Smitha Balachandran

Terrorism, which is a near ubiquitous phenomenon today, raises its ugly and sinister head every now and then with frightening precision and disastrous consequences. Terrorism can be defined as the deliberate targeting of civilians to terminate or lessen their support of their political leaders. In American military historian Caleb Carr’s controversial ‘The Lessons of Terror’ (2002), he analyses and describes how initially, this method was used by the Romans till the late eighteenth century...

The novel’s relevance remains undimmed. It speaks to a world still governed by appearances, ambition and self-deception, while quietly insisting on the redemptive possibilities of forgiveness, self-knowledge and love in its truest form. ‘The Painted Veil,’ a novel written by W. Somerset Maugham - the celebrated twentieth century British novelist, playwright, critic, short story writer and British secret agent during World War One - is one of the author’s most poignant and haunting...

When the British dismantled what they called the Indian empire, they shattered it repeatedly, unevenly and often inadvertently. ‘Partition’ is usually remembered as a single cataclysm in 1947 - the vivisection of British India into India and Pakistan. Yet, as Sam Dalrymple reminds readers in his ambitious and meticulously crafted ‘Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia’, that rupture was only one act in a longer imperial unravelling. Between 1937 and 1971, the empire splintered five...