HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is a sweeping history of a young India and a portrait of one of the country’s first public intellectuals, a book that examines the raw material of internet life, and another that traces the journeys of eight singular voices who have devoted their lives to Hindustani music
Impossible to ignore
KM Panikkar was a multifaceted man, one of the country’s first public intellectuals as India won its independence. His imprint is all over India’s colonial and post-colonial history: from constitutional reform in the princely states, where he was a strong advocate for India’s current federal model to charting India’s maritime policy as a free country. He believed in an essential Hindu culture that held his land together, yet he was a committed secularist. He was Gandhi’s emissary and the founder of The Hindustan Times. He was independent India’s first and most controversial ambassador to both Nationalist China and the People’s Republic of China. He was Nehru’s man in Cairo and France and a member of the States Reorganisation Commission. He had enemies in the CIA as well as in India’s own Ministry of External Affairs. He frustrated his admirers as much as he provoked their reluctant respect.
From the British Raj to the Constituent Assembly, across two world wars and an ensuing Cold War, KM Panikkar was India’s go-to man in all seasons.
{{/usCountry}}From the British Raj to the Constituent Assembly, across two world wars and an ensuing Cold War, KM Panikkar was India’s go-to man in all seasons.
{{/usCountry}}Through it all, he never stopped writing — on Indian identity, nationalism, history and foreign policy — material that remains as relevant today as it was seven decades ago.
{{/usCountry}}Through it all, he never stopped writing — on Indian identity, nationalism, history and foreign policy — material that remains as relevant today as it was seven decades ago.
{{/usCountry}}Yet, about the man himself, strangely little is known. In A Man for All Seasons, Narayani Basu bridges that gap. Drawing on Panikkar’s formidable body of work, as well as on archival material from India to England, from Paris to China, and from Israel to the United Nations, as well as on first-time interviews with Panikkar’s family, Basu presents a vivid, irresistibly engaging portrait of this most enigmatic of India’s founding fathers. Featuring a formidable cast of characters — from Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel to Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao and Gamal Abdel Nasser — A Man for All Seasons is as much a sweeping history of a young India finding its place in the world as it is the story of a man who was impossible to ignore then and remains so now.*
{{/usCountry}}Yet, about the man himself, strangely little is known. In A Man for All Seasons, Narayani Basu bridges that gap. Drawing on Panikkar’s formidable body of work, as well as on archival material from India to England, from Paris to China, and from Israel to the United Nations, as well as on first-time interviews with Panikkar’s family, Basu presents a vivid, irresistibly engaging portrait of this most enigmatic of India’s founding fathers. Featuring a formidable cast of characters — from Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel to Zhou Enlai, Chairman Mao and Gamal Abdel Nasser — A Man for All Seasons is as much a sweeping history of a young India finding its place in the world as it is the story of a man who was impossible to ignore then and remains so now.*
{{/usCountry}}Tech capitalism and human existence
When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition — to build machines that not only could communicate but also could do all kinds of other activities, and better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?
Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.
The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of herself and the world around her — from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen to using social media as The Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter to asking ChatGPT for writing advice — while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporate financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life — including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.*
An emotionally textured portrait of a musical legacy
The Call of Music traces the journeys of eight singular voices in Hindustani music – some acclaimed performers, others quiet torchbearers who create, teach and sustain the tradition far from the public eye. From the narrow lanes of Kashipur to the sweeping hills of San Rafael, these artists emerge from vastly different worlds, yet each has devoted their life to music with unflinching conviction and artistic courage.
Among them are the heirs of musical legacies, grappling with the weight of inheritance; vocalists who challenge gendered assumptions embedded in the tradition; instrumentalists who reimagine the expressive possibilities of their craft; a sarangi player navigating the complexities of caste and faith; and a tabla maestro bridging a lineage ruptured by Partition.
As these musicians forge their identities within a classical tradition, they reveal an art form not only enduring, but continually transforming – connecting generations, reshaping boundaries and resonating anew. What binds them is a profound surrender to the art, a deep-seated devotion that transcends convention and circumstance. Together, they form a luminous, emotionally textured portrait of a musical legacy – rooted and radically alive.*
•All copy from book flap.
