Land Rover Defender 110 Driving Impression

The Land Rover Defender 110 looks good, drives well and costs the earth!

I had a chance to drive and review the Land Rover Defender 110, back in 2021, for Man’s World magazine. I’m not really a huge fan of SUVs and fast, sporty cars (like the Audi S5, which I love so much!) are more my kind of thing. Still, for what it’s worth, I quite liked the Defender 110 and enjoyed the experience of driving it - more for its sheer size and road presence rather than its driving dynamics. Anyway, here is the article I wrote for the magazine.

What’s an SUV? That isn’t always an easy question to answer these days. Buyers across segments don’t seem to want cars anymore; everyone wants an SUV. So, of course, every car wants to be an SUV, which is why you have softroaders, crossovers, compact SUVs, SUV-inspired hatchbacks and more. Marketing types everywhere know a good idea when they see one; take a regular hatchback, jack it up a bit for slightly increased ride height, slap on a bigger set of wheels, bolt on some plastic cladding on the sides and on the wheelarches, add an extra dollop or two of chrome, give it a fancy new paintjob and a cool sounding name, and there you have it, a brand-new SUV for the unsuspecting masses!

Ducati XDiavel S: Italian Easy Rider

The Ducati XDiavel S remains one of the most beautiful motorcycles I've ever ridden

It’s hard to slot the Ducati XDiavel S into a specific segment or category. Is it a sportsbike? A cruiser? Touring bike? The reality is, the XDiavel S is a machine that dares to defy segmentation – brimming with cutting-edge engineering, design and technology, it’s a bike that looks like a cruiser, has the engine performance of a sportsbike, and with its adjustable ergonomics, it’s comfortable enough for long-distance riding. Even the handling is not too bad, as long as you keep in mind this isn’t exactly a Panigale.

I got to spend a few days with the XDiavel back in 2017, when I was the executive editor at Auto Tech Review magazine. Here’s what I wrote about the bike at that time.

Off the Shelf: The Rise and Fall of BooksFirst

Back in October 2022, I started working on setting up a new website, BooksFirst, which I finally launched in December that year. This website was supposed to be a useful, interesting online resource for people who love books. Or, more specifically, non-fiction books. And the objective was to go beyond just book reviews, book excerpts and book launches – regular books website stuff. I’ve always been an ardent reader and had, over the years, developed a keen interest in the book publishing business and how things work in publishing. And so, with BooksFirst, my objective was to find interesting stories from the world of books and publishing and bring those stories to the world. The site featured writers, authors, journalists, illustrators, designers, photographers, librarians, book publishers, book retailers and many others who were simply passionate about books and reading. They had an eclectic selection of stories to tell – about their work, about the book(s) they've written, about the books they read, about the authors they like – and I did my best to bring those stories to fellow book lovers.

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

‘The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship that developed between the famously outspoken historian [and book author] Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir,’ says the publisher’s note, about The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir, which was published by Juggernaut Books earlier this year. ‘Built around letters and emails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar and a reclusive editor prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm, this book is never short of the kind of wit, humour, and drollery that has been strangled by contemporary political correctness,’ it adds.

We are told that the Guha-Advani relationship, which has survived ‘forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring,’ started in Delhi in the early 1980s, a time when Guha was still an unpublished Ph.D scholar and Advani a greenhorn editor with the Oxford University Press (OUP). ‘The relationship grew and blossomed through the 1990s, when Guha grew into a pioneering historian of the environment and of cricket, while also writing his pathbreaking biography of Verrier Elwin. Over these years, Advani was Guha’s most constant confidant, his most reliable reader. He encouraged him to craft and refine the literary style for which Guha became internationally known – narrative histories that have made vast areas of scholarship popular and accessible,’ says the publisher’s note.

Publishing industry veteran, Sridhar Balan, who joined the Oxford University Press in 1985 and spent close to two decades working there, shares his own memories of OUP in the context of Guha’s memoir. Balan, who worked alongside Rukun Advani at OUP and was witness to the exchanges that took place between him and Ramachandra Guha, writes about their working relationship in his own inimitable manner, which is a joy to read and, as a review of the book itself, provides an excellent primer to what you can expect to read in The Cooking of Books.  

