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Friday, November 21, 2025
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Book Excerpts

Karunanidhi failed board exams thrice. Annadurai told him to study, not write on revolution

In Karunanidhi: The Definitive Biography, Vaasanthi writes about Karunanidhi’s reaction when Annadurai told him to stop sending articles on youth revolution.

Mark Zuckerberg once said yes to selling Facebook. This is what followed

In Facebook: The Inside Story, author Steven Levy writes about the meeting where Zuckerberg met Yahoo’s president and decided against selling Facebook.

Rishi Kapoor: Neetu asked me to hold back on Twitter many times

In Khullam Khulla, Rishi Kapoor, with Meena Iyer, wrote about how tweeting about the Gandhi family got him into the most trouble online.

Irrfan Khan landed the role of Maqbool after Naseeruddin Shah vetoed Kamal Haasan

In ‘Irrfan Khan’, Aseem Chhabra writes about how Khan was born to play Maqbool, and Vishal Bhardwaj casting him was both a risk and a masterstroke.

When Birbal died, something broke inside Akbar

In Akbar: The Great Mughal, Ira Mukhoty traces the friendship between Akbar and his courtier Birbal, which survived to become stories for generations.

The one job that will disappear by 2062 — the job of fighting wars

In 2062: The World That AI Made, Toby Walsh writes about the dangerous scenario of lethal autonomous weapons getting to decide who dies and who lives.

Here’s why Kashmiri Pandits living in Hindu-majority areas remain a minority

In The Minority Conundrum, Ankur Datta writes how Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu were seen as a privileged group of victims, living off the largesse of the state.

Hedgewar had hired Christian teachers to train the RSS

In The RSS And The Making Of The Deep Nation, Dinesh Narayanan writes about how the organisation was not only modelled on the British military, but trained and clothed similarly.

Had China not been so strict about Wuhan, coronavirus would have stayed in Wuhan

In The Coronavirus, Swapneil Parikh, Maherra Desai and Rajesh Parikh write about the days to disaster in Wuhan and how the virus spread because China wanted to keep mum.

Caring or cleaning? Distinction between nursing and domestic work is fuzzy

In Politics of Precarity, Panchali Ray writes how the nursing profession has struggled to be recognised as trained labour and not as domestic work.

On Camera

Europe’s sanctions are not the moral compass it paints to be. Look at the EU’s own data

Three years into the war, Europe’s sanctions regime now resembles a policy of managed hypocrisy: Moral rhetoric for public consumption, exemptions for industrial preservation.

At Charcha 2025: Local entrepreneurship, not just big IT, will drive next wave of distributed AI work

While global corporations setting up GCCs in India continue to express confidence in availability of skilled AI engineers, the panel argued that India’s real challenge lies elsewhere.

IAF’s leased KC-135 lands in Agra, American firm’s pilots to man mid-air refueller

India’s refueller fleet comprises six Russian Ilushin-78 tankers, first inducted in 2003, which are facing huge maintenance and serviceability issues.

INDIA has a Congress-sized hole. And the fix begins with a little humility

Without a Congress revival, there can be no challenge to the BJP pan-nationally. Modi’s party is growing, and almost entirely at the cost of the Congress.