Weekend reads

  1. Author Zac O’Yeah in Blink tries to re-imagine St Thomas the Apostle’s travels through South India between the years 50 CE and 70 CE.
  2. Vyasa Shastry in Mint tries to unpack Aryabhata’s stunning feat in managing to calculate an almost exactly accurate figure for the earth’s circumference, generations ago.
  3. What does the disquieting silence of the RBI mean for the credibility and autonomy of the institution, asks George Mathew in the Indian Express.
  4. In the middle of Madhya Pradesh, there is an ancient 80 kilometer-long wall, and no one quite knows what it is doing there, writes Rachel Lopez in the Hindustan Times.
  5. Praveen Chakravarty in Bloomberg tried to imagine what Reserve Bank of India Governor Urjit Patel might have been thinking when the government recommended demonetisation.
  6. “The best way to be sure that 2017 is not 1934 is to act as though it were,” writes Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker.
  7. Malavika Karlekar in the Telegraph writes about some of the earliest examples of fashion photography in independent India.
  8. “What fieldwork is teaching me about likeability, feminism and maddening girls”, by Joyeeta Dey in the Ladies Finger.
  9. Paul Edwards in the Cricket Monthly meets the men and women who populate the niche market for cricket books in the UK.
  10. “Something utterly real and ordinary, and yet something volcanic. Om Puri was a scale to judge the craft of acting by,” write Prachi Pinglay-Plumber and Dola Mitra in Outlook.