• About

    I write a fortnightly "Letter from India" column for the International Herald Tribune, and occasionally for The New York Times

    I'm working on a non-fiction book about India, to be published by Riverhead in 2010

    I've written for The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and several other publications

  • Highlights

    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).

    See also a related article from Granta on coastal erosion in South India.

    Two articles on the social impact of rapid development, from The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times (1, 2).

    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.

‘Maximum City’: Bombay Confidential

Sunday, November 21st, 2004
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Review of Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta, The New York Times Book Review

Election Time in the World’s Largest Democracy

Friday, May 14th, 2004
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Five Dispatches on India’s national elections and their surprising outcome, published in Slate

Beyond the Digital Divide

Thursday, March 11th, 2004
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An article on new business models that seek to bridge the digital divide with for-profit solutions. Published in The Economist

The Present Is a Foreign Country

Sunday, February 23rd, 2003
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Review of Heaven’s Edge, by Romesh Gunesekera, The New York Times Book Review

House of Blue Mangoes

Sunday, March 31st, 2002
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Review of The House of Blue Mangoes, by David Davidar, The New York Times Book Review

The Picador Book of Modern Indian Writing

Monday, August 13th, 2001
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Review of The Picador Book of Modern Indian Writing, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, The New Statesman
Anyone turning to this anthology in search of a tradition is likely to be rather bewildered by the bedlam of languages, themes and genres. But perhaps there is method in this madness. So many of the pieces in this collection suffer the same absence of a tradition that, at some point, it seems churlish to insist on calling it an absence.

Politics Into Economics Don’t Go

Monday, July 16th, 2001
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An essay on the literature of immigrants, published in Index on Censorship
The end of the Cold War altered political realities; it also changed the way the West receives–and reads–immigrants

Techno-Brahmins

Sunday, March 25th, 2001
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Review of India Unbound, by Gurcharan Das, The New York Times Book Review

To Hell in His Handbasket

Monday, December 18th, 2000
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Review of Eastward to Tartary, by Robert Kaplan, published in The Nation
Given his penchant for grand narratives, it’s a little strange that Kaplan misses the larger picture, the broad canvas upon which the events he describes are unfolding. But that’s the danger of serving history too faithfully.

Subcontinental Divide

Sunday, December 10th, 2000
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Review of The Other Side of Silence, by Urvashi Butalia, The New York Times Book Review