Book Summary Websites: Are They Really Useful?

Some things take time – that’s just the way it is. Want to be an expert at playing the piano? Want to build a National-level championship-winning physique? Want to learn to cook like the head chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant? Want to get a PhD in aerospace engineering? For any of those things – and perhaps thousands of others – there are no shortcuts. You need to put in the time, the effort, the proverbial blood, sweat and tears. There’s no other way.

On that note, what about reading a 1,000-page book? Or rather more specifically, a 1,000-page non-fiction book? It could be a book on politics, history, psychology, economics or religion. To gain an in-depth understanding of what the author has attempted to convey over a thousand pages, does one need to actually sit down and read every one of those pages, or could there be another way? Personally, I’d say you have to make that effort, you have to read every bit of it – there’s no other way. But clearly, some others believe there might indeed be a short cut.

The Story of the Mighty Paperback

A senior professional from the Indian publishing industry, the exceptionally well-read and eminently knowledgeable Sridhar Balan tells us the story of the ‘paperback’ format of books, which has over the last few decades democratised reading and made books more accessible to a wide range of buyers. In addition to his work in publishing, Balan is a well-known writer himself and his columns have been published in The Hindu, The Economic Times, The Indian Express, The Financial Express and The Asian Age. His book Off the Shelf: On Books, Book People and Places was published by Speaking Tiger in 2019.

A ‘paperback’ is defined as a softcover book with a thick paper cover or paper board cover, the pages of which are held together with glue rather than stitches or staples. Glue is used in a hardback too but here the pages are sewn together in sections. The hardback is characterized by sturdy boards with a loose jacket cover. The paper used for printing in a paperback is often of lower grammage or thickness than that of the hardback. Therefore, the paperback appears less sturdy, lightweight and perhaps flimsier. It’s difficult to believe that such an object could save a life. But that’s precisely what the paperback carried in the breast-pocket of French legionnaire Maurice Hammoneau did during the battle of Verdun, in the First World War, in 1913. Hammoneau was shot and lost consciousness. When he regained consciousness, he found that he was alive because the book had stopped the bullet – its last twenty pages had miraculously stopped the bullet from creating a fatal wound. As for the book, we know it well in India. It was the pocket edition in French of Rudyard Kipling’s famous work, Kim. This book can be viewed in the Rare Books Room of the Library of Congress in Washington DC, along with some correspondence between Maurice and Kipling.

The Lensman: In Conversation with Pradeep Chandra

Based in Bombay, Pradeep Chandra is a senior photojournalist who has worked with the Times of India for more than 25 years. He has also worked for a host of other newspapers and magazines and is the author of five books, three of which are on megastar Amitabh Bachchan. His latest book, Amitabh Bachchan: The Forever Star, was released in 2022. I had an opportunity to speak to Pradeep about his work as a photojournalist and an author, his books and the experience of working with Amitabh Bachchan. Here are some excerpts from that conversation.

Blitzkrieg: Audi RS5 Sportback Driving Impression

Three years ago, I had an opportunity to review the Audi RS5 for a leading men’s magazine. Along with its younger brother, the S5, the RS5 remains one of my most favourite Audis ever. So, here’s the article I wrote about the RS5, back in 2021

Audi is making a bunch of truly phenomenal cars these days. And that’s causing me some grief. No, not the cars themselves, of course. The problem is with the reviews I end up writing, which tend to go a bit overboard with praise for the cars’ performance. Take the last Audi I drove – the S5 – which made me fall deeply in love with its screaming, rasping, turbocharged V6, intense acceleration and terrific handling. Predictably enough, I wrote a rather glowing review, which was subsequently accused by the Editor [of the magazine for which I wrote the review] of being ‘gushing’ and ‘breathless.’ Oh, the shame!

Book Review: An Inky Parade - Tales for Bibliophiles

Author, avid bibliophile and book collector Pradeep Sebastian’s new book, An Inky Parade ‘is a window into the charming world of antiquarian book trade in India and around the world, as well as an ode to the book as an object of art, sure to delight every reader,’ says the publisher’s note. ‘Blending personal experience, revelatory conversations and bewitching legends from the world of books, the author paints in full splendour the picture of a life devoted to the romance of books,’ it adds.