Digital garden of longform articles
My friend Divyansh, introduced me to the idea of digital gardens – a digital garden is your corner of the internet, a place for you to explore and write about what interests you, just because it interests you (Here and here are a couple of really creative digital gardens on books!). I fell in love with the idea immediately. While other bloggers have done wonderful things with this idea, I just wanted to create a digital garden of all the longform articles I’ve enjoyed and loved. I truly enjoy reading good writing, especially when the author is narrating a story. And when I read a great article on the web, I tend to bookmark it, send it to myself on email or share it with my friends. But ultimately, they end up being scattered across platforms. So, this blog is a collection of all the longform articles I’ve loved, those that I want to keep going back to. Let me know which one you liked best!
Top 3 Recommendations
- Looking for Alice by Henrik Karlsson on his blog, Escaping Flatand. An incredibly personal article on how he found his partner, Joanna.
- Listen to Her by T.R. Shankar Raman on his blog, View from the Elephant Hills. Raman, an Indian ecologist and conservationist, who has worked on restoring forests in the Western Ghats, read books only by women for an entire year in 2019.
- Troops by Monika Mondal on Fifty-Two. An on-site analysis of human-wildlife conflict in urban India. “Monkeys and humans are fighting for space in Indian cities. Right now, it doesn’t look like a winnable war.”
A list of articles, in order of when I read them -
- Multiple Fractures : Numerous Fault Lines Await India’s New Government by Ramchandra Guha
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Let My Country Awake by T.R. Shankar Raman
“As far as I know, the family’s temple — that has for decades provided solace and adequate space for worship of Ram and Sita — had been built without any conflict or need to dispute with any other community.”
- How Caste Smells : Notes From A South-Asian Beauty Salon in London by Nandita Dutta
- The Quality Control Interview for Big Classes by Cosma Rohilla Shalizi
- AWOL from Academics by Aden Barton
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On limitations that hide your blindspot by Henrik Karlsson and Johanna Wiberg
“But there was also a deeper mental shift for me. I transferred my loyalty away from the thing in front of me and toward what I could achieve.”
- The Future of Friendships in the Age of Opinions by Manu Joseph
- Economic Ornithology by Robert Francis
- A National Evil by Jonah Goodman
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Things I Wish I Could Tell Every Woman by Ankita Apurva
“A man—any man, is a companion or a junction but never your identity or your destination. And no man who loves you will waste your time. Please don’t while your years away. Very few girls get a ‘second chance’ of focusing on their existence, let alone a third or a fourth. Before you know it, your relatives will start bringing arranged marriage proposals of men seven years older to you—do not. Okay. Work hard. Very hard. Rest well. Very well. Not only because you want to escape abuse and be safe but also because you deserve to enjoy and be celebrated.”
- ‘A Certain Danger Lurks There’ : How the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI by Ben Tarnoff
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Trial by Fire by Meera Ganapathi
“In fact, I believe that you can spot a seasoned cook by their tolerance to heat. They have fireproof fingers that hold searing iron pans without the trace of a wince. They can be identified with brown-black tattoos on their wrists and arms from years of being splashed by boiling oil and burnt by hot vessels.”
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Dating like a Savarna by Ravikant Kisana
“This English-filtering, becomes a tool of social ostracization (bordering on bullying) and is often the first line of attack and tool for excluding non-elite folks from elite social spaces. But language is not the only social barrier. Even if SC/ST/OBC people master English enough to blend in, they come to painfully realize that the Savarna dating landscape is a much more complex bubble. It is an art curation of cultural capital accrued over a life of intergenerational privilege.”
- Childhoods of Exceptional People by Henrik Karlsson
- Platonic by Prachi Pinglay-Plumber
- My grandmother’s indulgent recipes show how Indian women express their love by Anindita Ghose
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Eye in the Sky by Anisha Jayadevan
“As I watched the Blue Tiger Moth caterpillar languidly moving up a plant in my husband’s ancestral house in Kasargod, I heard my mother-in-law in the kitchen, cooking breakfast for the rest of the family. Before my husband and I went in to help her, I wondered how women burdened with care-giving find the time and support to access public spaces and observe the wondrous strategies of butterflies to escape predation—when the predator named patriarchy is still very much at large.”
- Indira Gandhi : One earth, One environment, One humanity by T.R. Shankar Raman
- We need a multi-pronged approach to end child marraige by Uma Mahadevan Dasgupta
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Studying the Antlion Taught Me How to be Human by Ambika Kamath
“I eventually came to understand that, as a behavioral ecologist, I was asking of the natural world the very questions I was too scared to ask of myself and those around me. I had so many questions about how to exist in this world, and it seemed impossible that a single organism could hold all the answers. Rather, I found that different creatures hold the keys to different doors, with each door leading away from a different difficult situation. After all, any living creature on this planet has an evolutionary history exactly as long as the evolutionary history of any other living creature, stretching billions of years between the moment when life began and right now.”
- The PhD Supply Chain Problem by Inger Mewburn
- Learning the tricks of turmeric trade in Tamil Nadu by Aparna Karthikeyan
- A short history of the India Coffee House by Karthik Venkatesh
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Stitching Hope by Kamala Thiagarajan
“After the tragedy, people in her village were paralyzed with fear; many were reluctant to go out to fish. The doll-making workshop seemed like a godsend.”
- What Cancel Culture Is – and Isn’t by Cathy Young
- The Humanism of Siddalingaiah by Chandan Gowda