Category Archives: Literature / Culture

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The free-market economy has made life comfortable for many of us; it has also opened up choices that did not seem to exist before. This sounds great, but it does not explain why we are bamboozled by a frenzied world that we have created for ourselves. Our computers keep us occupied, and while […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR The horrendous COVID-19 pandemic compelled us to realise that the most expensive things in life do not really bring profound happiness. Yet, the fact also is — blame it on our short-term memory — we are always drawn to them. It is rightly said that objects imitate life at the material level. In […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR It’s over five+ decades ago that the one and only John Wayne accepted the role of Major John Reisman in The Dirty Dozen [1967], a spectacular, runaway blockbuster. He asked Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer [MGM] for certain script changes, albeit he pulled out of the project to make The Green Berets [1968]. He was replaced by Lee […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR When Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth got together and published Lyrical Ballads, with A Few Other Poems, in an edition of 500 copies, over 225 years ago, the whole idea was exciting, all right. But, it wasn’t a tizzy, or an earth-shattering event, really. Rather, it was a humble beginning. Yet, beneath […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Burrhus Frederic Skinner was a pioneering, also provocative, psychologist. His work led to the emergence of a new understanding of human behaviour while changing the contexts of how society viewed everything from penitentiaries to childcare. Skinner deliberated that free will was an illusion and that all our actions were a result of conditioning […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR It was Nicholas Copernicus who first proposed, in 1853, that the earth was not the centre of the universe, but it, in fact, revolved around the sun. It took over a century for the idea to sink in — a gradual and rather agonising transformation. The Darwinian perestroika has been no different, notwithstanding […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Hope insulates us against stress. It inspires us to overcome difficulties. It reduces the song of one’s burden — the excess baggage of surplus, negative emotions that we carry during tough times. It is not just that — when the going gets tough, the tough ‘get going.’ Everyone does that — in one way, or […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Nelson Mandela remains a brilliant subject — a subject that is every biographer’s dream-come-true. His long life spanned the tribal rituals of rural Africa, the Anglicised tenets of the 1940s, the Gandhian ‘formula’ of anti-apartheid battles, a short guerrilla resistance, long imprisonment and, finally, power — power that brought majority rule to South […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR Partap Sharma, playwright, author, actor, director, filmmaker, and voice-over artist, with the golden larynx, was a genuine article. He not only carved a special niche for himself in everything he did, or explored, but he also set a benchmark — all his own. Sharma’s foremost job was, of course, keyed to his gilded […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR It goes without saying that we are in the midst of what futurist Alvin Toffler called “the rattling and shaking.” And, with no let-up in sight, and no end to the cultural and economic upheaval, interspersed with the COVID-19 scourge, or ‘earthquake,’ we are witnessing a fundamental ‘shift’ in our lives at work […]