William Dalrymple’s “The Age of Kali” makes for good reading only in patches– something in the lines of Mark Tully’s “No full stops in India”. I picked it up to prepare myself to read his magnum opus – “The Last Mughal”. Leafing through it I wondered why is it that only foreigners write about India (the only exception must be Bengalis, who both travel widely and write even wider). Perhaps the Indian experience for them is so overwhelming that it compels them to pen things down and give us sometimes impressive sometimes irrelevant travelogues. That brings me to the question why Indians, who travel widely in foreign shores, seldom write about foreign countries. I have traveled widely in Africa and remember jotting down at least three writing plots on an airlines napkin on flight from Addis Ababa to Harare. Never got to write anything though. So it maybe we are plain lazy while foreigners are not. By the way, Tully gives a much more balanced view of India – Dalrymple’s account of the country suffers from the same bias as I would have if I wrote about African societies. Superficial in nature, colorful in presentation – essentially “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”