been following their progress. In following their stories, we get introduced to the landscape of international chess and the drama that exists within, be it whatever Magnus Carlsen most recently did, or Hikaru Nakamura’s disrespectful conduct, or Kramnik’s accusing Nakamura of cheating. I only occasionally look at chess news, so my knowledge is more drama than gameplay… but that matters! In chess, normies like me can peek in, see that ‘our kids are doing good’, and that keeps us attuned to chess news, so when there’s an actual big event, we can actually tune in because everyone else is.

With badminton, all the attention started with Gopichand Academy and their success in churning out many medal-winning players. One man, with strong values, against an entire system! This was the Pullela Gopichand who had refused to endorse Coke! One of us! And that got pretty far, but it does seem like that narrative hasn’t been kept going long enough for it to become self-sustaining.

A shocking thing I found was that even top badminton figures like Gopichand, Saina and Sindhu didn’t post anything about the Thomas Cup. This points to there being no unified messaging about badminton in India. Even having a single Whatsapp group would probably work better than whatever they have going.

It seems like the problems in badminton’s popularity are mainly down to the sport’s governing body. Otherwise, there’s enough to make it fly — accessible sport, players being down-to-earth role models, a possible rivalry with China, maybe even a badminton league with local teams and sponsors.

How to create lifelong sports fans

I asked my husband why he follows his chosen NBA and NFL teams.

“I grew up following them,” was his answer.

He doesn’t follow baseball, though. He says he wouldn’t know the top baseball player in America if he had to pick him out of a lineup.

Not every sport is going to appeal to everyone. Not every sportsperson is going to be famous.

I went to a local soccer open house, and I got talking with one of the coaches. Turned out, she had represented the US internationally. Someone of that background was now coaching teenagers in relative anonymity. In any large-enough university, you’ll find Olympians. And they don’t expect you’ll know them.

People follow sports because they already have a habit of following sports. They might replace one sport with another, but having made time for that habit is important. And the best way to do that is to make it a thing for kids when they are young.

Here, again, badminton is well-positioned. They seem to have a whole Role Model Factory setup, and the folks at the top - Padukone and Gopichand - have every incentive to market badminton to kids in order to attract them to their badminton schools. Players seem to be working hard, getting results and are ready to be stars. All they need is the will to have a united front.

Plus, new India needs new narratives. We are no longer upstarts against the evil world which wants to keep us down. We’re destroying Pakistan on battlefields (without even leaving our borders), we DGAF about them on sports fields. We are enjoying our demographic dividend, killing it in a lot of fields, and hungry for more. Narratives of us just fitting in and holding our own in a global world would be sufficient. Rivalries will naturally develop, and narratives around them will, too.

And, the public will pay attention to things that feel relevant to their current life. So far, ‘I’ve done something no Indian has ever before’, ‘your kids can be top players too’ and ‘my amazing story of struggle is the key to my success’ have been great. But the more we try to market our sportspeople, the more we’ll unearth new narratives.

And, it should really not be the sportsperson’s job to do this. The sport’s governing body should be the one taking care of all of this. For some reason, none of these boards seem to have the raw aggression of peak era BCCI. Maybe all we need is a couple of politically connected sharks in the right places with the balls to tweet ‘reply my SMS’ to peak era Sushmita Sen.

Never Blame The Audience

Every non-cricketing sportsman in India seems to be annoyed at the general public for not giving their sport as much attention as cricket. But that’s the wrong target.

It feels just like the people who blame their books not selling on ‘no one reads anymore!’ The solution to both is simple — tell them a story they care about!

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I had a wonderful day with my family at the zoo, where all the animals were awake, active, and hanging out where you could see them. I got to see a rhino playing ball! I couldn’t take a video because my kid was pulling at my arm, crying, “I don’t want rhinos, I want to go home,” and then proceeded to hang out in the playground and not go home. One half of me was annoyed, but the other half was now full of empathy for my parents, who would take me to fun vacation spots with once-in-a-lifetime views, and I just wanted to read a book that I could have read anywhere.

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Greeks in Modern India

We know about Alexander coming to India, the connections between the Greek generals and the Mauryans, and the Ancient Greek influence on India and vice versa. But Greeks came to India as refugees as late as the 1920s!

Greeks from Pontus, on the southern coast of the Black Sea, found themselves displaced due to the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922. They had been persecuted by the Ottomans earlier as well, so the community was already migrating. When they started being genocided in 1914, they fled in waves and settled in many parts of the world. Many went to Iran, but they were persecuted there as well, so they found their way to India.

They seem to have settled mainly in Calcutta and other major cities and focused on hospitality and retail. Names of families mentioned in the article include Economides and Kakoulidis.

I tried to see if there are any Indians or Indian businesses by these names today, and I don’t find many. It looks like most micro-diaspora groups in India just integrate into the mainstream and get considered Indian. More so since it seems like several immigration taps turned off after independence and WW2. If you look at film and acting at the time of independence, they were chock-full of first and second-generation immigrants and mixed-race individuals. But we don’t prominently know them as such — Ibrahim Alkazi was Arab, Helen is half-Burmese, Jackie Shroff is half Central Asian, Amala is half-Irish… and the melting pot that is the film industry just swallows them all.

Are 94.7% of children’s books crud?

Noted children’s book author Mac Bennett has a book out titled On Telling Stories To Children. In it, he apparently asserts that 94.7% of kids’ books coming out these days are garbage. Obviously, there was a backlash from authors of kids’ books.

But, I agree with the author of this piece that Mr. Bennett has a good point. Every time I go to the library, I look for nice books to read to my kid, and after a good twenty minutes, I just end up reaching for Dr. Seuss.

When we visit our families and dig into our old collections of books for something for the kids to read, we’re always excited by what we find. Somehow, that doesn’t hold up for books today. Heck, I don’t even care for the artistic style of Eric Carle who everyone around me seems to adore.

The issue is that many kids’ books are written to make the author feel good about themselves. Which is great for the first draft, but then you’ve to put yourself in your reader’s shoes and cater to them. They don’t do that. So, the art looks horrid, with animals in every color except the ones they are, and no one seems to write in meter anymore. I mean, maybe they do, but it’s really hard to find them through the absolute mass of books that get released everyday.

Most of the books I get from those who don’t have kids seem to be written so they seem like a good present. Most of the books in the library seem to have been written so someone in power thinks they ‘ought to be’ in a library. They aren’t written so children will ask to read them over and over again. Besides, a lot of teachers at the daycare/kinder level don’t seem to put any effort into articulating the words very much and just read in a monotone. This was a problem even when I was little.

I don’t know what incentives existed in yesteryears so authors wrote for the kids who read their books, but we gotta bring them back.

How Ancient Indians dealt with Drought

This piece discusses recent research in the historical weather conditions in India 5000 years ago and what we can infer about the Indus-Sarasvati civilization from it.

In 2018, there was research on the Tso Moriri in Ladakh, showing that there was a 900-year-long drought in India, 4350 years ago, which was triggered due to reducing precipitation over India. This seemed like an important part of why cities like Harappa and Mohenjodaro seemed to be abandoned.

But in 2025, there’s another study from IIT Gandhinagar, University of Arizona and University of Colorado, Boulder, that gives the details of how this happened.

There were four major drought events. The first had a 5% rainfall reduction across 65% of the Indus-Sarasvati area about 4400 years ago. The second was about 200 years later, and was much more severe, especially in Punjab and Sind. The third major event happened 200-250 years after that, and lasted 164 years. This event was extremely severe, with annual rainfall reduced by 13%. Not long after that, about 3500 years ago, rainfall reduced by 12%, and there was prolonged summer and winter drought.

During the first two droughts, there was a stronger winter monsoon, which helped ease out the drought. But once the winter monsoon declined, people began moving away from the Sarasvati river area. This river was not glacier-fed like the Indus, so it couldn’t sustain its population.

Different places dealt with this drought differently. A place like Saurashtra didn’t reduce rainfall much, and seems to have maintained continuity. Some other areas seemed to shift to cultivating more drought-tolerant millet instead of wheat. Coastal settlements imported food from West Asia.

But even the worst-affected areas still continued to have settlements even if most of the people had moved away. One can only imagine the kind of societal breakdowns that would have happened when drought happened over this type of timescale. And yet, we persisted.

Artifact: Qing Dynasty Birdfeeder

Here is a very simple birdfeeder from 1800s China

You fill the tall, closed bit with birdseed, and that fills the short, open bit from which the bird can feed. The black seems to be lacquered wood, the top and bottom are edged with ivory, and there are also panels of ceramic. I wonder if back in the day this would be considered a thing of beauty, or if it would come off as ‘too much going on’.

I can’t imagine using this, tbh. Within a day, a squirrel would have tried to extricate more seeds, yanked it off its hanging, and smashed it on the floor.

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I’ve been wondering about the role of screen time for kids. It feels more and more like the issue isn’t just that kids can watch TV on demand for hours on end, but that the media they consume is low-quality slop that has only one goal - to make them keep on watching.

Kids’ shows these days are tailored extremely towards kids, including to specific age groups. Kids don’t particularly care about references to classical literature or current events, so there’s nothing beyond what is specifically interesting to a child when it’s a streaming show.

I’m almost missing TV channels where you can just turn the TV on, and it’s playing something your kid can watch without needing a tricky conversation — and which ends! I feel like I gained a lot from watching stuff not explicitly targeted at me, like the news, or a horrifying movie where Ambarish dies of rabies.

