When I approached Penguin Little Black Classics number 16, there was a particular sense of excitement. Marco Polo and his famous travels had been part of our schoolbooks, but I had never actually read him. And this selection, Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls, was about something even more intriguing: his experience…
A long time ago, I appeared for the pre-medical entrance examination required to get into medical school in India. I didn’t clear it, but a friend did. She is a successful doctor today, though there was a time when she stood on the brink of a nervous breakdown. A few decades ago, ragging was…
Four hundred years before LinkedIn influencers started dispensing career advice, a Spanish Jesuit priest had already written most of it. I encountered them while reading Penguin Little Black Classics 12 – How to Use Your Enemies. Baltasar Gracián (1601–1658) wrote The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a collection of three hundred aphorisms on ambition, reputation,…
Recently, I encountered Lamia by John Keats in Penguin Little Black Classics – The Eve of St Agnes. In my reflection on that little volume, I mentioned that while reading Lamia, I kept thinking of Sridevi. This post is about that. For my generation, Nagina (1986) is part of childhood memory. The movie, the…
The Penguin Little Black Classics continue to surprise me. Now when I had begun to find my footing in poetry through Keats, the fourteenth volume introduced me to another poet I had never really expected to meet this way. Until now, I had only known Thomas Hardy as a novelist. I have heard of…
End of April, Nifty hovered around 23,900. May, around 23,900. June, still around 23,900. And today, once again, around 23,900. If someone looked only at the headline index, they would conclude that the market has forgotten how to move. Last month I called it boring, and little has changed on that front. Meanwhile, geopolitics…
After Baltasar Gracián’s worldly wisdom, the thirteenth Penguin Little Black Classic brings us back to poetry. This time, the poetry reads like poetry. Unlike Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, where the verse often flows like elevated prose, Keats writes the sort of poetry most of us imagine when we hear the word: rhyme, rhythm, melody…
In the twelfth book of this continuously engaging series, we once again encounter aphorisms. Unlike the ones in the fifth book by Nietzsche, however, these are concerned less with philosophical questions than with the practical problems of life. After wandering through ancient China with the Tang dynasty poets and medieval Japan with Kenko, Penguin…
As I had written in my post on Nightshade, I hoped Michael Connelly would keep writing the Stillwell stories. It was refreshing to read about a younger version of Bosch, though one who is not quite as burdened by department politics. Stillwell also has something Bosch rarely enjoyed: an area of jurisdiction that he…
Where Whitman was all about enterprise and the pioneer fervour, in Penguin Little Black Classic number 11 we encounter a 13th-14th century Japanese Buddhist monk who says, “Sit around a while. Why the rush?” I knew nothing about Kenko before picking up this little book. I discovered that he became a monk late in…