Kaushik Dasgupta
Articles By Kaushik Dasgupta
Not another brick in the wall
A call to reclaim institutions of higher education as spaces for debate, dissent and dialogue
Between wickets: Mike Brearley’s latest book traverses 50 years of the sport
Brearley's latest book, On Cricket, traverses 50 years of the sport with palpable intellectual curiosity. It’s the work of a person who delighted in the aesthetics of the sport even when he was competing.
I Remember the Taste
A delectable memoir that contextualises Indian food and navigates its culinary nuances effectively
Why is India Filthy?
The intractability of waste management in India
He Who Eats Alone Eats in Harmony
Like Inspector Montalbano, the solitary eater will endorse that a table for one is often a deeply satisfying affair. In popular and academic literature, meals are about love, bonhomie, gifting, making friends, cementing social relationships.
I Dream of Domorudhor
Join Troilokyonoth Mukhopadhyay’s beloved fictional character, Domorudhor, on his flights of fancy and adventure
Food for Thought Curried Cultures
Understanding cultural paradoxes associated with Indian food in this age of globalisation
Five Spices and My Grandma’s Kitchen
The panchphoron is the foundation of Bengali cuisine.
In fact: Many floods, different, yet similar
The annual flooding of the basins of rivers like the Brahmaputra is difficult to prevent. Not so the increasingly common deluges in India’s biggest cities — manmade disasters only exacerbated by unusual rainfall.
Mangoes, peaches, watermelons make the Indian summer bearable: A look at how they came to be so popular
Activities of kings, nobles, farmers, traders and scientists have contributed to the oeuvre of Indian summer fruits. The Grand Trunk Road once was lined with mulberry trees by the Mughal rulers and their feudatories.
A Real Cool Time
The ‘last solace’ of the British in India was ice. But how did it get here in the first place?
Those were the days, my friend
A negotiation between nostalgia for the 1980s in JNU and a heartfelt affection for the university.
Three villages and a city
How the natives and the British collaborated in the making of Calcutta
A Moveable Feast
Communal politics around the biryani has scant respect for its fabled history or diversity. Is it the Persian pilao, improvised and transformed? Is it the result of avant garde experiments in royal kitchens? Or is it a plebeian dish, shaped, like India, by trade and cultural interaction?
WorkingPaper: Disappearing Borders
The picture gets somewhat muddied when the dominant economic paradigm of our times conflicts with a political tendency.
A River For Hilsa
The hilsa is steeped in nostalgia and history and, for the Bengali, it is as much about identity as about gastronomy. But what was once a match made during monsoon has now run into troubled waters.
Silver scales and survival ladders: the hilsa recipe
On August 4, Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti told Lok Sabha that the government was planning to create “fish ladders” in the Ganga near the Farakka Barrage to help hilsa travel upstream to spawn — hopefully improving the catch.