Amazon Prime seems to have some free live channels, including from NASA, which is nice. And you can pay for access to more.

On that note, it hit me there are a lot of great Substacks that would be great for kids to learn from reading… but we don’t actually write keeping in mind that kids would be reading it. This very post is an example — 99% of the time, my content is PG, but then, we discover things about Amrita Shergil’s sex life.

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Amrita Shergil’s Sex Life

Noted writer Khushwant Singh made his living from being elite and then revealing his friends’ dirty secrets over the course of a nearly 80-year-long career as a writer. His niece, Tavleen Singh, got famous for doing the same thing one generation later (with her epic book Durbar).

He was elite because his father, Sobha Singh, was the builder who built much of Lutyens’ Delhi (and he also was the only witness who testified against Bhagat Singh and got him sent to the gallows. He got knighted for his troubles). So Khushwant Singh’s very guts were embedded in the ruling class of Delhi.

He’s also known for talking a lot about sex and being a dirty old man. He seemed to have talked more about sex than actually done it, because 1) his life involved waking up at 4 am and writing, for years on end, and 2) His wife was cheating on him with a senior bureaucrat for years on end.

But he’s a goldmine for the dirty secrets of rich and famous Delhiites. One of whom was the iconic artist Amrita Shergil.

Excerpts from his book. Source.

They were in the same circles. She was known for her voracious sexual appetite.

Khushwant Singh says:

She usually stayed in Faletti’s Hotel. She was said to have given appointments to her lovers with two-hour intervals – at times six to seven a day – before she retired for the night. If this was true (men’s gossip is less reliable than women’s) love formed very little part of Amrita’s life. Sex was what mattered to her. She was a genuine case of nymphomania, and according to her nephew Vivan Sunderam’s published account, she was also a lesbian. Her modus vivendi is vividly described by Badruddin Tyabji in his memoirs. One winter when he was staying in Simla he invited Amrita for dinner. He had a fire lit for protection from cold and European classical music playing on his gramophone. He wasted the first evening talking of literature and music. He invited her again. He had the same log fire and the same European classical music. Before he knew what was happening, Amrita simply took her clothes off and lay stark naked on the carpet. She did not believe in wasting time. Even the very proper Badruddin Tyabji got the message.

Years later Malcolm Muggeridge, the celebrated author, told me that he had spent a week in Amrita’s parents’ home in Summer Hill, Simla. He was then in the prime of his youth – early twenties. In a week she had reduced him to a limp rag. ‘I could not cope with her,’ he admitted. ‘I was glad to get back to Calcutta.’

By the time she met Khushwant Singh, she was married to her cousin. Wiki tells me she was engaged to be married to someone else, but that man left because she was having an affair with her cousin.

When she met his family socially, his son was a 7-month-old, whom everyone was cooing over. Amrita Shergil, OTOH, said, “What an ugly little boy!” Mrs. Khushwant Singh was pissed and decided to blackball Amrita.

Everyone was soon talking about Amrita’s bad behavior. Amrita was annoyed at the consequences she had to reap, and decided to exact revenge in the only way she knew — “I will seduce her husband”, she said. But before any of that could happen, she was dead within the year, all of age 28.

Chakravyuh in Solapur indicates trade with Greco-Romans

I found this article really interesting — In the grasslands of Solapur district, they found a 50 ft by 50 ft labyrinth, and it dates back over 2000 years.

I only knew labyrinths in the context of the Minotaur — it was a notoriously complex structure created by Daedalus to hide the Minotaur. But it turns out, labyrinths are also a single-path structure you can walk on for meditation and reflection (though, sources that say this are more like theosophists and such).

Apparently, they also keep finding a lot of Greco-Roman artifacts in this region — it was a trade route for European merchants in ancient times. And it’s possible that the labyrinths were constructed as landmarks for the traders. There is another big labyrinth site near Gedimedu in Tamil Nadu, which is also along an ancient trade route.

The labyrinths in India have a spiral at their center, and they are called a chakravyuha. IIRC, the original Chakravyuha, as in the Mahabharata, was not a physical structure, but a battle formation that Abhimanyu had to navigate.

It feels like there’s a lot of confusing uses of terms here.

I dug into Alpha School

I’ve been inundated with content about Alpha School for the past several months. For the uninitiated, Alpha School is a new kind of very expensive private school that claims to compress all learning into just TWO HOURS, with personalized learning so kids can have the rest of their day to learn ‘life skills’. They claim your kid will be ahead of grade level, while also loving school.

Sounds great, right? That’s what I thought before I put my own kid in school and volunteered in classrooms.

When I read all the reviews with that perspective, it becomes quite clear — the two-hour learning is just kids grinding on educational software that isn’t actually very good, and the ‘life skills’ are regular after-school activities most kids go to. They expel kids who “don’t fit in”, and even with the ability to do that and a student-teacher ratio of 5:1, they seem to have significant issues with bullying anyway. No one who is actually smart would think Alpha School is any good.

To have the rubber meet the road, I actually went to an Alpha School virtual info session the day this post came out. I asked a simple question in the chat—do high school students actually get to do science labs?

They actually don’t! They said, ‘Students do hands-on activities in the afternoon. Book a call with us to know more.’ So they haven’t even thought about science labs?! Or they did and decided it doesn’t belong in the curriculum?

What school worth its salt actually doesn’t do science labs despite taking $75,000 a year? At that tuition level, you should be able to visit the International Space Station and do experiments there.

Alpha School to me seems like a slightly more accountable version of Acton Academy, which I wrote about here:

ADHD Writer Mom

Weird School Alert - Acton Academy

My Instagram is full of mom stuff — lunchbox ideas, hassled-mom memes, crafting clips, and… ads for private school and extracurriculars…

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6 months ago · 12 likes · 4 comments · Lila Krishna

Artifact: Centaur-sea-serpents from Gandhara

The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco has this pair of half-man, half-serpent sculptures. Why on earth would this be in an Asian art museum?

Turns out, it’s from Gandhara. The style is very Greek, of course, like how centaurs are typically portrayed. But the lower half is a sea serpent.

I assume these are just purely decorative, because I can’t imagine any story involving a creature like this, even if imagined. It just doesn’t sit right in your mind!

A man-horse works, because you can horse around on fours, but still have your hands free. But a snake-man is just weird because he can’t slither on the ground without his hands getting in the way, and his torso is too delicate to move on the ground. At the same time, he can’t half-slither that well, because the motion stops at the human half, which is upright. Seems like it would be a lot of work to not fall over because the center of mass is not aligned with the upright body.

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We see this in movies about school — Freedom Writers, School of Rock, Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver — all have teachers doing ‘something different’ to win the confidence of their students. RateMyProfessor and social media ruined that genre, which was highly dependent on one-sided media reports of miracle teachers.

Tools were less messy. In the 2000s, One Laptop Per Child was the big thing. The idea of children getting a leg up because they could teach themselves through a laptop, even when the teachers around them weren’t great, seemed to really fire our imagination. In the 2010s, this lapsed into TED talks, where we’d all get smarter just by watching a 15-minute video. And MOOCs like Coursera. We could get a Stanford education from home!

Now we know none of that works very well. But people can’t stop trying to “innovate” in education, so Americans, with their vaunted efficiency, can learn faster than kids grinding in India and China, and still have time to go to prom and do associated shenanigans.

The latest in this trend is Alpha School.

Alpha School

Alpha School stirs up a lot of discourse on social media. The narrative is that public schools are all horrible, and you ought to pull your kid out and try to homeschool them.

Or, you can put them in Alpha School, which compresses all their learning into 2 hours a day, and then teaches them actually useful stuff, like social skills and entrepreneurship.

Astral Codex Ten had a long review about this school. Which was enlightening to read. I was wondering how on earth do you get kids to learn everything in just two hours a day? Or even three?

At the time I read it, I felt ‘great, but not my ideal school’ — what they were doing was to have kids grind on an online program, which would adapt to their level. So, if you are answering all the questions, it moves on to harder and harder material.

The numbers that they reported were the MAP score - it’s an adaptive test administered to children at the beginning and end of the school year in order to figure out gaps in their learning. It shows what grade you test at. Apparently, Alpha School kids were testing two grades ahead.

Was it just selection effects? It’s a private school, and most people don’t have $40k a year lying around.

No, they said, look at our extremely diverse Brownsville, TX campus, which is majority Latino. Those kids are doing well, too.

Well, I came across ’s four-part account of her experience at Alpha School in Brownsville, TX.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Her kids apparently did not do well there. Plus, she says:

out of the original roughly 30 students who started at the Brownsville campus in 2022, only 2 remained by the end of Year 3.

If the great numbers are because the children who don’t fit the stats are edged out one way or another, then those aren’t great numbers.

When I read her posts as well as the Astral Codex Ten post, a picture emerges of how the pedagogy is supposed to work.

They claim to not have teachers. They have Guides. But…. the guides have teaching credentials! (It’s in the job description). And, it seems to be a 1:5 guide to student ratio! That’s way more than in public schools (1:20) or private schools (1:10).

The Two-Hour Learning seems to be mostly on iXL, a learning platform that is used in regular schools as well. They seem to learn math, science and social science using iXL.

And, they learn foreign languages using — get this — Duolingo!! Yes, yes, we’ll come back to this.

The two-hour learning takes way longer than two hours (obviously). They do 3-4 hours, with more for when they fall behind (as they would).

But the afternoons are for ‘life skills’.

