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✍️ Written by Saket Suman Writing and journalism are always under pressure. Pressure is their natural habitat. The tragedy now is that comfort has begun to cunningly pass off as success. The cushioned chairs, the familiar faces and the reliable applause!  A profession that cannot tolerate discomfort will eventually lose the ability to describe reality. And reality, unlike these sponsored festivals, does not curate itself. Nuremberg Rallies weren’t just big speeches.  They were mass propaganda spectacles;Via: Amber Speaks Up What we are watching unfold before our eyes is both censorship and choreography. Writing has already learned its steps. Journalism now knows when to enter and when to exit. There is a colourful, orderly, well sponsored parade underway where everyone is encouraged to carry a banner that says dissent provided they do not wander off the designated route. The music swells at the right moments when the masters of the ring want. The pauses are perfectly timed and...

There has been a visible impact of IndianRepublic.in ’s reporting . More than two days after this publication documented a serious marketplace misrepresentation, Amazon India has now removed the misattributed reviews and ratings from the Kindle listing of The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: The Life, Lessons, & Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru by Shashi Tharoor .  But the correction is incomplete and the silence surrounding it is louder than ever. ; Representational Meme Source: MJ__Speaks on X As of this writing, the Kindle product page for Tharoor’s book (ASIN: B0G6Z7858F) continues to display the biographical description of another author, Amitava Kumar , under product description. This is a misleading artefact that remains live despite the removal of the reviews. The result is a listing that no longer carries borrowed ratings but still presents incorrect author information to readers under product description . Tharoor’s Kindle edition now has zero ratings and zero reviews. But...

More than sixty hours after IndianRepublic.in exclusively documented a serious marketplace misrepresentation involving Shashi Tharoor’s latest book , The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: The Life, Lessons, & Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru , the listing remains live, uncorrected, and consequential. This is in brazen defiance of the law and utter disregard for transparency and fair play by entities concerned. Representational Meme Source: Edgar Again Poeha on X During this period, the Kindle edition of Tharoor’s book has continued to gain measurable traction despite having received no original ratings of its own . Instead, it has benefited from reviews and star ratings written for an entirely different book: Amitava Kumar’s The Social Life of Indian Trains . Those reviews, which reflect reader responses to Kumar’s earlier work, remain algorithmically attached to Tharoor’s Kindle listing. The misattribution has operated to Tharoor’s clear commercial and reputational advantage, even as ne...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman When Shashi Tharoor announced on social media that his new book, The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: The Life, Lessons, & Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru , had been released by the Vice President of India, C.P. Radhakrishnan, the message carried the full institutional gravitas of a nationally endorsed publication. Released on December 30, 2025 at Sivagiri Mutt in Varkala, in the presence of the Governor of Kerala and senior religious and political leaders, the book was framed by Tharoor as a serious intellectual engagement with Sree Narayana Guru’s legacy and the Kerala Renaissance. It is precisely because of this stature, visibility, and public legitimacy that a parallel development on Amazon India demands thorough scrutiny: a flawed and misleading product listing that algorithmically links Tharoor’s book to reviews, ratings, and metadata belonging to a different author altogether, and raises troubling questions about consumer deception, marketplace accountabi...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman There is no neat way to say this: the Great Indian Dream is dying. And it’s not being killed in faraway conflict zones, or in newsrooms that peddle noise instead of truth. It is being murdered in back offices of publishing houses and literary circuits, where contracts are torn with a smile, where deadlines are missed with impunity, where one writer's labour of years is discarded over silence, and where reputations are butchered so that the powerful remain unbothered. The very spaces meant to champion creativity are the first to abandon those who try to speak freely, those who refuse to bend, those who dare to write with sincerity. Representational Image: The 1st stamp of independent India shows the Indian Flag, released on 21Nov1947. I have lived through this. I have worked on a book that came from lived experience, research, pain, and a rare kind of stubborn hope. And I have watched that book — like countless others before it — be derailed by a system tha...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Mahatma Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth is not the story of a perfect man as political heavyweights present themselves to be -- and that is perhaps precisely why it endures still today. It is a book filled with self-doubt, failures, confessions, and contradictions. But it remains one of the most powerful examples of a life devoted to truth, however painful, however incomplete that pursuit may be. Gandhi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize a few days before he was assassinated. There’s something profoundly disarming about the way Gandhi presents himself. He does not hide behind legacy, myth, or moral superiority. He does not edit out the parts of himself that might be mocked or misunderstood. Instead, he offers his life as a series of experiments -- some noble, some naive, but all of them are deeply personal. The tone is intimate, often vulnerable.  You feel, as a reader, that you are being let in. Attended a prayer meeting at Gandhi Sm...

The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist has been revealed, showcasing six powerful novels that span continents, decades and generations -- united by a deep exploration of what it means to live, to love, and to endure.  The final six were selected from 153 submissions by a panel chaired by 1993 Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle, alongside judges Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Power, and Kiley Reid. The Booker Prize 2025 shortlist © Yuki Sugiura for Booker Prize Foundation Among the shortlisted are previous winner Kiran Desai and returning nominees Andrew Miller and David Szalay, alongside three debut shortlistees: Susan Choi, Katie Kitamura, and Ben Markovits.  The 2025 list is marked by mature, technically confident storytelling and a range of narratives that, in the words of Doyle, are “brilliantly written and brilliantly human.” The six books delve into themes of migration, loneliness, shifting family dynamics and the emotional burden of identity.  Set across div...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman At the Colorado edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) in the United States, a well-dressed panel sat beneath stage lights, bathed in the glow of literary performance. The session’s title, projected grandly behind them, read:  “Water, Water Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink.” Wrong . JLF: PhD in Fakery. Via Sanjoy Roy on X That’s not what Coleridge wrote. The original line, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , is:  “Water, water, everywhere,  Nor any drop to drink.” It’s nor , not not . This is a classic metaphor for what JLF has become: a festival of posturing without precision, of quotation without comprehension. It’s a stage where the most revered lines in English literature are mangled in broad daylight -- and no one even notices. Or worse, no one cares . Because for the gatekeepers of this literary cartel, literature is merely a prop . A backdrop against which their curated elites, their sons, their friends, and their...