Sumeru Raju

PhD student at IISc, MCB Department | Intrigued by inflammation | Fantasy fiction lover | Fitness enthusiast

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

Truly delighted to present ‘Never Enough — Avarice, Afflictions and Hypocrisies that make the World’ by British writer and my teacher, Jeremy Seabrook. It has been the singular honour of my life to edit this anthology and write an elaborate introduction. It is a selection of essays from the last quarter century of his writing life. There are over 130 essays arranged across a dozen sections.

November is the month of both Jeremy’s birth and death anniversary. Today (November 14) is his birthday, if he were to be around, he would have turned 87.

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Please pre-order your copy here. The book has been published by Paradarshak Media Foundation. Please buy a copy and support an independent not-for-profit publisher. The book is over 600 pages long: https://t.co/YhGGxyQWG1

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Praise for Jeremy Seabrook over the years:

‘[Jeremy Seabrook is] one of England’s most imaginative and creative writers… reminiscent
of George Orwell.’
— The Guardian

‘The inspirational Jeremy Seabrook beats any celebrity radical in the art of speaking hard
truths through fine prose.’
— Independent

‘[Jeremy Seabrook’s writings] can be classified as sociology that has the impetus and poetry
of a novel.’
— The Times Literary Supplement

‘Jeremy Seabrook weaves passionate prose, shot through with rage.’
— The Times

‘[Jeremy Seabrook’s] work always reflects a profound commitment to social justice.’
— New Statesman

‘[Jeremy Seabrook’s writing is] at once ironic and compassionate, delicately cruel and loving.’
— Kirkus Reviews

‘[Jeremy Seabrook’s writing] is versed in historical sources but not burdened by them.’
— The Indian Express

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JEREMY SEABROOK (1939 — 2024) was a British playwright, commentator and author, who operated outside intellectual tropes and academic fashions of his time to write with reason, emotion and compassion. In his lifetime, he easily produced a couple of million words in reportage, scripts and commentary, and fifty books on an envious range of subjects. His experiments with the genre of memoir to build involved and surrogate narratives of history deserves greater attention.

Jeremy was born in a working-class family in the industrial town of Northampton and went to University of Cambridge to study. However, instead of a settled academic or a staid official life, he chose the creative and peripatetic life of an independent writer. His writing life, which began in the early 1960s, was not committed to any form of ideological reasoning, but he emerged as an anatomist of reality with a refined idiom. Although he did not care for the label of a ‘public intellectual’ he was never exhausted when it came to advance the cause of those in pain and penury, and all those who were powerless. He did it with a humane and internationalist spirit. Although Jeremy was referred to as the George Orwell of his time and while some thought of him to be more Dickensian, he ploughed his own furrow.

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[Parimal @Fintech03]

2 months after C. V. Raman became Director of IISc, the mess secretaries lined up outside his office.

The Andhra mess said the Tamil cooks made everything insipid. The Bengali mess said the Andhra cooks made it too hot. Then came the Mahratta, Karnataka and Malayali messes, each with a complaint about someone else's cooking.

Raman heard them all, then told the writer D. V. Gundappa, who was sitting in his office, in Tamil:

"See the kind of research going on here? Gastronomics is the only science here."

Source: D. V. Gundappa, "Dr. C. V. Raman: A Personal Tribute", Public Affairs, Dec 1970

Photo: C.V. Raman (seated, white turban) with Robert Millikan's party at IISc, Bangalore, 2 Feb 1940.

[New India Foundation @newindiafndtion]

(1/7)
"Indira is not India. India is infinitely more than Indira."

That was on placards in Washington DC, half a world away from where it mattered most. Sugata Srinivasaraju tells the story of the Emergency entirely from the United States, through the people who refused to let it go quiet, and ends with Indira Gandhi losing Rae Bareli and saying she felt an enormous weight lift off her shoulders.

The Conscience Network is longlisted for the NIF Book Prize 2026.

#kcbp2026 #indianhistory #emergency #newindiafoundation #bookprize #BookRecommendation

@sugataraju @NandiniNai @PenguinIndia @penguinrandom

[New India Foundation @newindiafndtion]

150+ Nominations. Ten books Longlist. One prize. INR 15 lakhs.

Announcing the Longlist for the 9th Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, honouring the finest non-fiction on Independent India’s history.

From the making of the Constitution to the partition of a subcontinent, from the story of India’s development to the rise of its scam economy, from the life of a diplomat who shaped the Republic’s foreign policy to a diaspora's resistance to the Emergency, from the lives of migrant workers in a Delhi factory to a hidden maestro of Hindustani music, from questions of justice in the Republic to a personal history of the nation, these books reckon with the India we live in today.

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

“I am not an academic. I just do it out of my passion and love for reading. When I do a translation, it is because I love that work,” says my partner in this Express interview. I feel she is first a poet and then a translator, and that gives a unique flight to her prose.

Writer’s Corner | Sahitya Akademi awardee Rosy D’Souza on translating into Kannada

Writer’s Corner | Sahitya Akademi awardee Rosy D’souza on translating into Kannada

https://t.co/znp1mQYoeR

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

Delighted that the audio version of my latest book on #IndiraGandhi’s #Emergency, THE CONSCIENCE NETWORK: A CHRONICLE OF RESISTANCE TO A DICTATORSHIP is just out on listening platforms, including Audible. Please listen to the book if you have not already read it, and if you still want to listen to it after having read it. I am pretty sure you’ll enjoy the 21 hours of listening about the 21 months of resistance that took place over 50 years ago. The book is not dry history but narrated through the lives of select protagonists, and their love lives are included too. There can anyway be no resistance without romance!! Here’s the link to the audiobook on Audible: https://t.co/DrVkbTw3Fl

If you want the printed book as an accompaniment to your listening, you can get it at your nearest bookstore or here:
Amazon: https://t.co/eAANHrSk6n
Flipkart: https://t.co/aeWlxNCrly

*The cover below is only an artistic representation of the book’s original cover.

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

My wife sent me this manuscript page of my most recent book (#TheConscienceNetwork) with the following comment: <<When the young editor strikes!! The daughter had father’s manuscript sheets for maths rough work and that one time she decides to read what is on the other side! And on reading one page, she has declared her father is a good storyteller and she might take up that book for reading someday and he is not as boring as she thought him to be. Read her edits and comments😂>>

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

Remembering a great mentor, a fantastic human being and a remarkable writer, #JeremySeabrook, on his first death anniversary. Here’s a long tribute that I published in the @scroll_in a year ago. https://t.co/qiwmJMYZ0h @equalityderek

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

Am absolutely thrilled to hold this remarkably produced book of photographs on Hampi, by my mad-genius friend and colleague, Saibal Das. The prints here, developed using the sophisticated platinum palladium process, look ethereal and classy. The un-touristy Hampi that emerges 1/5

[Sumeru Raju @SumeruRaju]

Thank you Pappa, I am honored 😊🫂

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

The first copy of my book, #TheConscienceNetwork, is for my son, Sumeru, to whom it is dedicated. From being a quiet, curious and reflective kid, he has become a conscionable young scientist. The dedication line is from a 12th century vachana by Allama Prabhu. More in the book.

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

Delighted to announce my new book: THE CONSCIENCE NETWORK: A CHRONICLE OF RESISTANCE TO A DICTATORSHIP. June 2025 marks 50 years since #IndiraGandhi imposed the #Emergency. Check out the book’s dramatis personae at the end of this #thread. Pre-order: https://t.co/Wphr2Eyn3F 1/9

[Advanced Bioimaging Center @ UC Berkeley @ABCUCBerkeley]

Finally here! Our preprint on the MOSAIC, a multimodal adaptive optical microscope enabling non‑invasive in‑vivo imaging from molecules to organisms, is out.
https://t.co/B2GHHP5b0K
@Eric_Betzig @legant_lab

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

Deeply saddened to learn that long time friend, Akumal Ramchander, has passed away. He had made it big in the art world with his discovery of abstract expressionist American painter, Harold Shapinsky. Here’s a Channel 4 documentary on Akumal, narrated by @SalmanRushdie, 1/3

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

In imaginations of a Kannada world in a digital age, in @Vijaykarnataka, my father, Chi. Srinivasaraju, figures in IPL cricket gear with Rajkumar, Kuvempu, Karanth, Kailasam, Bendre, AN Krishna Rao, Shankarnag and Lankesh doing their own things. #Rajyotsava @RajeevaVK

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

On counting day, June 4, when the result trends were just getting stable, I spoke to @fatimaolumee of ABC Radio at 10.30 am IST on how the Indian elections were not rigged as feared and how the voter had imposed sobriety on the new Modi regime. Link: https://t.co/5xWpb39jnJ

[Simons Foundation @SimonsFdn]

It is with great sadness that the Simons Foundation announces the death of its co-founder and chair emeritus, James Harris Simons. Jim was an award-winning mathematician, a legendary investor and a generous philanthropist. https://t.co/w48DhauUVj

[Sugata Srinivasaraju @sugataraju]

Perhaps no polling booth has such a marvellous jackfruit tree, and not everybody gets to vote in a booth on a street named after one’s own😊 #Bengaluru #KarnatakaElections #VotingDay

[TOI Plus @TOIPlus]

Rahul Gandhi’s defeat in Amethi delivered a gut punch to the Nehru-Gandhi family in 2019. With Narendra Modi upping the ante against dynasty politics, no seat seems safe anymore

https://t.co/gZegVUyfLF

[Ash Jogalekar @curiouswavefn]

Fritz Haber died #OTD 1934 in Basel on his way to Palestine; a broken and bitter man who was cast out by the country he had given so much to, including striking the Faustian bargain to develop chemical weapons for it. Even his unyielding patriotism could not save him.

[Ash Jogalekar @curiouswavefn]

1/n: There are some academic papers that are so brilliantly and so accessibly written and so universal in scope that they transcend disciplines and stand as timeless testaments to both great thinking and great writing. Here's a short personal selection: