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 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 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 All of us struggle with moral dilemmas. Such quandaries define and affect our lives and of the people around us. What’s more, most moral dilemmas are difficult, complex and demanding. They involve not only risk, but also discomfort, even when we are convinced that we have conducted ourselves in an upright manner. Remember […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR No yesteryear Bollywood hero — to state the obvious — held as much appeal as Shammi ‘Yahoo’ Kapoor, when he was at his peak, giving just about every star a run for their money. That Shammi, as he’s fondly known, established a sublime niche of his own, like no other, in the 1950s […]

RAJGOPAL NIDAMBOOR We live in an era of paradoxes — of sometimes pleasing, usually passable, and most often ear-splitting music, aside from the typecast ‘stamp,’ or raucous remix[ed] digressions, thanks to hi-tech glitz. This isn’t all. There seems to be a growing penchant for Punjabi-accentuated songs in Hindi films today — rather than perceptible Hindi numbers. […]