Last updated on 21st February 2026

On my shelf

(Things that I want to start reading soon!)

• Veer Savarkar - A contested legacy - Vikram Sampath
• The materiality of the past - History and representation in Sikh tradition - Anne Murphy
• The new scientific spirit - Gaston Bachelard
• Harvard - Kahn
• The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko

Currently reading

• The WEIRDest People in the world - Joseph Henrich
• What I talk about running when I talk about running - Haruki Murakami
• Trans: When Ideology meets Reality - Helen Joyce
• Orientalism - Edward Said

Books

Non fiction

• 2026
  • The political philosophy of Zhang Taiyan - Viren Murthy
• 2025
  • The Ocean of Churn - Sanjeev Sanyal
  • The Worldly Philosphers - The Lives, Times And Ideas Of The Great Economic Thinkers - Robert Heilbroner
  • The End of History and the Last Man - Francis Fukuyama
  • There is not Antimimetics Division - qntm
  • The Doctrine of Vibration - Mark Dyczkowski
  • Proto - How one ancient language went global - Laura Spinney
• 2024
  • Reading the fifth Veda - Alf Hiltebeitel
• 2023
  • The Sphota Theory of Language - Harold G. Coward
  • The Problem With Democracy - Shadi Hamid (notes )
  • ‘Yogini’ in South Asia - Interdisciplinary approaches - Istvan Keul
  • Evolutionary Causation - Tobias Uller and Kevin Lala
  • Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt (notes)
• 2022
  • Which of us are Aryans? Rethinking the concept of our origins - Romila Thapar, Michael Witzel, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese, Razib Khan
  • The Mathematics of Gods and the Algorithms of Men - Paolo Zellini
• 2021
  • A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J. B. S. Haldane - Samanth Subramanian
  • The Opium Wars - W. Travis Hanes III and Frank Sanello
  • Religious Difference in a Secular Age - Saba Mahmood
  • Smut: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology - Murray Davis
  • Projections - Karl Deisseroth
  • India that is Bharat - J. Sai Deepak
  • Savarkar: Echoes from a forgotten past, 1883 - 1924 - Vikram Sampath
• 2020
  • Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine - Norbert Wiener
  • The Art and Politics of Science - Harold Varmus
  • On Human Nature - E.O. Wilson
  • Among The Believers - V. S. Naipaul
• 2019
  • Reconceptualizing India Studies - S. N. Balagangadhara
  • Do all roads lead to Jerusalem? - S. N. Balagangadhara
  • As Others See Us - S. N. Balagangadhara, Divya Jhingran
  • Chance and Necessity - Jacques Monod

Fiction

• The Dark Forest Trilogy - Liu Cixin
• Kafka on the shore - Haruki Murakami
• The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Papers

Classics

• Dependency on Medium and Temperature of Cell Size and Chemical Composition During Balanced Growth of Salmonella Typhimurium - M Schaechter, O. Maaloe, N. O. Kjeldgaard, 1958
• More is Different - P.W. Anderson, 1972
• Preponderance of synonymous changes as evidence for the neutral theory of molecular evolution - Motoo Kimura, 1977
• The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptationist Programme - S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, 1979

Recent

• Intercellular Competition and the Inevitability of Multicellular Aging - Paul Nelson and Joanna Masel, 2017
• Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions - Stewart et al., 2018

Essays

• Who can name the bigger number? - Scott Aronson
• The bitter lesson - Richard Sutton
• On the cruelty of really teaching computer science - Edsger Dijkstra
• Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944-2019) - Stephen Wolfram
• The Salvation of Doug, and The Demise of Bill - William Sullivan, Douglas Kellogg
• What Nihilism is not - Nolen Gertz, from Nihilism
• A Tract Against the Prevailing System of Hindoo Idolatory - Raja Rammohun Roy, 1820
• The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences - Eugene Wigner