From the ACX review, the ‘life skills’ feel like what you’d expect from an afterschool program, or fun extracurriculars at school. Sports seem popular. They have chess, Go, and ice-skating. They also have debate and piano. But they also have shit like ‘Organizing a Thanksgiving Dinner’, which… seems much less involved than the cookery class for teens run by our local parks department.

The only thing that seems ‘real’ is the kids owning and running an AirBnB. But somehow, that phrasing reminded me of this epic Tracy Jordan line:

I was impressed reading the ACX review before my kid started public school. But now, after volunteering in K-8 classrooms, after-school, tutoring kids, and helping organize extracurriculars for almost a year, I’m convinced Alpha School is sucking parents dry with little to show for it.

Alpha School is sucking parents dry with little to show for it.

Alpha School has a tuition of $40,000 a year in Austin, TX. Austin private schools typically cost like $10-15,000. They are opening a campus in Palo Alto, and they seem to be charging $75,000. Which is way more expensive than a $50,000-a-year school like Harker, which has PhDs teaching high school and alumni who seem almost obscenely successful.

So, Alpha is QUITE expensive.

Too expensive, I’d say, for a school mainly based on grinding on standard-issue education platforms.

Now, the platforms it seems to use for its pedagogy are also used at public schools! So much that there’s a viral blog post about how iReady makes kids hate school. So what is Alpha doing differently? What is its value add?

Most of the money seems to be going into the 5:1 student-teacher ratio. This is like four times as many teachers as a typical public school. This is like a typical classroom with six teachers! Think back to your own schooling experience — what would it be like with six teachers in your classroom?

If they aren’t teachers (despite the teaching credential in the job description) and they aren’t teaching, what are they doing?

Their whole job seems to be to keep kids on task as they grind iXL. Making sure there’s no zoning out and doodling, no switching tabs, no opening TikTok.

iXL makes this quite easy to do from just the platform. It doesn’t have to be a whole job. The teacher can lock what apps kids are allowed to use, monitor all their screens remotely, see how many problems they are getting right, and identify if they are stuck at a particular problem.

If the kids get stuck, the guides show up and guide them…. no, jk, they don’t. They go through a ‘stuck point’ process. Which, according to JeskaLuv, is like

I walked her through the “stuck point” process: “Did you read the instructions? Did you watch the video?”

Yeah, that’s basically what they seem to do, apart from playing a video at the start of the lesson covering what they are going to do. Possibly from Khan Academy.

They also don’t know the curriculum. They probably don’t have expertise or a credential in the subject they are ‘guiding’, because she says:

The guides tried to help too, but they didn’t know the curriculum well enough. They often gave incorrect methods just to arrive at the right answer.

Which is insane, right? And they seem to do a version of the ‘Socratic method’ I mocked in this post on Acton Academy — they don’t give kids answers, they keep asking them questions till they figure it out shrug and say ‘never mind’. They seem to be encouraged to Google for the solution. In which case, the Guide seems criminally underused?

Plus, iXL isn’t supposed to be used in isolation! At the very least, you’re supposed to have a teacher teach and then use iXL for practice.

iXL seems to have cancelled Alpha School’s license because they were using it in isolation. But worry not, Alpha seems to have copied all their content (likely also against the Terms of Service) and now has their own platform that is likely a shittier iXL.

iXL on its own isn’t great. Like most platforms, it relies heavily on multiple-choice questions. This greatly limits how children learn to reason. I can understand learning through MCQs when you’re attempting the IIT-JEE, but for standard-level subjects, especially science and social science, I don’t think you’ll learn enough just this way.

And it isn’t a ‘smart’ platform in any sense of the word. It is incapable of accommodating decimal inaccuracies in your answers. How will it account for other subjects that have way more subjective answers?

Foreign Language through Duolingo?!

Duolingo for learning foreign languages BOTHERS me greatly. I have a 250-day streak learning Chinese, so I have a grip on its strengths and weaknesses.

Duolingo is great for learning to identify phrases in the wild, and great for persisting with language learning. But it’s quite disorganized in what you’ll learn. Like, a simple kids’ book that lists the names of all the colors, numbers, and shapes, and the 100 most common words would get you much further ahead than weeks on Duolingo. There are actual songs for kids that teach you colors, numbers, seasons, months, animals, and birds that will give you more knowledge and more easily. Duolingo doesn’t do any of that.

Worse, if you’re not writing down what you’re learning in a notebook (which you can’t do without significant effort if you’re tuned in to Duolingo’s metrics), you won’t see the connections in word structures, phrase structures, and other aspects like tones, homophones, and false friends. If you don’t gain this scaffolding, it’s like running with ankle weights.

But the metrics are great…. right?

So from what I see, Alpha is reporting their MAP scores and talking about how amazing their students are. But they aren’t reporting any other numbers.

MAP is an adaptive test given 2-3 times a year, and it measures how much growth a student is seeing from their starting point. It is completely different from standardized tests like CAASPP and STAAR, which check if a student is meeting grade standards. These are usually the numbers reported to say kids can’t read or do math.

In Texas, the STAAR test is mandatory for all public schools, is important in students moving from one grade to the next, and in high school, the scores are essential for you to graduate at all. WHY are Alpha Schools not publishing those scores? Those would be vital in comparing them with other schools in the state.

They even offer their students financial incentives to get high STAAR scores. If their STAAR test results were good, you can bet they’d be tom-tomming that to hell and back. And they aren’t. That’s suspicious.

Stressing the students out as motivation?

From the ACX post, it seems like students get AlphaBucks (1 AlphaBuck = 10 cents) for doing their work. They make about like $1-2 a day, and they can use that at the school store to buy things.

I tried this with my kid, giving her a quarter every time she played a song from the songbook. It worked for about 2-3 months, and then she said (after amassing a princely $25), “I don’t need to play music for money, I’m already rich”. The only way I could motivate her more was by convincing her to spend her money on pointless toys so she’d want more money and be willing to work for them. But those are not the values I want to cultivate, so I’m trying things other than money.

Seems like Alpha Brownsville hit this wall as well.

From the JeskaLuv posts about Alpha Brownsville, it’s clear that the guides stress students to hell and back to meet their metrics, while not even helping them understand the basic concepts. If they are struggling, they take away all the fun stuff, and have them grinding more and more on iXL. They make them feel like loser kids if they aren’t having their metrics high enough, which is what has them skipping meals to grind more.

With these resources, you should be doing so much better.

If you had a 1:5 ratio of teachers to students, and you could kick kids out, you wouldn’t have behavioral problems in any school.

And yet, Alpha Brownsville seems to have a problem with bullying and disruptive children.

JeskaLuv says:

There were also issues with bullying. {…}. Most kids were affected at some point. I chalked a lot of it up to age, the high number of neurodivergent students, and the natural difficulty many had with social cues. But my issue was with how the school handled it. Some students were given multiple chances. Others were not. One student asked to finish the spring semester from home after being harassed repeatedly. The school denied the request, forcing the family to unenroll.

I fail to understand how you can have this extent of bullying with this many adults present. That would only happen if the adults think it’s not their job to teach and model good behavior. Also, if a large portion of your student body is neurodivergent, wouldn’t you want people trained in helping them on your staff?

If parents are paying $40k a year in Texas, you can literally hire PhDs to teach all the subjects. You could get Joe Rogan to teach the kids stand-up comedy and podcasting. You could have tailor-made curricula for each student. But they settle for learning 2.6x faster.

Look at the best schools — is this how they teach their students? I love science, and I wouldn’t leave my kid’s science education to a computer program. Like, do they even have science labs? Do the kids get to even cut open a frog? A cockroach? Do they have a lab full of preserved creatures, at the very least? Or, did they at least get a bunch of caterpillars and watch them transform into butterflies? They do that in public pre-K.

Maybe that’s too expensive, but do they get to hands-on construct a triangle with a compass and ruler? Measure an angle with a protractor? How can you say you’re giving children a quality math education if they aren’t getting to even do that?

Plus, like I said before, the ‘life skills’ seem awfully like after-school activities that most kids do — sports, musical instruments, specialized skills. The entrepreneurship thing seems exciting, but I came across a Reddit comment saying they were made to create and post TikToks to market their work.

The fanciest schools eschew screens. They go it old school. They focus on good classroom instruction and support that with experiential learning and field trips. There’s been such a backlash against using tech in schools with proven downsides that LAUSD is going screen-free now.

However, all you get at Alpha School is a screen and an adult driving you to keep staring at it. It’s not the approach actually smart people would take.

Alpha School is sucking parents dry with little to show for it.

A Stupid Person’s Idea of a Smart Place

The parent who reviewed Alpha School on ACX said this in her post about the school her kids were in before Alpha:

There was no overall school curriculum. Every teacher did their own thing. While one first-grade class had weekly spelling bees, the teacher in the other classroom did not believe in learning spelling at all. But it didn’t matter. The metrics they measured the kids on in both classes advanced “enough” that no one was concerned.

This doesn’t seem like a smart person, TBQH. At least, not someone who comes from solid learning. This would be the first thing any smart parent would check — curriculum and pedagogy, not just the entry criteria. You want to know your school is doing something beyond selection bias.

Her kid was in a ‘gifted’ school in first grade. I gotta ask, WHY? Sure, maybe they wanted to stay away from the poors, but the delta isn’t that much better, as they found out the hard way.

It seems rather trivial to find an academic-focused school if you have $40k a year lying around. Just put your kids in a Challenger or a Stratford, and you have them consistently two grades ahead. Heck, there are actually several Challenger schools in Austin, and they cost less than half of what Alpha Austin does.

