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PODCAST

Books and Authors

Hindustan Times - HT Smartcast

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

society & culture books

All Episodes

56:19

The original mother of many tongues

Books and Authors ·

2025/06/21

"One thing that's become abundantly clear from the ancient DNA revolution of the last 10 years is how important migration has been in the history of our species. So, of course, there has been hybridisation, cultural, genetic, linguistic. There is no such thing as a pure people, pure culture, pure language. Genes, culture and language do not map neatly onto each other. This book was a huge amount of work because the only way you can tell the story of Proto Indo European [the ancestor of Latin and

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48:36

Of raab, kadhi and more

Books and Authors ·

2025/06/13

"Food is not just for nutrition but also for the soul" - @neelakaushik and Shibani Sethi, editors, 'Flavours of India talk to @utterflea abt the 40k strong Gurgaon Moms community that's contributed the family memories and recipes in this bookLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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65:15

Of unforgettable soundtracks and an emotional core

Books and Authors ·

2025/06/05

"In Raj Khosla's films, songs were storytelling devices. They didn't just push the narrative forward; they were also narratives by themselves. They had a beginning, a middle and an end, and the way they were shot, the way relationships were portrayed, and the way situations were brought in... It is an art that Guru Dutt taught Raj Khosla and which he then brought out in a way that really connected with the crowd." - Amborish Roychoudhury, author, 'Raj Khosla; The Authorized Biography' talks to

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54:00

Greed, greenwashing, and the perils of convenience

Books and Authors ·

2025/05/30

"All materials come with an environmental impact but plastics are worth singling out as they have turbocharged our desire to consume and our reliance on disposability. Consumer goods companies are the ones we should be looking at. They make decisions about what we see on supermarket shelves, what we see in our homes. I hope this book makes people feel that we do have the power to change things because these companies want us to like them. They are very sensitive to how their reputations play out

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52:12

Remembering not to forget

Books and Authors ·

2025/05/23

"I'd never attempted a memoir. For me, writing something so personal and putting it out there for the world to see was difficult because I was reliving those days. But that's when I realised, I don't want to forget those days. A lot of people want to move past grief. You want things to be normal. But there is no normal after this. This is the new normal and I have to learn to live with it. My husband and my mother in law became statistics of the COVID wave but they were so much more. Like love,

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55:15

Of trances, theta states, and shamans

Books and Authors ·

2025/05/17

"Every part of India has shamans; you could say its part of folk culture. They call Himachal Dev Bhoomi because every village is home to several deities. Every village also has its main deity and a shaman, who is the medium of that deity. He can communicate with that deity when he goes into a divine possession trance that is ritually invoked. The villagers communicate with their devis and devtas for everything and in pooch sessions, the shaman or goor will answer questions as the deity. To a

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49:45

Of spiritual churning and identity umbrellas

Books and Authors ·

2025/05/09

"Any place where a guru goes and spends time becomes a dera; it gets a sacred connotation. Deras are reflective of our larger tradition of argumentation, philosophy and contestation. In India, there is nothing singular about our world; everything is very plural. So, any sort of broad brushing or monolithic thinking about deras is unhelpful. All deras are not Dalit. But I was surprised to see Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura at one. Some are doing very much for Ambedkarite thought. They have a lot of

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50:33

Company Painting: A transformative moment in Indian art

Books and Authors ·

2025/05/02

"To earlier academics, it seemed like Company Painting was not really to be taken seriously. The Modernists didn't look at it because it's too early and the Court Painting specialists didn't look at it because it was too late. It just sort of fell in the gap. Perhaps people were less inclined to rescue it from that gap because they had difficulty in coming to terms with its hybrid colonial status. You cannot get away from it being a product of Empire. But rather than telling the story of the

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62:43

Sojourn in South Korea: In the land of the morning calm

Books and Authors ·

2025/04/25

"South Korea is strategizing its soft power through K-Drama, K-Beauty, K-Pop and now K-Cuisine. There was a conscious strategy from the government of the country and the private sector. So the craze for Korea that we see today is no accident."Vasudev Tumbe and Sudha Huzurbazar Tumbe, authors, 'Seoulmates; Korea Through Indian Eyes', talk to Manjula Narayan about their six-year stay in South Korea, its punishing work culture, beautiful public places, numerous fantastic public toilets, contradictions

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47:38

Of Bakharwals, Jonangis and more

Books and Authors ·

2025/04/18

"How to keep kids engaged through the book is the most important job of the illustrator. Every page was approached through that angle. That's why I've included as many dynamic poses of dogs as possible — running, jumping out of the page almost!" says Chandrima Chatterjee, illustrator, 'The Little Book of Indian Dogs'. "I've always been aware of Indian dog breeds but I wanted to introduce my daughter to them and there was absolutely nothing out there that one could read out to a toddler. So I

