• About



    My book, India Becoming, will be published on March 15th, 2012. Read an excerpt in The New Yorker.
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  • Highlights

    I write a lot about development and change in modern India--how new wealth is changing the country, for better and for worse. See these reports from the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. (1, 2).

    I'm particularly interested in (and concerned by) the environmental destruction being wrought by development. See this report on coastal erosion from Granta, and this report on India's garbage crisis.

    I've also written on development for The Atlantic (an essay review on Amartya Sen ) and The Economist (on the digital divide).

    I've written several literary essays and reviews over the years. See this one on VS Naipaul, from Transition, and this one on Indian literature, from The New Statesman.

    Two articles on the five-year anniversary of the tsunami (1, 2), from The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. These follow-up from my two original reports on the tsunami, published in The New Yorker (1, 2).

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

I’ve just stumbled across this article by Robert Nozick that tries to explain why “wordsmith” intellectuals are anti-market. I’m not sure I’m totally convinced, but his hypothesis–essentially, that they resent their low valuation in a capitalist economy–is nonetheless interesting reading. (I studied with Nozick as an undergraduate, in a course called something like “Socrates, Buddha, Jesus”!)

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