I think I know why Alpha seemed attractive to a parent who posts on ACX — their kids probably can’t focus long enough. They don’t tolerate that shit in Challenger. I remember reading an article about the lady who founded Challenger, saying she was watching toddlers in a daycare and realized they were wasting time playing instead of learning to read and do math. It’s not for the faint-hearted.

The ACX post also mentions that the new media folks in Austin send their kids to Alpha School:

Austin is home to a small group of non-conformist “new media” personalities. I can name a dozen off the top of my head: Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Lex Fridman, Andrew Huberman, Byrne Hobart, Razib Khan, Peter Attia, Matt Bateman, Chris Williamson, Ryan Holiday, David Parell, Rob Henderson and the Kill Tony guys. At least 3-4 from that list have kids in one of the Alpha schools.

A good number of those names scream stupid people trying to seem smart. Of course, they won’t notice if their kids don’t understand how the Pythagoras Theorem works. Likely, they also teach their children to disrespect teachers, so they probably struggle in a regular school.

Americans, as I said at the beginning, want learning to come easily and quickly. They say stuff like “Finland and South Korea have the same PISA scores despite Korea putting in more hours".” But the friction is what helps you learn. The immersion and the hours are what help you learn hard things. Personalized teaching is what helps you get over the frustration and learn at your ideal pace. Americans try to innovate their way out of the friction and frustration. It won’t work!

It’s all about motivation

The difference I find between the ‘accelerated’ classrooms and the others is simply that the kids manage to stay on task. Even if they goof around, they come back to the task. Is this a symptom or a cause of learning more? I don’t know.

There are many ways to get kids to stay on task, but you want to balance that out with allowing them to manage their own attention. This is the challenging thing about school: How do you get kids to pay attention all day? Many billions have gone into figuring this out.

A big part of it is just kids being motivated enough to WANT to stay on task. But that will differ based on individual abilities, what they are used to, the learning environment, and the adults around them. As these things differ, your motivation and hence ability to stay on task, will differ.

What people are trying to do is find a one-size-fits-all solution for motivation. And in this, they try to use gamification to do so. People in all countries and of all backgrounds are addicted to games. Why not try that with learning?

Plus, many tech folks think that because they managed to learn from mucking around with a computer, everyone can (the thinking behind One Laptop Per Child). Some high-motivation adults think that just because they managed to learn machine learning from Coursera, their kids should be able to learn long division from iXL. It doesn’t work that way — to be able to learn from Coursera, you need to have learned long division from a teacher who cared.

But motivation doesn’t work that way. And if you make kids learn using intermittent dopamine hits, that’s going to wire their brains badly. If they never learn to struggle with one problem for quite a while, how will they do so as adults?

And this dopamine-based motivation doesn’t even seem to work at Alpha — their model is having an adult constantly making sure a child is grinding. It’s not customized curricula, small classes, or interesting co-curricular activities. It’s literally just adults ensuring a child is constantly on their laptop until they hit their numbers.

Most people don’t do this for good reason — it’s insanely cruel, and it doesn’t help a child learn to learn independently.

Plus, if you are paying children that much attention, you might as well teach them!

The reason they are able to scale this is that they don’t actually need to hire exceptional staff who know the subject and who know how to instill a love of their subject in children. They hire people who don’t need to be highly qualified, and then also expel the kids who don’t fit in or make their numbers look bad.

In Conclusion

There’s no shortcut to learning well. The best you can do is have your kids around smart people who love them and hope things work out.

Everything else, including Alpha School, is a scam.

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I find myself reading quite a bit these days — books that are light and focused on the current moment. My latest two reads have been ’s book Like, Follow, Subscribe, which is about family influencers, and ’s Famesick.

Lena’s memoir puts her whole life in stark relief, with a point of view very different from her first one, Not That Kind Of Girl. She got to create an HBO show at 24, and then was thrown into an obscene amount of work that she had no perspective on, and seems to have been exploited horribly by her showrunner and supposed ‘best friend’, Jenni Konner. That level of constantly being on, combined with a family that’s supportive on the surface but actually jealous of your fame, and writing a main character that’s based on you, but extremely dislikeable, seems like hell. She talks about her persistent health struggles, which I have noticed in a lot of extremely hardworking women from difficult circumstances. I have a lot of regrets through my 20s, but reading this memoir, I’m just glad I didn’t ruin my health during it.

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Like, Follow, Subscribe is rather an interesting read, though I picked it up and persisted through it on the steam of ‘omg look at these horrible parents exploiting their children for millions of dollars, I’m like soooo much better’. Honestly, I found a lot of the book unrelatable. I have no clue why people follow family influencers. Or lifestyle influencers at all. I have actually tried, but they 1) have repetitive content and 2) usually have a product placement on every second video, and I hate being sneakily sold to. I actually can’t relate to most complaints people have of Instagram - I don’t see scantily clad women, or AI-generated content other than CatFU, and I definitely don’t see much parenting advice or dating content that brainrots young women. I just seem to see memes, museums, and food. How do people end up with brain-damaging content?

Let’s lapse into an Instagram-free past — Onto our links!

Old Man from Texel fondly remembers Indian soldiers during WW2

I came across this video on Twitter, and found a linkable version on Youtube. It has an old Dutch man reminiscing fondly about the Indian soldiers who were stationed on their island during WW2

I don’t know the context of any of this, and I haven’t found the source video for this.

Why were Indian soldiers in an island in the Netherlands? I looked up the significance of Texel in WW2. It’s still not very clear to me.

Basically, the Germans had taken over the Netherlands, and islands like Texel were part of their defense against the Allies hitting them from the Atlantic. Texel seems to have been the site of the ‘last battle of WW2’, where Georgian soldiers rebelled against the SS, and were cruelly crushed. Every source says that Canadian soldiers showed up, defeated the Germans and freed the island from Axis control.

So, the Indian soldiers came in with the Canadians? I don’t know, but possibly.

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Pre-Harappan Trash Analysis

I came across this article that talks about ‘Shell middens near Dholavira’ that date to 10,000 BCE or older.

What ARE middens? Turns out, it’s just a fancy word for food waste. They found a prehistoric landfill in Khadir Bet, the island that’s home to Dholavira. It’s full of discarded shells and prehistoric tools. Carbon dating has them at 10,000 BCE.

So at this point, people were still hunter-gatherers. No cities, no farming just yet. But they still seemed to have a pretty sophisticated life with haunts regular enough that they filled up a landfill.

They found tools made of stone to cut meat, scrape hide, and process plant matter. The interesting thing is that these tools sometimes used non-local stone! This means they either traveled widely, or they had trade networks already.

Interestingly, the landfill seems to have been used repeatedly over several different eras, so people probably built cities around where they were already familiar for millennia.

The point this article is trying to make is that lack of settlement or agriculture doesn’t mean culture hadn’t started yet. That was already in progress. And it should impact how we think about hunter-gatherers.

Why do women leave tech in under 10 years?

I’ve been ruminating on this question myself, and it was gratifying to see a piece on this in AI Magazine. Apparently, 87% of women leave tech within a decade.

That’s a horrifying statistic. What is it for men, though?

Having discussed this with my own mom friends, the thing we zero in on is always that a tech job requires you to be ‘always on’. It’s not a job you can leave at the office. Sure, it can be, but if you want significant career growth, it is not. And you can’t go on for too long without significant career growth in most tech companies, which have a go-up-or-get-out culture.

Women who struggle with balancing work and family are convinced to go into Project Management or Technical Writing. But then those jobs got axed majorly in the past four years.

The work in a significant number of tech companies can feel like a race to the bottom in terms of work hours and speed of delivery. And, there are no part-time tech jobs. The ones that do exist tend to be a 4-day week at best, and they usually only give it to you if you have a long and proven track record at that company.

This is not great for men, either, which is why the FIRE movement (Financially Independent, Retire Early) is popular among men in tech. But when a family comes into the picture, men tend to structure their care work around their paying work, while women would like to fit in their paying work amid their care work. This makes sense because women feel primarily responsible for the care of their families, as we see with the Emotional Labor discourse.

I don’t have a solution, but it’s nice to talk about this.

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Faith in Fiction

Emma Darwin, a noted author of historical fiction, as well as a descendant of Charles Darwin, has this great piece in Historia Magazine about depictions of faith in historical fiction.

While writing her latest novel about an era in Europe where rebels went about smashing religious images, she started wondering why people want to destroy religious imagery. As Hindus, the question is extremely familiar, and the answer is extremely clear to us.

She talks about how difficult it is to depict the extent of faith and the emotions behind it in fiction. That’s a challenge I know too well.

I like to think I’m religious, but growing up in the ‘religion is not rational’ milieu that I did, I find it hard to get into the mindset of someone, even of my mother’s or grandmother’s generation, who would cry when they finally get a darshana of Guruvayurappa. Like, I understand it. But I don’t feel those emotions. Even if I might, life gets in the way.

So, when I try to write about the religious inner lives of revolutionaries from a hundred years ago, who see India as a Goddess, I think I come up extremely short. But that’s no excuse to erase that part of them. Someone like Lala Hardayal, a scholar at Oxford and professor at Stanford, was also a missionary of the Arya Samaj. Reading Savarkar’s memoir, you see so many instances of his religious practices keeping him sane. The last brief meeting he had with his wife before being shipped off to the Cellular Jail, his brother-in-law gave him a shloka to recite, which he came back to now and then.

