Books and Authors

"To be alive is, in many ways, to travel; it's to journey through time. We tend to think of travelling as something that involves space or place or geography; moving from one place to another. But the other aspect of travel is just journeying through time; every human being alive journeys through it. I write about journeying through language, grief, parenting...These are universal milestones. I look at them like I look at travel. Trying to be a good traveller can be applied to these other kinds of inner landscapes too. I've travelled so much and I've lived repeatedly in different cities So developing different lenses and multiple perspectives through which to view things just happens unconsciously. As you go to more and more places, you develop more implicit norms. It's an agglomerative, expansive process where you are becoming more and more capacious and more and more able to see things from an insider-outsider perspective; but it's not just one insider and one outsider but multiple insiders and multiple outsiders" - Pallavi Aiyar, author, Travels in the Other Place talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about everything from the Japanese idea of mono no aware and attempting to be a Tiger Mom to the parallels between pregnancy and cancer, the power of hair, and the brevity and beauty of life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Trains in India are public sites and they are sites for social exchange and its a collective identity but what the smartphone has introduced is not only the private sphere into the public one, but also a flagrant abuse of the public sphere by making it totally private! This includes the watching of shows at a loud volume and having conversations like that too."- Amitava Kumar, author, The Social Life of Indian Trains, talks to me on the Books & Authors podcast about how train travel has changed, the people he met on his journey from Kashmir to Kanyakumari on the Himsagar Express, memories of earlier train journeys in childhood, lost loves, how caste plays out in our lax attitude to the disposal of waste, the famous train scene in Satyajit Rai's Pather Panchali, and how the vast mass of Indians who are not affluent are subdising luxury train travel for the few. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"In my father's view, the making of a filmmaker wasn't just about teaching the art, craft, and science [of filmmaking], but also about allowing the filmmaker to find their own unique voice and have the confidence to be their authentic self." - Radha Chadha, author, The Maker of Filmmakers talks to Manjula Narayan about Jagat Murari, who played a key role in the emergence of the FTII, the conflicts that effected the DNA of the institution, Indian New Wave cinema of the 1970s, the tussles between proponents of arthouse and commercial films, and the many debates about the kind of films that India needed to make in the post-independence period. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"Some call them ghosts but I look at them more as energies that coexist with us. In many ways, like the Buddhist and other Indian philosophies say, we are on a continuum of Time and many souls can go back and forth, in some sense. While you never really get used to it (ghosts and supernatural elements), you get used to the fact that not everything is ordinary. I have very acute hearing and maybe that's why I am able to hear a frequency that's somewhat different from everyone else. It's more animal-like, perhaps. Places absorb energies at different points and then it's a question of how do you deal with it? Do you deal with it by getting an exorcist and thinking this is not right or do you deal with it by thinking that they are there and we are here and we all coexist and it's okay - that's a liberal sensibility. We may not understand it as we don't understand other dimensions but it's not that they don't exist because we can't scientifically prove it. You can make much drama or you can accept it and say we don't know everything about the way the world works, which we don't." - Sanjoy K Roy, author, There's a Ghost in my Room; Living with the Supernatural talks to Manjula Narayan about encountering disembodied spirits and ectoplasm and experiencing ESP and paranormal activity in places as far apart as Spain, Delhi, Jerusalem and New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"I wanted to use fraud as a way to look at our society today. We have a fraud underworld industry that employs multitudes. If you have such a large number of people who will readily go over to the ethically grey zone -- they join to help family and then they find there's no coming back -- they are an incredible asset not just for someone running a scam in India but anyone anywhere in the world who is trying to target any demographic. The story of fraud is the story of globalisation and to my mind, more vice versa. It's a workforce that has also come to the attention of these very sophisticated transnational scam cartels, proper cyber crime mafias from China. They can see that people can be very easily lured into migrating to some of the scam cities being set up in South East Asia where there is very little regulation and the political class is complicit. Those who are lured, some younger than 20, are kept in closed compounds and they could lose their lives if they refuse to scam. In India, decades of inequality has pushed some people to the point where they feel they have nothing to lose. It is a matter of survival. The human trafficking part of this is grisly and the truth is it's continuing at a very large scale."- Snigdha Poonam, author, Scamlands; Inside the Asian Empire of Fraud that Preys on the World talks to Manjula Narayan about the scam ecosystem powered by a transnational workforce from low income countries that's leaving a trail of devastation from Delhi to Manchester, Texas and Melbourne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"In India, we don't use the word 'cult' but the photo of a godman hangs in every other home and it's all placed under the umbrella of culture. Cults go after the most vulnerable, those who are not thinking with their rational mind. That's exactly what happened with my parents. When they saw death, they gravitated towards what gave them most certainty. The majority of people going to such gurus are going for something related to their health; they are going in the hope of getting better. It could be related to disease, addiction or poverty. When you don't get answers from anywhere, you go to someone who gives answers as the guru did in my parents' case. People won't get healed but they are hooked by the continuous promise that if they sustain on this path, things will change. When you become part of a cult, there is manipulation, fear and guilt. In my case, everything got attached to my mother's wellbeing; that if you don't follow the rules, she will lose her life. You start getting manipulated because you don't want her to die. I see my parents as victims too. Within the cult, you are only allowed to do certain things like watch the guru's sermons or listen to his mantras. After a while, from disuse, your brain starts to atrophy and you lose critical thinking because you are not allowed to question anything, These cults may be born from any religion; the thing is they distort the teachings of that religion to suit their own narrative. This is possibly the first book by an Indian about being influenced by a cult. I'm trying to create awareness so people can spot when this happens. You need mental health professionals to deprogram victims because indoctrination changes your brain wiring. There has to be a larger systemic change with the creation of proper programmes so victims can be led back into their lives."- Priyamvada Mehra, author, The Cost of a Promised Afterlife, talks about how her family was drawn into the fold of godman Rampal after her mother was diagnosed with a brain tumour, the blind belief that led to the deterioration of her condition, the proliferation of religious charlatans who prey on those who have lost hope, and the mental abuse that being part of a cult entails Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"I was picked to cover Punjab in 1984 and that's how my journey began. After that, I was sucked into the lives of people living with everyday violence. For me, it was about being a storyteller and about the sociology and the psychology of violence and why it had taken root in the different conflict zones that I've mapped. I'm talking about conflicts that are still relevant. I've tried to trace them from where they started, how they started, and why it's still so easy, four decades later, to stoke the embers. What makes young men turn their bodies into missiles? This has kept me going for 41 years. I've never been pulled by the force of religion. I don't question other people's faith but I've seen religion play a part in fuelling violence. I've never wanted my face to be my calling card. So, except for two years when I worked with TV, I've always been a print journalist. I enjoy the anonymity of print. All I've ever tried to do is be an archive. This book is part of that archive. Along the way, I've learnt it isn't just conflict which is murky; politics makes it murkier." - Harinder Baweja, senior journalist and author, 'They Will Shoot You, Madam' talks to Manjula Narayan about the conflicts she's covered including Punjab, Kashmir, the Mumbai attacks and Afghanistan, the people she's encountered from Chhota Rajan and KPS Gill to Yasin Malik, and about the fascinating and still unknown backstories that set her book apart. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices