Wow @Tuppence - reading and discussing your book, Scorpions, with my daughter after hearing and meeting you at Hay Festival. So in awe of how you have coped AND become such an accomplished actor with all that going on! Hope you got a Nurosym machine! It’s working for me!
@RealAqibKhan Just seen it - this is the 4th car ramming attack in the news in the last 6 months. Two in Germany, one in Vancouver, and now this! Now words to describe how terrible this is.
The world doesn’t know what to do with India.
We don’t fit their neat little boxes. We’re not white.
We’re not monotheistic.
We’re not ex-colonizers or submissive ex-colonized.
We are something they can’t decode.
We are too many things at once—ancient and modern, spiritual and scientific, emotional and logical.
We believe in gods and particles, karma and quantum.
We’re chaos that somehow moves forward.
That bothers them.
Because we aren’t supposed to succeed.
We don’t speak with one voice. We speak in thousands.
Our system isn’t clean. It’s noisy. It debates. It screams. But it works—because we’ve lived through worse and survived.
When we rise, they frown.
When we achieve, they doubt.
Because they still see us the way they chose to see us long ago—untrained, uncouth, and scattered.
But we’ve always known how to turn our mess into movement.
They don’t get that a billion people don’t need a single script.
They fear our success because it didn’t come from their textbooks, their aid, or their approval.
We remember being ruled, but we were never truly conquered.
We adapted, absorbed, transformed—but never disappeared.
And that is unsettling for those who thought we would.
India rising doesn’t fit their world order.
Because we didn’t wait for permission.
We didn’t rise from imitation—we rose from memory, from contradiction, from sheer force of will.
And that’s why they don’t celebrate our rise.
They resist it.
Because it wasn’t supposed to happen.
@jopriyu I’ve read this several times and I still can’t find the words to convey how excellent I think it is. A succinct and wonderful portrayal of India’s amazing history, diversity culture and growth I have been reading about, and talking about for years. A country close to my heart.
@danny_robins@BBCiPlayer Cow farts ? clutching at more straw than any animal can eat. Also - if a wind could blow a stack of books off a table - I reckon it would have blown the duvet off my bed first. I’ve experienced the running up and down stairs and door slamming in two places I’ve stayed in.