Wing It With The Butterflies
Lead Essay, from Outlook magazine’s 16th anniversary issue Thiruchitrambalam Koot Road is the kind of place that would have once been called a farming town. And D. Ayyanar is the kind of young man who, a generation ago, could only have imagined himself as a farmer. He sits by the side of the road on […]
Chiang Mai State of Mind
Conde Nast Traveller The rigors of a book behind me, I head for rejuvenation to Thailand’s largest city in the North. My mind was still in overdrive when we landed in Chiang Mai on that early morning. As we came down over the flat land–the low-slung concrete houses, the rice fields that extended towards distant, […]
Rural India Disappears
Blog Post, The New Yorker Online The photograph above was taken twenty years ago, up the road from my childhood home in rural South India. This one I took recently, from almost exactly the same spot. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, famously described the country as an “ancient palimpsest on which layer […]
Podcast
The New Yorker Out Loud PodcastNY OnlineI talk to Blake Eskin, The Online Editor at The New Yorker, about changes in the cow market, the rural economy, and growing up in a world that’s gradually slipping away. I talk to Blake Eskin, Online Editor at The New Yorker, about changes in the cow market, the […]
The Shandy
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, India Becoming, published this week in The New Yorker. Check back here to learn more about the book, or pre-order now at Amazon or Flipkart. The India to which I had recently returned, after more than a decade in America, was a markedly new one: a […]