Let me begin by saying the I enjoyed Da Vinci Code just as I enjoyed the Rule of Four. Both are immensely readable and written in a racy style that makes one turn the page to find out what happens next. While the Rule of Four does not take great liberty with history, it has not created a major stir as has Da Vinci Code. It is unfortunate that many take the version of the Life of Christ and the subsequent developments in the Roman world especially after Constantine as being based on historic...

One of the dangers of writing History in these post modern times is that the traditional tools of historiography, critical evaluation of the documents, evaluation of the biases inherent in historical narratives, assessment of the degree of vermisilitude in historical sources, have all been forgotten. Indeed there are even some historiographers who say a la Hayden White that since historiography presupposes narrative, there is essentially no difference between fiction and history. Of course t...

Turkey is located geographically right in the middle of two great continents, Europe that lies west of the Straits of Bosphorus and the vast Asian lands to the east. Such a location is not without its obvious difficulties, a cultural confusion noted right from the days of Herodotus is only one obvious problem. Turkey aspires to join the European Union and as such has to meet certain exacting standards of human rights, judicial due process, political and intellectual freedom etc. This bill of...

The line between "reel life"" and "real life" is a very fine one even in the best of times. In the worst of times the first overshadows the second. And this is exactly what has happened to the film The Da Vinci Vode . In certain countries there has been a demand for a total ban on the movie. In Philippines the Catholic Church has waerned the laity regarding the film and considers even the act of watching the film a blasphemy. All this of course raises the same issues as did the infamous Pr...

What can you say of a girl of nineteen who took a single false step. That she is young. That she is ambitious. That she took a short cut to fame. Yes, you can say all this about a young Harvard sophomore called Kavyaaa Viswanathan, She is the only child a doctor parents who trained her from childhood to enter the portals of a great institution of higher learning--Harvard. She is by all accounts a bright, well groomed sophomore. Unfortunately for her her book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got...

For the past three years or so I have been reading a weblog maintained by a young Iraqi woman whose name is posted as Riverbend. She writes about Iraq and the violence in that country unleashed first by the American troops and now increaingly by the Sunni militias backed by one or the other ethnic or political or sectrian leaders. She is writing from a city where even doing the daily chores of life such as going to get vegetables from the market can literally be life threatening. Yet with a ...