We Hindus tend to minimize our religious expressions, especially when writing in English, because the English words for our practices and expressions of faith tend to sound so serious. We shouldn’t, especially since for a lot of us, they are a vital part of our inner life. We cannot depict ourselves accurately unless we go forth with describing all of ourselves.

Artifact: Mail-and-plate armor from Sindh

This complete armor set is from Sindh in the late 18th century. It’s made of steel plates joined together by chain mail, and the steel plates are covered with decorative brass. It’s currently at the Met Museum.

It would have been ten kinds of terrifying to look at in battle, especially if the armor was shiny.

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I last posted a Monday Cup of Links in October 2025, so if you’ve joined me here since then — This is what I do every Monday - a collection of links, often history-focused, for you to peruse through the week. It’s mostly stuff I’ve been reading myself, so it reflects my current interests.

But first:

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Personal/Novel Update

I started writing my novel, India House, too many years ago. I’m glad to say I’ve actually finished writing it!

It’s currently being professionally edited, which feels grand. It’s stressful to go through all the edit suggestions, honestly, but it feels nice to have a thorough professional dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s for me. I’m working on getting a nice cover for the book as well. And then we’re going to work on typesetting.

But then… what?

I have no clue how to release it. Like, I have done the Amazon self-publishing thing before, so I know how that works. But it feels like a thoroughly researched novel about Savarkar and the origins of our independence movement ought to have a little more fanfare?

I have no clue how to go about doing that. I have no clue how to rope in influential people into endorsing my book — I’m honestly SO WORRIED something about how I’ve written the book will piss them off. Or, maybe my book just isn’t good enough, and I haven’t done justice to the subject matter anyway? I basically have no confidence about this.

But then, it isn’t about me. The book is about Savarkar and his largely unsung comrades who did extremely brave things without worrying about their personal consequences. Dhingra was fifteen years younger than me when he assassinated Sir Curzon-Wyllie, and his entire family disowned him (continues to disown him to this day). I can take an email rejection, I think.

But… what should I do? I have no plan, no vision about marketing. So, do me a favor, will you? Tell me what you think I should do to market my book! What gets you buying?

Enough about me. Onto our links!

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Tamil, Prakrit and Sanskrit Graffiti in Egyptian Tombs

Researchers in Paris and the University of Lausanne have found inscriptions in Indian languages in pyramids in the Valley of the Kings.

Several of them are in Tamil, and one dude named Cikai Korran seems to have inscribed his name in a lot of places. But is that actually his name, or is it a meme? They don’t think about it that way. They seem convinced it’s the name of a dude.

Another graffiti says “Kopan Varata Kandaan” — ‘Kopan came and saw’. Could be a name, could be a meme. They don’t even consider the possibility of memery.

But, like… why were these men visiting a tomb? Was it a tourist spot then? Or a religious place? Were they there to work on it in some way, like maintenance and repair? The reason I wonder is because it’s extremely inauspicious in Indian culture to go to a tomb or anything funerary like this.

Book Recommendation - The Bucket by Arnab Ray

A while ago, I got to speak to famed author Arnab Ray.

In the podcast, he talked a lot about his upcoming book, The Bucket, which is about growing up in the ‘90s, being middle-aged in the 2020s, and how male friendships evolve through all that.

The book is out now! I was terrified to read it, because horror gives me nightmares, but Arnab uses horror and the supernatural as a way to confront extremely human themes. I’m glad I read it — Arnab’s books are quick reads, with a story that’s constantly moving forward and keeping you turning the page. It’s very, very different from Shakchunni, his earlier book, which followed more in the classic footsteps of Golden Age Bengali literature. But that’s what’s great about it — it’s a very original work with some solid payoff that comes at a time when books and movies feel derivative. Do go and read it!

Another Book - The Delhi Directive by Anirudhya Mitra

Remember the Nagesh Kukunoor series The Hunt about catching the assassins of Rajiv Gandhi? It was based on a book by author and journalist Anirudhya Mitra.

Now, Mr. Mitra has another book out called The Delhi Directive, which is 'fiction’ about Unknown Gunmen. The tagline tantalizingly says, “The only way to tell the truth is through fiction”.

I haven’t read this book yet, but I look forward to it!

Yet another book (and an interesting interview) - Hindu at Heart by Indu Viswanathan

is an educator and researcher who has been at the forefront of talking about Hinduism in America. She now has a memoir of growing up Hindu in America, and how public schools are where this identity conflict gets shaped.

I came across this really in-depth interview of hers about the book. With a child going into school, myself, in this era where Indian hate is increasing in America, I found this to be an interesting and hopeful study.

Alpha School and such

Now that I have a school-aged child, I pay more attention to discourse about school and learning and such. It’s become a prevalent topic to rail about how everything in schools is bad. But, some kids are still doing well, so what are they doing differently? Pursuing this line of thought is what helps me separate the wheat from the chaff in education discourse.

One of the most interesting lines of discourse is about Alpha School — a school where kids get to learn math, science, and reading in two hours, self-paced, and then get to learn social skills, entrepreneurship, and such the rest of the day with other kids. They seem to be putting out data saying their kids are ahead of public school kids by two grade levels. Astral Codex Ten had a long review about this school.

But then there’s this review of the Alpha Schools experience by a mom who had her kids at a satellite campus for a couple of years.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

It goes completely against the popular media discussion of how this school is run. And it reminded me of my own post about a microschool that I kept getting ads for:

ADHD Writer Mom

Weird School Alert - Acton Academy

My Instagram is full of mom stuff — lunchbox ideas, hassled-mom memes, crafting clips, and… ads for private school and extracurriculars…

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6 months ago · 12 likes · 4 comments · Lila Krishna

I realized all these ‘innovative’ new ways of schooling are basically getting you to grind all day on Khan Academy or iXL, doing multiple-choice questions. But, like, if you wanted your kid to be really good at math, would that be the route you take?

Artifact — Greek Gold Earrings

I found these in the British Museum collections. They were found in Larnaka in Cyprus and are dated to 300 BC.

These are so intricate — the little petals on the rosette at the top, the bird, and the intricate designs on the dangling inverted pyramid are so detailed and thoughtful.

I like looking at these because I want to understand what it takes for a culture to get good at making intricate jewelry.

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Technically, the previous one was supposed to be the last, the one that set you up with the final image of Savarkar heading off to the Cellular Jail.

But this one is the chapter that sets us up for the sequel - Ghadar - The Sword of Revolution.

I haven’t done much research on the content and the characters of the sequel, but I do know the action is going to be divided between San Francisco and Berlin. Maybe a touch of Canada. Maybe even Iran.

But… we know from facts that Lala Hardayal led Indian revolutionaries in the Bay Area, Viren Chattopadhyay was on the Berlin Committee, and both were on the Hindu-German Conspiracy managed by the German embassy in San Francisco.

However, they didn’t start in San Francisco and Berlin. Chatto gave West Asia and Iran a shot before deciding Germany was the one who was going to help them. Hardayal was in Martinique among the Girmitiya Indians (indentured laborers) when Bhai Parmanand, another Arya Samaji, came to Martinique and exhorted him to go to America and lead the Indians there.

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The meeting I’ve described below between Chatto and the Khediv (Caliph’s Viceroy) of Egypt is all fact. I could scarcely believe this happened, myself! The Ottoman emperor’s representative in Egypt was trying to get Indians to assassinate his British resident? There was purportedly a meeting between Chatto and Mustafa Kemal at one point as well, but I didn’t want to do all the research it would have taken to add it, especially since it didn’t add much to the plot.

Hope you have enjoyed reading the novel all these months! I didn’t intend it to be this long, but that’s just how it panned out. I hope it has been an exciting ride.

I’d love it if you shared your thoughts with me on what you’ve read! I want to keep the thoughts of you, my readers, my first supporters, top of my mind when I’m editing, formatting, marketing, and promoting the book!

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The Sword of Revolution

Chatto and Chari found themselves in a bizarre and unnerving meeting in a private suite at The Ritz in Paris. The dimly lit room, adorned with velvet drapes and rich tapestries, was opulent and cushy, but they felt unnerved to be there.

They had been summoned by none other than the Khediv of Egypt—a man known for his inscrutable alliances and volatile temperament.

The Khediv’s sharply dressed, elite guards had abducted them from a café. The message was clear: “Tell no one you are here, or we will find you and make you regret the day you were born.”

They had barely adjusted to the weight of their surroundings before the Khediv’s steely gaze fixed on them.

“Tell me how you murdered the British officer,” the Khediv ordered.

Chatto’s pulse quickened. A trap? The Khediv had a reputation for ruthless measures against those who defied British rule, especially the rebels in Egypt.

“We didn’t do it,” Chatto stammered.

“Of course you didn’t,” the Khediv’s assistant interjected with annoyance. “Or you’d be hanging from the gallows. But you know how it happened. You know how it was planned.”

Chatto hesitated. What were they asking for?

“Well, what is to say?” Chatto shrugged, “There was no grand plan. Just Dhingra walking right up to Sir Curzon-Wyllie, shooting him, and surrendering himself.”

The assistant’s brow furrowed. “That’s all?”

“Indeed,” Chari replied calmly, his voice unwavering.

“He didn’t try to run and escape?” the Khediv pressed, his eyes narrowing.

“Where would he run to?” Chatto’s said bluntly.

The Khediv nodded in agreement.

“So that’s the one in London,” the Khediv’s assistant said, “Tell us how you killed the British officers in India.”

