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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

57:30

The Road to Zanskar

Books and Authors ·

2026/03/26

"Even in winter, twice a month, the first postmen in Zanskar in the 1980s climbed rock faces and crossed frozen rivers -- if you fell in, you could die -- in a journey that took three days, to deliver the post. Then, there's the first allopathic nurse in the region, who once walked without stopping through deep snow for three nights to save a woman in labour. What extreme tourists do today for fun, these people did as part of their regular lives. I had to put down their stories before they were

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54:05

Slow and steady wins the race

Books and Authors ·

2026/03/20

"The fossil fuel age gave us speed. This, on the one hand, allows us to think, 'I'm going faster', but it never defines 'faster to where, and to what?' You become a victim of speed -- always trying to catch up with yourself. The climate crisis is a result of chasing speed mindlessly, endlessly. Slow living is mindful; it's caring of the earth and of community. Healing our relationship with the Earth is the most urgent matter of our times. We need to learn from the Earth how to be an intelligent

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48:25

The quiet pull of the Pune police procedural

Books and Authors ·

2026/03/12

"The way I look at it, whydunnit is actually more important than whodunnit. There are only so many permutations and combinations you can think of in terms of whodunnit. It's finite whereas whydunnit is extremely important because what drives the person? I read a lot of news and I really wonder about the depths to which people can fall"- Salil Desai, author, 206 Bones; An Inspector Saralkar Mystery talks to Manjula Narayan about writing successful murder mysteries set in Pune, the biting wit of his

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54:59

A return to the land

Books and Authors ·

2026/03/05

"We went in with urban confidence and rural reality hit us in the face at every turn! Establishing a farm is probably the most difficult thing I've done. I think everybody should do it."- Arti Dwarkadas, author, Two Bandra Girls Buy a Farm, talks to me about growing varieties of rice, mangoes, tomatoes and more on the patch of land in rural Maharashtra that she and her friend Suzann have been nurturing for the last five years, their Adivasi neighbours' encyclopedic knowledge of plants, the

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65:31

Using stick figures to demolish dubious politics,...

Books and Authors ·

2026/02/26

"You may try to believe that you are living in a First World country and that your reality differs from that of a poor person in your vicinity. But, at the end of the day, you will face the same existential threats that they do. Through my comics and the essays in this book, I'm trying to reach people who have the same privileges as I do; those who tend to ignore politics because it benefits them. I also wanted to make this book accessible to younger people and engage them in politics" - Rachita

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59:34

A fight against forgetting

Books and Authors ·

2026/02/19

"Comics and literature allow us to enter worlds through our imagination; it is a medium of not-saying. We read because we want to get into the interior worlds of say, a family living in a room in Algiers. Cinema does not give that because the director decides, though TV sometimes does give that. But through comics and literature we get into the extraordinariness of the interior world." - Sarnath Banerjee, author, Absolute Jafar, on writing a Gen X visual history, the changing nature of

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55:23

A people willing to sacrifice their lives to save nature

Books and Authors ·

2026/02/13

"The Salman Khan story reached the headlines and people thought, well, if the Bishnois can go for him so effectively, it's not safe to poach there. It has actually reduced poaching. So many Bishnoi die protecting nature; they will go unarmed against poachers. The Bishnois all share the horror of what Salman Khan did but the Lawrence Bishnoi method is completely the opposite of what the community believes should happen; they don't kill, shoot or cause threat in that way."- Martin Goodman, author, My

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52:41

Jewellery: Of ornamentation and adornment

Books and Authors ·

2026/02/05

"I don't think you will find anyone in India who doesn't wear a piece of jewellery [of some sort]. The Amrapali Collection is a pan Indian one. The jewels in this book are worn by pastoralists, the agricultural communities, the villagers of our country. I look at jewellery as works of art. Our villagers are no longer what they were. So it was important for me to document this art form before it vanishes and the memories of it vanishes. I think every piece of jewellery has a soul and right from birth

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59:41

Tatti tales: The things you can learn from animal poop

Books and Authors ·

2026/01/30

"Poop acts like social media for many herbivores. Besides, the droppings of whales tackle climate change, while elephant waste helps regrow forests. Wild animal poop is helping science and conservation and is also used in zootherapy" - Shweta Taneja, author, The Big Book of Wild Poop, talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from the finicky housekeeping habits of ants and how some DNA researchers who collect tiger poop say it smells like Basmati rice (!) to the cuboid droppings of wombats, the

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61:34

From poffertjes to perad and pepper water

Books and Authors ·

2026/01/22

"I used to be very possessive of my recipes. I didn't want to give them away until a senior chef told me, "Listen, even if you give the recipe, everybody's hand is different; it will not be the same." Then, as time went on, I said, actually, some of these recipes should be preserved and if my children are not going to carry it on then at least other people in the community should know about them. Some of the things that I ate as a child have been totally forgotten. That's when I decided to start

