Chhota Pegs

I am a big fan of creepy stories. No, I’m not into Stephen King or Dean Koontz or their choleric forerunners: Lovecraft and (alas often) Poe among them. I will take M.R. James though, even though he sits uneasily on the fence between baroque excess and darker understatement. But how not to love “ Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad ”? I’ll take Stoker too (yes, yes, Dracula , but read The Squaw ). Among my all-time favorites, however, are the more nuanced but nevertheless not unusual suspects; say Ambrose Bierce’s " The Boarded Window ," W.W. Jacobs’s " The Monkey’s Paw ," H.H. Munro’s " Shredni Vashtar ," or that great eerie masterpiece by Henry James, The Turn of the Screw . I’ll also take The Little Stranger , a chilling novel by Sarah Waters. So it was with interest that I recently picked up a reissue of Robert Aickman’s oddly described “strange stories,” this one a collection called Cold Hand in Mine . I liked the description “strange stories.”...

It's 4.30 in the morning in Calcutta, and I can't sleep. I can't sleep for a good reason, which is that my few days here are invariably tinged with some jetlag, accentuated by the need to get work done in New York when the Americans are up and about. But this strange late-night early-morning transition has always been part of my life in Calcutta. As a college student, such transitional experiences --- followed by bunking the morning classes --- were an invariable part of my routine. Often it was nerdy: I still associate Lagrangean multipliers with a faint whiff of candle or kerosene. Sometimes friends stayed over, so I associate those nights with the tail-end of intense conversations. Sometimes there was a book. (Recently I found my battered screenplay --- with photos! --- of La Dolce Vita and understood why Anita Ekberg is also associated with humid Calcutta nights.) But it was always half-magical, and if you've done the same (or perhaps even if you haven't), y...

The Times of India recently reported , not without a certain self-congratulatory air, that: "The latest wealth index by New World Wealth that looks at multimillionaires — an individual with net assets of at least $10 million — has ranked India eighth in the global rich list, below countries such as the US, China, Germany and the UK but above Singapore and Canada." This has certainly sent Indian cyberspace into a little tizzy. A common celebratory headline: "India has more multimillionaires than Australia, Russia and France!” And given that the largest number of the world’s poor also live in India , a common admonitory reaction is: "See? Told you so! India is just a corrupt society." This isn't the first time we've been gobsmacked by the sort of numbers India can generate. Recently, farmer suicides did the rounds, with the already large numbers (around 300,000 since 1995) helped along by the Indian numbering system: read here for why some parti...

Branko Milanovic  has commented in some detail  on a  recent post of mine , about Piketty's  Capital in the Twenty First Century.  My initial urge was not to reply. But I see that Branko's post is getting a fair amount of attention on the net, with a wealth of approving accompanying comments about theorists who know nothing of that grand place, the Real World.  So here is an attempt to point out why Branko's post is problematic. Not that it will help much with the general public who are (to some extent understandably) distrustful of academic arguments. And we all know it never ends: the title of this post puts me in mind of the little old lady who snapped, "Young man,  it's turtles all the way down !"  Preamble. At various points Branko claims that I bring to bear an ahistorical, abstract set of arguments on what is a vibrant historical process. In doing so I'm apparently missing all the nuanced depth of Piketty's Laws. It is hard to convey just ...