The BookJelly Podcast

India loves calling itself a civilization of knowledge. We proudly invoke Nalanda, Takshashila, ancient scholarship, Sanskrit learning, astronomy, philosophy and the glory of our intellectual past. But walk into most public libraries today and the romance collapses almost instantly. In this episode, I ask a simple but uncomfortable question: if architecture shapes thought, what does our library architecture say about us? This is not just about books. It is about beauty, citizenship, public culture and aspiration. Because a library is not merely a place to study for exams. At its best, it is a temple of reflection. And India badly needs those temples again.

Marc Andreessen, in 2024, claimed in an X post that there is "so much alpha" in books written between 1870 and 1930. Is he right? In this episode, I explore one of the most extraordinary periods in literary and intellectual history - a time that gave us Dostoevsky, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Nietzsche, Freud, Thorstein Veblen and many others. From artificial intelligence and social media to status signalling, consumer culture, morality, ambition and technological disruption, these writers wrestled with many of the same questions that define our lives today. Why do books written more than a century ago still feel startlingly modern? And what can they teach us about navigating an increasingly chaotic world?

For forty years, across nine presidencies, America kept returning to the Middle East — convinced, each time, that this administration would finally get it right. It never did. In this episode, we dig into Grand Delusion, a fantastic book by Steven Simon — a former Reagan and Obama insider who had a ringside seat to four decades of foreign policy. The book traces a chilling pattern: each president arrives with a new theory, builds policy around it, and leaves the region worse than they found it. Oil? Turns out, that was never really the point. This one is essential listening if you follow geopolitics — or if you've ever wondered how the world's most powerful country keeps making the same expensive, exhausting mistake.