Chatto’s stomach tightened. “What is there to tell?” he said, trying to maintain control. “The boy got ahold of a gun. He walked up to the Collector, who was responsible for atrocities in his town, shot him, and surrendered.”

“Did he give up his associates?” The assistant’s voice was thick with suspicion.

“No,” Chatto said. “But the British found them anyway, and sent them to the gallows on flimsy evidence.”

“Do you Indian men feel no fear?” the Khediv asked, almost incredulously.

“What do we have to fear worse than what the British already do to us?” Chari said.

The Khediv nodded slowly.

“The fates force me,” the Khediv said, his voice dropping to a softer, more conspiratorial tone. “I must pretend to align with the British in public, even as my heart burns with hatred for their presence in my land.”

Chatto nodded. It must be hard being a Khediv.

But then, the Khediv’s eyes gleamed.

“I need an Indian man — brave as your friends. I have a job for him. If he completes it, three generations of his family will never want for anything again.”

The words hung in the air like a dark promise. Chari leaned forward, wary but intrigued. “What is this job, may I ask?”

The Khediv’s assistant leaned in, his tone low. “The British proconsul. He causes us endless trouble. If we could make an example of him…”

Chatto and Chari exchanged a glance, their minds reeling. Had the word of Abhinav Bharat reached this far?

“Forgive me if I misunderstand,” Chatto said carefully, his voice measured. “But are you looking for a mercenary?”

The assistant’s lips curled into a knowing smile. “I understand your hatred for the British runs deeper than your own lives,” he said.

“We resent the British occupation of India,” Chari replied firmly, his voice resolute, “but we have no interest in harming those who have had nothing to do with us. It doesn’t help our cause.”

The Khediv’s eyes flickered with irritation before he spoke again, the tension palpable. “What price can I offer for such bravery?”

“Forgive me for my insolence,” Chatto said, “But if you can help us send arms and ammunition to India…”

The Khediv’s face darkened, and he shook his head slowly. “Alas, I do not have that power.”

The atmosphere in the room shifted abruptly, and the meeting quickly ended, their hosts ushering them out with little ceremony.

The door shut behind them with a soft, final click.

As they walked down Rue de Rivoli, the cool Parisian air did nothing to ease the knots their stomachs had tied themselves into

“What on earth?” Chari muttered, glancing at Chatto, still trying to make sense of the encounter.

“They think we’re mercenaries now?” Chatto shook his head, incredulous.

“It’s not a bad thing. The British are poking around in Egypt,” Chari said, half to himself. “They’ll be deposing the Caliph in Constantinople soon, if he’s not careful. But what’s strange to me is… they can’t find a single Egyptian to do this job?”

“They probably want to pin it on us,” Chatto said with a dry chuckle. “We’re the scary Indian revolutionaries, always lurking, ready to shoot British officers willy-nilly.”

Chari raised an eyebrow, his voice light. “Maybe we should go straight to the Caliph himself and sort this out. They sent their hordes to India; they can do so again to liberate us this time.”

Both of them broke into laughter at the absurdity of it all.

But then Chatto suddenly grew quiet, his face turning serious. “The Caliph’s Viceroy summoned us. Surely the Caliph will grant us ten minutes? There are tons of Indian businessmen and pilgrims in his land; he won’t take us lightly.”

Chari stopped mid-laugh.

He had always wanted to visit Constantinople.

Lala Hardayal stood at the edge of the bustling dock in Djibouti, the hot African sun bearing down on his back as the chaotic sounds of cargo being loaded filled the air. His gaze was distant, unfocused, lost in thoughts as his hands tightened around the crumpled pages of Tatya’s book, The Indian War of Independence. He could feel the weight of it — the words, the ideas — pressing down on him.

Paris had been a suffocating web of intellectuals and pseudo-revolutionaries, each claiming to have the only answer to the Empire’s oppression. But Hardayal had grown weary of their ideals that felt detached from the true pulse of India. He’d seen enough of the grand debates and endless talk.

Most of all, he had grown weary of the idea of targeted assassinations, the misguided belief that one or two deaths could shake the empire.

Those did send out tremors. But it wasn’t enough.

These assassinations weren’t going to take down the British. The Empire had a bottomless well of men, all ready to serve its whims. The real revolution wasn’t going to come from killing a few officers; it would come from bringing the entire machine to its knees.

Tatya had always seen it clearly — the assassinations were a tool to awaken the hordes. An army of the disenfranchised. The forgotten. Who would then infiltrate the machinery of the Empire. Subvert it. Break it from within. They were the ones who could collapse the system from the inside.

Hardayal crowded onto the ship with poor, proud Indians from French India—men and women bound for the sugarcane fields of Martinique. They were just another cog in the machine, another group of expendable bodies, indentured to the whims of empire.

But Hardayal saw potential. He saw the fury and resentment that had been buried beneath a hundred years of subjugation.

They needed to be free. And he would be the one to set them on that path, no matter the cost, no matter the sacrifice.

As the ship creaked beneath him, carrying its human cargo towards a distant, uncertain future, Hardayal’s resolve hardened.

This was a war of survival.

And his journey was just the beginning.

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This chapter is all from Savarkar’s memoir of prison, Mazi Janmathep. The details that stood out to me were that Savarkar was taken to Madras, where he was briefly held at Madras Central Jail before being shipped off to the Andamans.

But most importantly, Savarkar was questioned about the assassination of Collector Ashe at Maniyachi. He, of course, had no idea of what had happened as he was kept largely isolated in prison without access to even newspapers. So he was trying to counter-question the cops to try to understand what had happened.

One more thing that stood out was that many cops seemed quite pleasant to Savarkar, and all seemed to agree it was a gross injustice that he was being sent off to the Andamans for 50 years. Many British officials even offered to help him out of this situation using whatever means they had, like a prison doctor saying he could certify him too sick for transportation, or another official saying he would recommend his name for release on the King’s birthday. Besides, he was already facing fifty years in prison, so that brought a certain understanding between the cops and him.

So, when the cops were questioning him about the Ashe assassination, they hit a point where they had to admit that they were both questioning each other. And they could do nothing other than laugh about the absurd reality of the situation.

Savarkar’s own description of his internal state when getting on the SS Maharajah headed to Port Blair was filled with a lot of sadness. He describes the crowd that had come to watch as “having come to see a corpse being tied to its bier”. There was nothing upbeat about his mental state in that moment.

No one in Savarkar’s situation would be looking back at the ‘events of the novel’, so to speak. At this point, he had been in horrifying prisons for nearly two years, been insulated from the world, completely isolated, and was burning with fever. One of the first things he does on the ship is to ensure he is given the food he is legally mandated to be given. IRL, at this moment, Savarkar has more pressing worries than taking stock of life.

But in my novel, this is where we leave our protagonist. Our last glimpse of him, which puts the whole novel in perspective. We’re contrasting him with him from the first chapter. We’re going to need more sensemaking than what reality provides. This final image is going to be more reflective than what reality would reckon.

Savarkar talks about how, when all the people were gawking at him being loaded on the ship, he wished at least one of them would say to him, “Go forth, brother, I will sacrifice for this country in your stead”, he would have gone happily. What I want to instead say is that he is able to look forward because he knows, thanks to the news of the Ashe assassination, that his comrades are going forth and sacrificing for India in his stead.

Plus, not long after this, Lala Hardayal took a ship to Martinique, where he hoped to organize the indentured Indian laborers into fighting the British. He eventually turns his focus to organizing Indian farmers in California, which leads to…. Ghadar and the Hindu German Conspiracy.

So, yes, the novel ends with Savarkar going away to prison for fifty years, a notably hopeless situation, but I talk about the machinations his friends are up to which shows us that the movement isn’t dead, and we’re going to see a sequel.

Hope you enjoy this!

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Madras Central (Jail)

The train barreled through the arid plains of rural India, relentless and unforgiving, like a tiger with its prey. Tatyarao felt like the lifeless rabbit caught in its jaws, knowing escape was impossible.

The windows were sealed tight, trapping in the suffocating heat and the stench of sweat. Through the grime-covered glass, Tatyarao could barely make out the blurred landscape, the world reduced to a murky smear of colors.

Time and place slipped away as station names flashed by in a haze, as excited vendors screamed out their wares at station stops. Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil — their words flowed from one to the next, merging seamlessly like rivers converging. He marveled at how fluidly the languages bled into each other, each shifting in tone and texture, until it felt like one language had melted into the next.

The meals changed as slowly as the scenery. Poha for breakfast, ragi rottis with chillies for dinner, and dosas the next morning. Each bite was bitter with the knowledge that food would be scarce and flavorless from here on. His eyes welled with tears, but he blinked them away when he caught one of the officers watching him.

Exhaustion, fever, and hunger stole his consciousness, but when he awoke, their eyes would be on him again. He’d jerk awake, his heart hammering, only to see the man’s eyes on him, only to calm himself with the mantra his brother-in-law had given him.

At Guntakal, a banana-leaf package of lemon rice arrived, followed wordlessly by a vadai tossed onto his open leaf. Tatyarao snatched it up quickly, wolfing it down before anyone noticed. Who knew when he would get another fried treat?

By the time they got to Arakkonam, there was a strange familiarity between him and the policemen. Their glowering faces had softened slightly. Perhaps it was pity. Perhaps curiosity. They had begun anticipating his needs, even ready to take him to the bathroom if he showed the smallest sign of distress.

As he felt the train slow down to what seemed like a final stop, his heart was in his mouth.

Could this train, speeding relentlessly onward, turn around now and take him home? He blinked back the hot sting of tears.

