Category Archives: Blog Posts

I always feel uncomfortable when people ask me, “What’s the last book you read?”. I can never ever answer the question because of this nasty habit of mine which I’ve been trying to break for years – the habit of starting 15 books at the same time (quite literally, no exaggeration here) and never finishing […]

Rashomon has always been one of my favourite stories. My first encounter with it was my viewing of Akira Kurosawa’s film of the same title, which I have placed in its entirety here, thanks to Youtube. The film (and short story) is essentially about the difficulty of finding out the truth about a rape and […]

Clips from the movie adaptation of the book, The Bridge Over the River Kwai.  

There are some bizarre books out there, and we’ve been asked to list those that are “too strange to be of interest to a well-adjusted human being”, mentioned in the shop description. Here’s a list, then, of ten of our weirdest, in a weekly series. Aghora: At the Left Hand of God – Robert Svoboda […]

The Mahabharata has to be one of the most amazing epics in the history of Mankind. It’s often been compared with Homer’s Odyssey and Illiad, but The Mahabharata is older, more massive, and has been kept much more alive, by South and Southeast Asian traditions, in unbroken chains of transmission.

The Great Attractor  

Cataloguing the book Indian Art and the Art of Ceylon, Central and South-east Asia reminded me of the amazing Ellora Caves in Aurangabad, Maharashtra, which is a complex of some 32 Hindu, Buddhist and Jain caves.

Thank you, Youtube and Youtube users, for uploading the 1972 production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi!  

When I was studying history in school, I remember reading the one mention of Ibn Battuta in our insipid textbook, which contained almost nothing outside the bounds of British colonialism and Singapore independence. Yet even then, I was curious about this 14th century Ibn Battuta character, in the same way I was curious about Marco […]