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Good morning. Happy to announce my new book.
Will release in a few weeks with Allen Lane @PenguinIndia
More details here: amazon.in/Gods-Guns-Miss…
Manu S Pillai
30.1K posts
Manu S Pillai
@UnamPillai
Deviant vegetarian. Historian. Author of five books. Latest: 'Gods, Guns & Missionaries'
Represented by @DGALitAgents.
Joined November 2009
- Just received the official notification of the award of my PhD 🙌 Don't have a picture of anything specific to the process, so here's a picture of me with a great old tree instead.
- Apparently I am "Sagar Chauhan", senior frontend engineer. Not the first time this is happening. Somewhat miffed that I have such a generic face, it gets lifted for all kinds of random advertisements 😅Credentialing is broken. We still rely on random Degrees and Certifications to measure how good someone is for a particular Skill. And LinkedIn feels like a Product from early 2000. It’s time to change all of this. NextLevel is launching next week.
- "Bajaj is also the rarity in India - an industrialist who has never met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in an era when most other biggies make quiet pilgrimages to South block and the PMO."
- "By the time we are halfway through The Kerala Story, it is hard to decide who is more brainwashed - the protagonist or the makers of this insidious film...The writing is consistently cringeworthy...The script..an act of cinematic terror."
- Father passed away this morning. And before grief, it is paperwork and bureaucracy one has to negotiate. Only positive glimmer was when a lady asked if we'd like to donate his eyes--and so there was one paper I was happy to sign on one of the most hideous days in my life.
- KK Shailaja deserves to be in the Kerala cabinet. Thoroughly disappointing news about her exclusion. I hope they reconsider. There is a whiff of sexism to this. Even with the criterion that besides the CM, cabinet will be all new faces, I think ShailajaT merits an exception.
- Paternal grandmother Padmavathi Pillai passed away this morning, on her 99th birthday in Kerala. She was alert till just before the end, telling everyone that her mother Kalyani Pillai had come to fetch her and that she had to go.
- 'When you’re running through decades of history without commenting on it, what you choose to mention or omit becomes of great significance. Every tumultuous event of the last 40 years is included..Everything, that is, except the 2002 Gujarat riots.' lifestyle.livemint.com/how-to-lounge/…
- Shiva and his armless Muslim friend; a goddess with a Buddhist retinue; Christians joining Hindu festivals; a 20th century rani commissioning both a temple flagstaff and a silver cross--the "Kerala Story" *I* prefer to tell. In today's Times of India. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/retelling-the-…
- Ahilyabai Holkar is an icon, but Ahmednagar was established by *Ahmed* Nizam Shah. The Nizam Shahis are as integral a part of Maharashtrian history as the Holkar queen who was born near the city generations later. Regrettable that one must be eclipsed to celebrate the other.#Maharashtra's #Ahmednagar is set to be renamed as #AhilyaNagar, Maharashtra chief minister Eknath Shinde announced at an event in Ahmednagar Read more- hindustantimes.com/cities/mumbai-…
- On Eid, here's a picture of the Mishkal Mosque in Calicut, built originally by a Yemeni in the fourteenth century, destroyed by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth, and reconstructed a few decades later by the Zamorin Rajah.
- "For all advertisers promoting the BJP, Facebook charged an average of 39,552 rupees ($517) for one million views for an ad, but for all advertisers promoting Congress, it charged an average of 52,150 rupees ($681), nearly 32 percent more."
- Wrote in the TOI about kingly violence, feat. amputated noses, human beings ripped apart, butchered religious leaders, etc. The point being that kingship as an *institution* was linked to violence. Brutality wasn't purely a Mughal monopoly as some believe. timesofindia.indiatimes.com/really-royally…