Ignoring his plea, the train pulled into Madras Central with a long sigh of steam, hissing as if it were as exhausted as he felt.

This was it.

Endgame.

Policemen with khaki shorts and red-striped turbans brought out rows of prisoners from the train, who were chained in groups of five or ten. Tatya rose too, but “No, stay,” barked the officer with the thick mustache.

The British officer from the front of the train came in. He unchained Tatya from his seat.

“Well, Mr. Savarkar,” he said. “Here we are.”

Tatya studied Officer James, but said nothing.

“I’m sorry this is how we must part,” James continued, his tone unexpectedly soft. “I wish you the best.”

Tatya, caught off guard by the officer’s civility, nodded. Why care? he wondered. Then it struck him — James must’ve expected a raving, defiant prisoner, someone brimming with hate. Instead, he got a young, feverish man, meek and composed despite the suffering. Perhaps guilt gnawed at James for misjudging him.

“I do hope, Mr. Savarkar, you’ll be free soon. The coronation in Delhi is coming up, and I’ll put in a word for you,” James added.

“Thank you,” Tatya replied, “But my wounds are too deep for hope.”

One of the officers piped up. This sentence is a tragedy, Mr. Savarkar. We’ll do what we can to help you.”

“They had made you sound like some rakshasa, sir,” the mustachioed officer said, his own face taking on a rakshasic undertone as he said it. “It is very unfair,” he said, shaking his big face.

The third officer chuckled. “Let’s not forget, he gave them a hell of a chase in France,” he said, and the others joined in, though they quickly stiffened as the prisoners peeked into the compartment.

“Mr. Savarkar, I hope this is au revoir,” James said, tipping his hat. “You will be free soon. Your courage will stay with me.”

The officers followed suit, tipping their hats, before a voice interrupted.

“Ah, the hero of Marseilles!” A Madras Police officer in a sharp beret called out, his Telugu accent peeking through his clipped British tones.

“Inspector Alex Pandian,” James introduced, saluting. “These men, Constables Kale, Arole, and Hazare, have made this journey easy. And so has our prisoner here.” He gestured to Tatya.

Pandian gave a slight nod to Tatya. “I’ll see to your safe passage from here, Mr. Savarkar.” He locked their handcuffs together. They exchanged salutes, and the officers from the train left.

Tatya alighted onto the platform to a haze of heat, steam, coal smoke, and whoa, what was that stench? He had just spent three days in a hot train with a hundred other unwashed men in high heat, and yet the wall of putrid air was worse. He involuntarily retched.

“I see you have discovered our Cooum,” Inspector Alex Pandian said.

“What is the Cooum?” Tatya asked, expecting it to be a beached whale or a cheese factory ten times the size of the one in France he had walked by.

“Our river,” Pandian replied. “All the town’s sewage flows into it. Terrible planning. But we call it ‘Welcome to Madras.’”

What was this strange pomposity, he wondered, that one was proud of the sewage in their town?

“How far is it to where we’re going?”

Pandian smiled. “The Central Jail is just a stone’s throw away.”

Almost like it’s all designed purely to transport Indians to Port Blair, Tatya thought, his heart crying to go home.

As they walked, three more constables joined. Tatya glanced around, and his gaze landed on a line of newspapers hanging from a string at a nearby stand.

He could just make out an image — a paternal-looking Englishman and a police sketch of a young Indian man with intense eyes. Something in him stirred. He had to know what that news story was about!

He tried to read the bold yellow text on the images, but struggled. The letters were in Tamil — he should have learned it better. But the image, and the connection it sparked, quickened his pulse.

It was just like the newspaper photo the day Dhingra had sacrificed himself!

The officers resumed their conversation in Telugu and Tamil. Tatya, distracted, kept his eyes on the paper, his thoughts racing. As he walked beside Alex Pandian, a new energy gripped him. Who was that young man? What had he done? He scanned the words he could catch as they moved, determined to learn more.

“Higginbotham’s,” he read. No, that was the name of the newsstand.

“P. Orr & Sons,” he read. No, that was an advertisement for watches.

“Collector Ashe Shot Dead,” he read while walking past Higginbotham’s.

His heart skipped a beat. Could it be? Was it possible?

But he couldn’t linger. Inspector Alex Pandian’s unslackening pace dragged him along by the wrist. Ahead, the chained lines of prisoners were disappearing into a complex of buildings. His chest tightened with foreboding.

And yet, he was distracted by this matter of Collector Ashe. Who was the young man with the intense eyes?

He debated asking Inspector Alex Pandian. He was already facing fifty years — it couldn’t get any worse. But he stopped himself. His interest would be considered proof of his involvement, and they’d use it to turn the screws on whichever brave soul orchestrated it all.

Above him, the big metallic letters loomed on austere gray buildings and said MADRAS CENTRAL JAIL.

The air felt cooler inside, being as the building was made of stone. But Tatya was not fooled by the relative calm. Despite the shrubbery and the vaulted arches, he felt the familiar stench of authoritarian cruelty papered over with government apathy.

He was led into the large entrance hall, where the prisoners were being registered, and was pointed to stand on a scale by a man in a white coat.

“Five foot, ninety-five pounds,” the officer said, noting it in the register. “Guilty of Waging War Against Crown And King. Two life sentences. Fifty years.”

Tatya nodded, the weight of the sentence heavier than the chains.

Alex Pandian guided him through a narrow hall, past cells where prisoners shouted and laughed, ignoring the bloodstains on the wall. A chill ran through Tatya’s spine.

When Tatya got to his cell, the stench hit him.

“Prime river-facing property, Mr. Savarkar,” Alex Pandian said.

Tatya forced a smile. “Rest well, Mr. Savarkar. Tomorrow is the big day.”

Tired, Tatya stretched out on the floor. His lower back hurt from sitting for three days straight, and he stretched himself in a bitilasana. He couldn’t tell what time it was. The sun streamed in from a transom window high up. Beyond it was probably this sewage-filled river the inspector had mentioned. Cooum had he called it? He had to mock Aiyar for it, he thought.

Aiyar! Dear Rishi! What had happened to him?

Did he succeed at what he, Tatya, had failed and make it to French territory? That wily giant definitely would have.

How did this young man get this Collector Ashe? Was it a bomb? A gun?

It had to be a gun. There wasn’t enough time for Aiyar to figure out bombs and establish a supply chain of picric acid and everything else. The Bengalis had had the luxury of time and authorities ignorant of their plans, and yet they had messed up and been caught. Aiyar wouldn’t risk it, especially under the circumstances.

Somehow, wily Rishi had managed to terrorize the authorities. Was this Ashe the same as the one who had passed judgment against that fiery young Congressman, Chidambaram Pillai? He hoped it was. That man needed to be avenged.

He said a short prayer, beseeching the Gods to keep Aiyar safe, as sleep took him.

“Good morning, Mr. Savarkar,” said Inspector Alex Pandian in his clipped accent.

Tatya had been rounded up with all the other prisoners, handcuffed, and marched to the harbour with the other prisoners.

The harbor’s closeness to the prison made Tatya uncomfortable — the prison was right by the train station, and the harbor was a stone’s throw from the prison. It almost seemed like a system set up to ship Indians to Kalapani.

The smell of fresh fish had hit him as the posse of prisoners walked to the waterfront, through endless stretches of large shipping containers. The dockworkers all paused to gawk at the prisoners.

By the time they were at the waterfront, a crowd had gathered to watch. Red-turbaned policemen pushed the crowd aside roughly to keep them away from the prisoners.

All these people were here for him? To watch him go to his death? He felt strangely self-conscious, while his eyes filled with tears again. No, he couldn’t yet let himself cry.

Far away in the water, an imposing steamship stood forebodingly by. It was too far to swim to the shore from that ship, he noticed.

Surely they weren’t afraid to transport him with all the others by now? But no, here was the Inspector again.

“Good morning, Inspector,” Tatya said.

“It’s not usually this crowded, but they all have come to see the VIP,” he smiled at Tatya a little too sweetly, “Come with me, let’s take one last boat ride together.”

Tatya obeyed.

A posse of policemen surrounded Tatya and the Inspector on the boat.

“Quite far to the ship, isn’t it?” Pandian joked to Tatya, “If your ship had docked here, no chance of escaping, like in France.”

He’d have still made it to shore, Tatya thought. Two lifetimes of Sazaa-e-Kalapani were enough motivation to push himself to the brink. But just nodded quietly.

“Such an old prison, ours,” Pandian ventured again, “Built in 1837. The British sure know how to make things last. I’m sure you felt that way in London.”

Tatya nodded. “Yes, they do.”

Pandian continued, “Quite different from our tenements and government offices, huh?”

“Much of which are built by the British again,” Tatya said, “The tenements and government offices in London are just as telling.”

Pandian laughed. “But didn’t you come away impressed by London?”

Tatya met the Inspector’s eyes.

“I came away feeling the British are on the decline,” Tatya said, “They already struggle to find young men for their army.”

He paused before he added, “Their empire won’t last fifty years.”

Alex Pandian’s laugh faltered. “I’m sure such fictions are essential for a man facing the horror you are, Mr. Savarkar,” he quickly said and pressed on.

“What happened to your Abhinav Bharat organization? Got branches in Madras?”

Ah, that was the point of this ride, Tatya realized.

“I’ve been in prison for a year, Inspector,” Tatya said, “No one comes to see me. I don’t get newspapers. No pen to write, even. Surely you know more than I do about Abhinav Bharat, or whatever fiction the courts came up with.”

