Men of mêtis

An American archaeologist reveals Athens’ navy as the engine of that city’s golden age

Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy
John R Hale
Penguin Viking
pp xxxvi + 396

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Sparta is now remembered chiefly as the arch-enemy of ancient Athens, not so much for its own achievements. The entire story of the Persian Wars, during which the quarrelsome Greeks united against Darius and Xerxes, of the Peloponnesian and Spartan Wars, which saw Athens and Sparta locked in a bloody, costly, decades-long struggle, and the wars thereafter which precipitated Athens’ slide into naval oblivion, was written by Athenians and Athenian sympathisers. Today, we acknowledge our debt to golden-age Athens every time we speak, study, represent our universe through art (in the Western tradition, at least) and, of course, congregate politically. Athens is the capital of modern Greece; Sparta isn’t even a noble ruin.

Cloud city

Darjeeling in the monsoon season is stripped of its chief visual attraction, but…

Kanchenjunga is the view from Darjeeling, they say, and you’re a lucky visitor if you’re there on a cloud-free day to see that mountain towering against the horizon. Well, I went to Darjeeling in mid-monsoon, and I consider myself lucky to have seen so many clouds.

Room to grow

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Crowded and bedraggled as it is, there’s something uncommonly pleasing about Darjeeling. Having spent a few days there recently, I was able to meditate on how beautiful views and cool weather offer ample compensation for narrow, slippery walkways, running drains, dry taps, and damp and poky accommodation.

Being a condemned Delhiite, my thoughts turned inevitably to the home city.

Urban legends

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No matter how much our cities have changed in the last two decades, we haven’t yet had more than the faintest foretaste of the revolution to come. I don’t mean mass social unrest; rather, a significant reshaping of our view of the urban environment.

Tickety-boo

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Here in Delhi traffic tickets tend to arrive in the mail at least a month, and often a few months, after the alleged offence took place. On almost every occasion we have received a ticket, the alleged offence was committed at a time and a place where our car was not.

New stone age

Upcoming government buildings in Delhi lean on the past

It was Nature who set the pattern, equipping the neighbourhood of this capital with a supply of red Agra and Dholpur sandstone.

Palace of allusions

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A TV ad for home security systems a few years ago showed the youthful father of a good-looking nuclear family turning on the home alarm at night. As he did so, from the keypad a host of 0s and 1s spilled out in all directions across the wall, around corners and onto ceilings, until all surfaces of the house, and thus the family within, were protected by this flickering binary mesh. It was sufficiently disquieting to remain lodged in the memory — and I was reminded of it recently, while reading about new discoveries at the Alhambra, the castle-palace of Granada in Spain.

Smokestacks are hot

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Surveying the local skyline, such as it is, from atop my favourite local pedestrian railway bridge, one thing is clear: smokestacks are hot.

Placebook

A handbook of Delhi’s modern architecture casts familiar buildings in a new, collective light

Few speak of Delhi’s architectural heritage beyond what the sultans, badshahs and British built. Architect Rahul Khanna and photographer Manav Parhawk set out to challenge this paradigm. Many of the 47 masterpieces of Delhi’s modern architecture they describe in this slim handbook are institutional buildings and embassies, but there are also homes, places of worship, memorials… An e-mail interview with Rahul Khanna.

Instant books

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There’s really no room for revolution in the design of a book. Makers and users — not professional designers — have perfected its form and features over millennia. (The real revolution, if we’re looking for one, was the invention of the alphabet by the Phoenicians 5,000 years ago.) After all, a book is basically a text-bearing surface, organised for convenience.

Capital view

Even in flat, dusty, noisy and low-rise Delhi, there are homes from which you can, unexpectedly, get a bit of the “big picture”

The emperor’s favourite subject

A “people’s history” in which the state plays the leading role

Technology in Medieval India c. 650-1750
Irfan Habib
Tulika
xii + 140

“People’s history”, it says in the title of this series, but reading this slim volume on technology in medieval India, the one name that recurs is not of any clever subject but of Akbar, the Mughal emperor. Time and again it is the emperor who is credited with a game-changing invention or espousal of a particular technology — by his court chronicler Abu’l Fazl, of course, but even so.

Hope in ruins

It’s almost impossible to get a neglected monument “listed” — and not much use

Walking through the enormous Siri park near his home in Delhi, BBC journalist Sam Miller says he passed it “about 50 times” before he saw it: a narrow mass of masonry rising above what looked like a dense thicket. Stepping off the path to investigate, Miller discovered it was, in fact, a sizeable, overgrown ruin — a building, he explains, that is neither mosque or barracks, but clearly palatial in scale and detailing. It is not frequented enough even to serve as an open-air toilet.

No more sacred

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When the tide rose high at Mamallapuram, the tourist guides told us, small sluices used to be opened to allow sea water into the Shore Temple. Then the reclining Vishnu in the garbha-griha, lit by lamps, would appear to rest on a sheet of water.

Hidden in plain sight

BBC journalist Sam Miller discovered Delhi on foot. He takes us through four worlds in one morning

“That’s the cheapest house in Panchsheel Park,” says Sam Miller, pointing. This is one of the priciest parts of Delhi, so why is it cheap? The house overlooks a neighbourhood park on one side, and on the other the stumpy remains of the 13th-14th-century city walls of Siri — spectacular in the morning sunlight. But behind the old walls are three tall tin roofs, marking a cremation ground. “They’re afraid of bhoots,” says Miller gleefully, pronouncing it “boots”.