• It is often forgotten, but India was conquered not by Britain but by a private company, the East India Company – possible the greatest instance of corporate corruption in the history of capitalism. In his new book, The Anarchy, Scottish historian William Dalrymple recounts the tale. Jason Burke reviews the book for The Guardian.
  • Rabindranath Tagore is a misfit in modern India. His words must not hold back the country any longer, writes Sukanta Chaudhuri with bitter sarcasm in the Telegraph.
  • The corpus of judgments by India’s Supreme Court is replete with cases where the bogey of national security has trumped basic rights, argues Suhrith Parthasarthy in the Hindu.      
  • Animal sacrifice was an integral part of worship for Bengal’s Shakta Hindus once. But that has changed: as Vaishnavism influenced the region, the ash gourd took the place of the animal, writes Tanushree Bhowmik in the Mint.
  • From reports of suicides to long queues outside document offices, the proposal for a National Register of Citizens is causing panic. By insisting on a nation-wide NRC, the Bharatiya Janata Party is not working in the national interest, argues this edit in the Indian Express.
  • In the absence of structural reforms for transformative growth, a rural-led growth strategy is the only option for economic revival at this point of time, argue Ashok Kotwal and Pronab Sen in the India Forum.
  • In Forbes, Ethan Siegal lays out the once science lesson everyone could learn from Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
  • In n+1 magazine, William Harris writes on the documentaries of Anand Patwardhan, which have mapped Indian politics over the past four decades.
  • Karachi is hardly a tourist destination, but it’s a must-see for anyone interested in why cities thrive, writes Tyler Cowen in Bloomberg.
  • Happy 90th Birthday, Lata Mangeshkar: The singer’s greatness is taken for granted (and rightly so), but is the “Lata era” still a thing? Or is it just for older listeners and nostalgists? Baradwaj Rangan writes in the Film Companion.
  • How new neuroscience explodes the myths of the male and female minds: In the New York Times, Emily Oyster reviews Gender and Our Brains by Gina Rippon.