“True enough,” Inspector Alex Pandian agreed, “You revolutionaries would find barely a handful of men to join you in this civilized Madras presidency. We are level-headed people, not hot-blooded scoundrels in Bombay who wage war against Crown and King. We are quite happy with the British here, keeping us safe and civilized, and away from the hordes of your Peshwas. No one would even think of disrupting law and order here.”

Tatya marveled at the wonderful bait the inspector had laid out. It was so easy to correct him with the names of Pillai and Bharati. Why, even the very construction of the Central Jail, close to the train, and close to the harbor, was an indication that the British very intently feared the Madrasi. But he stayed silent, not taking the bait.

“Everything’s calm in Madras, Mr. Savarkar,” Pandian said.

“Are you sure?” Tatya smirked.

The other policemen started chuckling.

“Sir,” one officer said to Inspector Alex Pandian, “This man here knows all about the Ashe matter.” He shot an amused glance at Tatya.

“He is pumping you for information, and you are pumping him for information,” another officer chortled.

Pandian shot him a glare, but what point was there when they all knew what was going on?

He gave in and laughed. Tatya did too.

The little motorboat touched the SS Maharaja, and they moved him to the deck. This was it. His eyes misted over.

But when he opened them again, he saw an incredible scene — all the men on the ship had come out to see him. The prisoners, the officers, the crew — they were all out on the deck, their eyes riveted on him.

Dotting the sea were boats and boats full of people. Men, women, children — their necks craned in his direction. They had all come out and gathered around. For him.

Inspector Alex Pandian undid his handcuffs, somehow confident that under all these eyes, Tatya wouldn’t dive into the Bay of Bengal and swim away to freedom.

“Mr. Savarkar, it’s been a privilege,” he said, and went back to the motorboat.

Tatya felt the eyes of everyone on him again. What are you looking at, Tatya wanted to ask them all, a corpse being tied to its bier? This felt like his funeral procession that passers by were gawking at before going back to their lives, except he was awake for it.

Could not even one voice rise, to say “Go, brother, I swear to make India free and fulfill your vow!”

They led him below decks, into an enclosure of iron bars and stale air. He sat, dizzy, letting the motion of the ship settle into his bones.

Maybe he didn’t need to worry about unfinished work. Aiyar likely was safely ensconced in Pondicherry, as was Aurobindo Ghosh. Judging by the Inspector’s reaction, Aiyar seemed to have the Madras police quaking in their boots.

Wily old Shyamji would figure something out. Madame Cama, that noble lady, would do her best. And Chatto would think out of the box and do what he could, even if he did come up short. Hardayal, he was sure, would become a leader of men somewhere else.

Maybe it was good that he and Babarao were now captured and put away. Now, the British wouldn’t know where their next threat would come from.

Others still moved in the shadows. The struggle had never belonged to one man alone. If anything, his removal only thickened the fog in which it would now advance.

Around him sat his co-prisoners. Some were lumpen, hardened men, worn down by repeated sentences. Others were barely grown, their eyes sharp with fear and fury. They would be isolated, broken, and turned against one another if left alone. He could already see it. They would need someone to hold the line, to speak, to insist.

Perhaps this was where he was meant to be, leading these men, with Babarao, Hem, Ulhaskar, and Barin. They had each, separately, threatened the Empire badly enough that they were being condemned to a fate worse than death. Wouldn’t they kick up a good fight with the jailors together?

His vow to Goddess Bhavani had not unfolded as he had imagined. But he had given it everything he had. As long as the blood coursed in his veins, he had to give her the blood sacrifices he had vowed to her.

Fever burned through him. The air was foul, his lungs aching with every breath. Yet beneath the weakness, his mind had a new fire in it that burned even brighter and filled him with new energy.

The sun was setting on the British Empire.

But first, he had to weep.

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I thought I’d make these free for everyone to read, because I rather like them.

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I am almost to the end of editing as well — nice timing.

I will bring back my regular programming — Monday Cup of Links, cultural commentary, and historical deep dives. I’m not sure what to paywall of that TBH, so until I do, only novel chapters will be behind the paywall.

Thank you, all you wonderful paid subscribers, for supporting me through writing this novel. I have a couple of ideas for what I might offer you guys, but it’ll be a few months of no new paid content. I ought to pause your subs for this duration, but I’m concerned that might impact you or newer subs from reading the novel chapters.

I’ll figure it out.

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Today’s chapter

We came across Vanchinathan two chapters ago, a clerk in Travancore who is incensed by the brutal treatment of Chidambaram Pillai and wants revenge against Collector Ashe.

Why is his story in a book that’s primarily about Savarkar, who was famously Marathi and famously lived in London? Because, in his prison memoir, he talks about being brought to Madras before being shipped off to the Andamans, and the police there were questioning him about the assassination of Collector Ashe.

It’s really hard to have an upbeat ending for a book that ends with our main character going to prison for not one, but two life terms! But this is as close as it gets — Savarkar might be stuck in prison for fifty years, but men he’s never met, in parts of the country he’s never visited, are continuing what he started.

And the upbeat ending was important for me — I don’t see why people would read about endless sacrifice without payoff. I could have ended this novel with Savarkar’s failed escape attempt at Marseilles. Many of my beta-readers expected me to. But when I tried to, the universe seemed to be saying to me, picture abhi baaki hai, mere dost.

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So, here we have Vanchinathan, trying to improve upon the work of Madanlal Dhingra and Anant Kanhere. For his troubles, we named the railway station where he assassinated Collector Ashe after him. We got at least one thing right post-independence.

Last Hurrah at Maniyachi

Vanchinathan stood at Maniyachi Railway Junction, by the train to Kodaikanal, his nerves taut with anticipation. The scorching midday heat bore down on him, but he stood tall and listened intently for the train from Tirunelveli. It would only stop for 30 seconds, so he had to be alert and act fast.

Collector Ashe was going to switch trains here!

***

On the train to Kodaikanal, Robert Ashe wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief irritably. This was supposed to be a first-class compartment, equipped with fans and water coolers, yet it felt like an oven. He muttered a silent curse at the officials in Calcutta for scheduling summer vacations in tandem across the country. The officials in the north could head to Manali and Kashmir in June comfortably, but by then, he had been working in the relentless heat for two months already. He had longed for the cool relief of Kodaikanal for a long time. And now, it was just a train away.

Beside him, his wife seemed equally miserable. There wasn’t much to do in Tirunelveli other than play bridge at the circuit house. She had been longing to visit Kodaikanal for a while now. In Kodai, there were actual real parties where it mattered that you dressed up in the latest styles. There was good British food, and most of all, she didn’t have to slather herself in talcum powder to stave off prickly heat.

Kathamuthu, their orderly, fanned himself with a newspaper. The entire summer in Kodaikanal? What a thrill. He got the increased away-pay, and the leftovers at the parties would be meatier. And most of all, he could sneak away every evening to partake in the mushrooms the Toda tribals collected. He had heard things. Did they really make one see God? He couldn’t wait to find out.

Their train finally huffed into Maniyachi Junction. Ashe and his wife alighted. Kathamuthu struggled with all their luggage. He brusquely engaged a porter, excited to show off his sheer power as the Collector’s orderly.

“This way, sir,” Kathamuthu said, guiding them through the bustling platform. The porter, his pace quickening in annoyance, attempted to stay a few steps ahead, trying to avoid Kathamuthu’s condescending tone.

They all settled in on the Kodaikanal train. Ashe pulled out the latest novel his brother had sent him from London. Psmith in the City, with its cricket references, was just the kind of light reading he had been looking forward to. There needed to be more sport in books, he had always felt.

His wife opened the train window and absently watched the goings-on on the platform. There was a man with intense eyes. But then behind him, a train pulled in, releasing a flurry of activity. Passengers spilled out, shouting at one another, hawkers calling their wares, and the noise of trunks scraping across the platform filled the air. Would the train start already, she thought, looking at the ceiling. She wanted to start her vacation right away.

Suddenly, there was a sharp Bang!

Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked to see where the loud sound had come from as it echoed all around.

Ashe felt a sharp pain in his shoulder. Something had struck him. He touched it. His hand came away red.

Before he could register the pain, a volley of Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! rang out, piercing the silence. He looked up to see a young man with intense eyes pointing a gun at him.

“Robert!” his wife cried. Ashe slumped lifelessly beside her.

“Yeii!!!” yelled Kathamuthu as he leaped out of the train and right at the young man with the gun.

But Vanchinathan stepped aside, and Kathamuthu fell onto the platform. High on adrenaline, Kathamuthu got back on his feet, ready to grab Vanchinathan again.

But now, Vanchinathan waved his gun menacingly around, daring anyone to approach him. People shrank away. Fear finally got to Kathamuthu, and he backed away with his hands in the air.

Vanchinathan continued to flourish the gun wildly, his hand on the trigger, screaming about how he was going to shoot every dog that dared to approach him, as he walked backwards, and disappeared into the platform bathroom.

Kathamuthu snuck back onto the train, wondering if his vacation

Vanchinathan wasn’t foolish. He had learned from Madanlal Dhingra’s mistakes. The trial would be of no use, and there was no point in going to prison. They hadn’t even returned Dhingra’s body to his family and friends, despite his last will asking that his body not be touched by anyone who was not a Hindu.

He considered his surroundings. The station was small, and the police would take time to arrive. He had a moment.

And just one last bullet left of the six-shot Browning.

He put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

His mission was complete.

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