In the 200th episode of this podcast series, I bring you Ratna Rajaiah's book Secrets of Health from the Indian Kitchen. The author brings you some of the ancient and finest cuisines from grandma's kitchen and tell you the stories of each of them along with the recipe secrets. Enjoy the podcast and enjoy the food.

Ancient Greeks has their own worldview, beliefs and folklores. The myths found in their culture are as rich as you would find anywhere. In this podcast, I take a look at the creation myth of this culture.

Salman Rashid is Pakistan’s leading travel writer. The author of nine travel books, A Time of Madness is his first memoir where he recounts his visit to India and finally coming to terms with the dark past of India-Pakistan partition in which he lost many of his family members. I share an incident from the book in this podcast.

The Greatest Folk Tales of Bihar is a book written by Nalin Verma. It is a collection of timeless tales that have been told through generations, are adored for being a literature and treated as sacred testament of village wisdom. I narrate one popular folk story from the book in today's podcast.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short fiction in history. Today I narrate one such short story with you. It's called An Enigmatic Nature.

Though he considered himself to be mainly a painter, lived most of his life in the United States, and wrote his best-known works in English, Kahlil Gibran was the key figure in a Romantic movement that transformed Arabic literature in the first half of the twentieth century. Since he is most remembered for his book The Prophet, I pick this one and narrate some of its beautiful chapters in this podcast.

The Blank Slate is a 2002 book by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations. I discuss some of the ideas of the book in today's podcast.

The Book of Indian Kings comprises stories and essays about some of the greatest rulers and statesmen in the history of India. It's a collection by some of the brilliant writers of our times, from Rushdie to Dalrymple. In this podcast, I narrate the essay by Romila Thapar which briefly discusses the Mauryan empire and its most important face, King Ashoka.

A novelist who writes eloquently about the wrenching dislocations of history, Milan Kundera is as good a writer of novels as he is a novelist. In his books The Art of Novel and Testaments Betrayed, he explains the history and the future of novel writing. I narrate some interesting parts of these books in this podcast.

In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky depict how an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facets of the news. What emerges from this groundbreaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media are, and how we can learn to read them and see their function in a radically new way. I discuss some of these ideas in this podcast.