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This volume is an adda of great minds, spanning generations and multiple nationalities. While one discusses creativity and aesthetics through Indian classical music, another recounts the pleasure of a simple walk. Another questions how it would be if Rabindranath Tagore lived in the twenty-first century; yet another, how ‘cool’ Indians are or might be in the future. Subjects as far apart as war and solitude find space in these musings. Through these lively engagements emerge key insights into the ideas, writings, and life of one of the foremost intellectuals of our time in Indian and global scholarship, thought, and dissent—Ashis Nandy.

Contents: Introduction/Ashis Nandy—The Art of Thinking Differently. 1. Dear Ashis-da: A Fan Letter on Your Eightieth/Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2. At the Edge of Selfhood/Fred Dallmayr. 3. A Life in Dissent/Ramin Jahanbegloo. 4. The Intimate Friend-Enemy/John Cash. 5. A Tale about Our Hyper-masculine Selves/Tridip Suhrud. 6. When Ashis Nandy’s Myths Meet Those of Westphalia/Phillip Darby. 7. The Future of Coolness: Fashion, Fusion, and Our Futures/Arindam Chakrabarti. 8. The A B C D (and E) of Ashis Nandy/Ziauddin Sardar. 9. Celebrating the Organic Intellectual/Rudolf C. Heredia. 10. Ashis Nandy: Master of Contrarian Reason/Richard Falk. 11. The Gift of a Living Past/Lydia H. Liu. 12. Relating Ashis Nandy’s Interpretations of Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi/A. Raghuramaraju. 13. (Just) War Is Hell/C. Douglas Lummis. 14. The Real and the Imagined: M.N. Srinivas’s Social Anthropology and Short Stories/T.N. Madan. 15. Non-player Dialectics/David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah. 16. The Cognitive Storyteller/D. Venkat Rao. 17. At ‘Home and the World’ in Iraq 1915–17/Amitav Ghosh. 18. Dial ‘M’ for Modernity: Rabindranath Visits the Twenty-first Century/Aseem Shrivastava. 19. Walking as Philosophy/Shiv Visvanathan. 20. Artist Alone/T.M. Krishna. 21. A Gift of Song/Ananya Vajpeyi. 22. Ashis Nandy in Conversation with Ananya Vajpeyi and Ramin Jahanbegloo/Ashis Nandy, My Brother by Manish Nandy. Index.