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47:30

Reading, writing, rocking

Books and Authors ·

2026/01/15

"The thing about being a writer is that we write from a sensitive, empathetic place but we are also ruthless in that when we are grieving, we take notes of our grief. Ruskin Bond told me that the best way to write about people is just to live long enough that they all die before you. It succeeded with him; hopefully, it will succeed with me!"- Twinkle Khanna, author, Mrs. Funny bones Returns, talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about everything from her father's eclectic

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62:55

On journeying through life

Books and Authors ·

2026/01/09

"To be alive is, in many ways, to travel; it's to journey through time. We tend to think of travelling as something that involves space or place or geography; moving from one place to another. But the other aspect of travel is just journeying through time; every human being alive journeys through it. I write about journeying through language, grief, parenting...These are universal milestones. I look at them like I look at travel. Trying to be a good traveller can be applied to these other kinds of

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50:16

Space operas, dystopias, and the perfect worlds of...

Books and Authors ·

2026/01/06

"Science and speculative fiction has always been about responding to the preoccupations of the time. I was attracted to the genre by the imaginative possibilities it offers by allowing the creation of a different world that then lets you shine a light back onto our world. While putting this anthology together we were looking for anything that could broadly fall under the category of spec fic. If could be sci-fi, magical realism, even horror. Indian readers and writers are in a dystopic frame of mind

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45:33

Train through India

Books and Authors ·

2025/12/11

"Trains in India are public sites and they are sites for social exchange and its a collective identity but what the smartphone has introduced is not only the private sphere into the public one, but also a flagrant abuse of the public sphere by making it totally private! This includes the watching of shows at a loud volume and having conversations like that too."- Amitava Kumar, author, The Social Life of Indian Trains, talks to me on the Books & Authors podcast about how train travel has changed,

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64:06

Irony, 'influenza', and Internet mythology in...

Books and Authors ·

2025/12/04

"I don't take the usual dystopian view of the Internet. I see it as a unit of society and use it to understand the self, the nation and politics. So, I didn't want to look at caste from the usual Dalit-Savarna perspective - a different kind of system is playing out on the Internet. Many middle castes are anxious to move up the ladder. No one can become a Brahmin but the Kshatriya space is open so many communities can claim they are Kshatriyas -- that is happening all over north India. And it's

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62:57

Jagat Murari & the FTII: art, argument and...

Books and Authors ·

2025/11/28

"In my father's view, the making of a filmmaker wasn't just about teaching the art, craft, and science [of filmmaking], but also about allowing the filmmaker to find their own unique voice and have the confidence to be their authentic self." - Radha Chadha, author, The Maker of Filmmakers talks to Manjula Narayan about Jagat Murari, who played a key role in the emergence of the FTII, the conflicts that effected the DNA of the institution, Indian New Wave cinema of the 1970s, the tussles between

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65:10

On the multi-storeyed tower with no staircase and no...

Books and Authors ·

2025/11/20

"What I wanted to say about the global dimension of caste was to look at it from the subjectivity of its victim. So Dalit as a subject takes a central place in this text, and this Dalit subjectivity travels to nearly 15 countries with us [the diaspora]. These constituents are similar but the geographical,political and local [elements] that interact with it give a new dimension to caste. Though it is a global story, it is also a very particularly localised form of caste that we see operating in

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62:29

Things that go bump...

Books and Authors ·

2025/11/14

"Some call them ghosts but I look at them more as energies that coexist with us. In many ways, like the Buddhist and other Indian philosophies say, we are on a continuum of Time and many souls can go back and forth, in some sense. While you never really get used to it (ghosts and supernatural elements), you get used to the fact that not everything is ordinary. I have very acute hearing and maybe that's why I am able to hear a frequency that's somewhat different from everyone else. It's more

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53:45

Going with the mighty flow

Books and Authors ·

2025/11/06

"We travel on the river but the real traveller is the river, and to understand it one has to make a substantial effort" - Sanjoy Hazarika, author, River Traveller; Journeys on the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal talks to Manjula Narayan about his earliest memory of seeing dolphins dance in the river in Guwahati, following the great stream through Tibet, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Bangladesh and the people he met along the way, the Chinese government's plans to build the massive

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50:03

Fraud, fear and loathing from Jamtara to Sihanoukville

Books and Authors ·

2025/10/30

"I wanted to use fraud as a way to look at our society today. We have a fraud underworld industry that employs multitudes. If you have such a large number of people who will readily go over to the ethically grey zone -- they join to help family and then they find there's no coming back -- they are an incredible asset not just for someone running a scam in India but anyone anywhere in the world who is trying to target any demographic. The story of fraud is the story of globalisation and to my mind,

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349 results

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