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52:27

Intrepid Americans in India

Books and Authors ·

2025/04/10

"I thought it would be interesting to write about early Americans in India because, at that time, there were no border controls, no surveillance, no way of monitoring people who crossed borders. The Americans were not conscious state actors unlike the British, French, Dutch or even the Danes, who were all supported by their respective governments. I was interested in these brave individuals from a faraway land who just marched into a new life. My curiosity about them got me going. And because these

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44:12

Delhi underbelly

Books and Authors ·

2025/04/03

"The system of policing in India has so many constraints that unless the person has a special kind of inner motivation to pursue something, it's going to be very hard to get results. Inspector Prashant Kumar has that. He is an amalgamation of a real person and some fictional tropes. I've had the desire to write crime fiction for a very long time and as a journalist, I got to hang out with a lot of Delhi cops over a period of about two years. The police have miserable lives, most of them. Their work

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56:14

Barking up the right tree

Books and Authors ·

2025/03/28

"I've shot almost 10,000 pictures of dogs across the world over the last four years. But the pictures in this book were all shot on the beaches of Goa in the monsoon. I began shooting them during the pandemic. A deep grey sky is like a photographer's ideal studio. The atmosphere and the subdued palette came because of the season. The whole intent of this book was to create awareness about dogs in an oblique way. Somebody like me who's spent his life bullying people to do his bidding, whether it's

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49:52

Delhi; tales of a city with multiple pasts

Books and Authors ·

2025/03/20

There are stories in every nook and cranny of Delhi and rightly so because this is the 11th or 12th city built one on top of the other; sometimes cannibalizing one city to make the other. So, there are stories of the city's multiple pasts and of the people who have lived here. Heterogenous in every sense of the word, it is a melting pot. So many places in the city have witnessed history in the making. The title brings together multiple strands about the city': Basti' means 'habitation' and this has

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58:09

A sampling of some of the best Indian short fiction

Books and Authors ·

2025/03/13

The span of the book is so wide that we had to leave out some great people. The book gives you a sampling of some of the best writing. My favourite is the first story, Rebati by Fakir Mohan Senapati, translated by KK Mohapatra. In the stories written in English, Ruskin Bond's The Prospect of Flowers is so poignant. It has been difficult to get good translations from languages like Nepali, Dogri, Bodo and Santhali. Also, in certain languages there are no real translators into English. When it comes

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48:27

The incredible story of the most successful escape of...

Books and Authors ·

2025/03/07

"When you look at history across the world and across centuries, there are some things that are well remembered and there are many things that are forgotten. In some way, it's interesting to ask, 'What is remembered and why?' and then maybe take that further and ask, 'by whom?' It's really interesting for me as a historian to ask why is it that this particular event, this particular escape and the camp itself and the thousands of Indians who were there... Why has it been pretty much forgotten until

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64:14

Exploring the multiple layers of truth

Books and Authors ·

2025/02/28

In terms of photography, this is not a book about Banaras or the Himalayas or very specific things; a name-place-animal-thing kind of book. In terms of narrative, of visuals that follow the structure of a novel or something in that space, we are yet to broaden our reach and scope, especially in India" - Ritesh Uttamchandani, author, 'Where Are You', talks to Manjula Narayan about his photobook of pictures clicked in Manchester, UK, that touches on everything from ways of being in public to

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45:52

The power of absence to shape the world

Books and Authors ·

2025/02/20

"You find fasting in every culture, across the millennia. We carry within us the ability to hold back. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Judeaism vary in specifics about fasting but the idea is the same. You step back from something that you normally enjoy - it doesn't have to be a luxury - and then you hold off partaking of it. That holding back is, for me, at the heart of fasting. It is such a powerful realization that this power of absence is real, that we can shape our world

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48:45

Breaking up is hard to do

Books and Authors ·

2025/02/15

"On the one hand we are proud of the fact that India has one of the lowest rates of divorce, globally. It's about 1.1 percent annually. However, UN reports indicate that the number of divorces has multiplied twofold since the advent of the millennium. Why is this happening? The answers are many and this was the premise for writing this book. This book has taught me that education, class, financial independence and status are not necessarily protection against domination and toxic equations. I have

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48:45

Breaking up is hard to do

Books and Authors ·

2025/02/13

On the one hand we are proud of the fact that India has one of the lowest rates of divorce, globally. It's about 1.1 percent annually. However, UN reports indicate that the number of divorces has multiplied twofold since the advent of the millennium. Why is this happening? The answers are many and this was the premise for writing this book. This book has taught me that education, class, financial independence and status are not necessarily protection against domination and toxic equations. I have

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331 results

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