Siddhartha Golu

The Age of Faith, by Will Durant

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 10:20:34 +0530

Started on: Dec 16th, 2025
Finished on: Mar 18th, 2025
Time to read: 39 hours, 54 minutes

“Medieval” and “Dark ages” has become two faces of the same coin in popular culture, so much so that we almost always use it as a synonym for decadence. Like all sweeping generalizations, though, seldom is this accurate. Mr. Durant showcases how much depth and variability a thousand years can have. Taking up the Volume IV of The History of Civilization series, you are now quite familiar with the quirks and tropes of Mr. Durant. He frequently speaks in superlatives and uses “barbaric” for foreign powers so much that you feel repulsed. But now you know that these are distractions to an otherwise wonderful scholarship.

There are some peripheral topics in the book which are less than satisfactory - the frequent wars and discussions of numerous rulers being one of them, but the central theme of the book, the three religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam, is dealt with a scholarly hand. Amongst the three, Christianity is given the most importance and discussed most at length, but I’m not complaining. It is a rather interesting deep-dive, where you experience the world’s most dominant religion from its birth to its triumph and barbarity. I have an “Oriental” mind, as Mr. Durant would put it, so I loved walking through the century with a Euro-centric, Christianity-obsessed perspective.

The book is long and becomes exhausting to read at times, especially when reading about the kings who are footnotes in the ocean of history. It took me ~40 hours over a period of three months to complete the book. But as with his other books in the series, you never regret having taken the pain to go through the journey. I’m looking forward to read the next one.

Sinners (2025), by Ryan Coogler

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 23:14:45 +0530

Check it out on Letterboxd

Extremely happy that a film with an original story is the biggest blockbuster of the year, but man did it feel rushed and poorly executed, especially in the second half.

I don’t watch trailers before watching a film, so I had no expectations as to what’s going to come. The film, unfortunately, feels like that famous horse-drawing-beginning-end meme; you can clearly see that it is two different films stitched together in the middle haphazardly.

The cultural vampirism angle, final shootout of the KKK, music being a transcendental force - these themes were introduced like a great tasting of a food party where the main course leaves a lot to be desired. Could’ve been a great one.

Read /u/Theposis’s take on the plot holes here: www.reddit.com/r/TrueFilm/comments/1kcruzo/am_i_the_only_one_who_thinks_sinners_is_a_little/mqiin97/

On Killing by Dave Grossman

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 09:46:43 +0530

Started on: Dec 20th, 2025
Abandoned on: Dec 23rd, 2025

Also published on Goodreads

I picked up this book expecting it to tread into the choppy waters of war, ethics of killing and the psychological costs associated, something that the title itself told me to expect. Alas, as I continue reading, two things became clear - 1) Grossman was never going to go against the army establishment, being a Lieutenant Colonel himself and 2) he was trying to package his theories into pseudo-intellectual bullshit and trying to portray it as something profound.

I stopped reading when he made a case for “killing is as natural as sex and we should not fight against the natural order”.

Just watch Paths of Glory or Full Metal Jacket by Kubrick and you’d come away with a far better understanding of war than wasting your time reading this.

Jugnuma/The Fable (2024) by Raam Reddy

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Tue, 16 Sep 2025 23:02:18 +0530

Check it out on Letterboxd

Technicolor maximalism at display. Every shot feels controlled and patient and you can feel the craft shining through. The story is immaterial, maybe even treated as a crutch to let the visuals speak some narrative. Oh, the visuals. Sitting in the theatre on a Monday evening; and I almost wished that not many people come to see the show, and felt bad when that wish was granted but I can imagine that sorry state of alternate reality when people might get up in between and leave; when the quiet dialogues get drowned out by impatient murmurs.

This is a film which is capable of bringing nostalgia to someone who has never even lived in the mountains. Nothing feels rushed and hurried. A lot of the plot points remain unexplained; maybe because you’re not supposed to understand the plot and should just live through those two hours of quiet existence, letting yourself be transported to that Himalayan village in 1989.

I loved the lack of any soundtrack, loved that there were no tense music leading up to the final revelation, loved that things were left ambiguous. I especially loved the interactions with villagers, capturing them in their rawest emotions. Voiceovers generally detract from the experience, but here they don’t stand out as much because it is used judiciously.

This was a treat to watch and I’m glad I got to see this in the theatre.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 23:53:07 +0530

Started on: Mar 26th, 2025
Finished on: Apr 8th, 2025

Also published on Goodreads

Memoirs are by definition biased, which means you have to always put things in perspective and exercise caution while forming judgement. However, it is seldom that you get an insider look into the dirty underbelly of Big Tech, partly because it can be a career suicide and partly because the lawsuits make the rest of your life miserable. Which is why this book was an illuminating ride.

I belong to that community which is more commonly referred to as “nerds”. I enjoy tinkering with stuff, going into obscure rabbit holes, live and breathe technology, get into heated and passionate debates about the hacker spirit, and someone who used to deeply admire Mark Zuckerberg. I grew up with Facebook, got inspired by Mark’s yearly challenges, watched the engineering culture at Facebook with envy and aspired to build something great like Facebook.

Things started taking a turn for the worse in my early twenties. I started feeling more isolated the more time I spent on Facebook and started seeing the hypocrisies of Mark - how he would fiercely protect his privacy while violating his users’, how he viewed this entire thing as more of a power game than building cool stuff and having fun. All of this is abundantly clear when you read this book.

There is nothing earth shattering here, nothing that you have probably not read about in online columns. The author keeps making the point that she could not leave the job because she thought she could do more change from the inside than outside (haven’t we all heard that before). But it still feels impactful to hear how power corrupts from within. How cool engineering without moral values is just a façade.

I’ll recommend this not on literary merit, but on having the courage to speak truth to power.

Sonatine (1993) by Takeshi Kitano

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Sun, 24 Nov 2024 16:29:30 +0530

Verdict: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Check it out on Letterboxd

An important film not just for the career of Kitano but an interesting take on the Yakuza genre films.

Sharp cuts, pensive soundtrack and absurdist portrayal of the leading man. When you typically watch gangster films, the violence is glorified and the men responsible for violence seem to enjoy doing it. Spinning that whole genre on its head, Kitano (who stars himself as the leading man) plays himself as a brooding and tired yakuza who is quite indifferent to the violence. While the entire film is very reserved with its dialogues, there’s a short segment in the middle when the lead character is having a conversation with a girl and lays his innermost thoughts in a simple manner:

I wouldn’t carry a gun if I were tough. I shoot fast because I get scared fast. When you’re scared all the time, you reach a point when you wish you were dead.

The film’s ending which is supposed to be a cathartic act of revenge for the leading man, is portrayed with a detachment - machine guns playing like light shows with sharp jump cuts between the scene from the outside and from within. While it sometimes feels a bit slow in the middle, especially if you’re not well-versed with sensibilities of Asian directors, it pulls you in the later half and ends with a memorable scene. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and hope to see Hana-Bi next.

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Sat, 28 Sep 2024 11:35:18 +0530

Read 2 times

Started on: July 29th, 2023
Finished on: Aug 24th, 2023
Time to read: 14 hours, 31 minutes

Also published on Goodreads

Update from my 2nd reading

A kind friend gifted me the hardcover version of this book. It was a sublime experience - to be able to hold the narrative in your hands, flip through the insanity and come out of the house with a greater understanding of human beings.

Original notes from my 1st reading

This is probably the strangest book I’ve ever read. One of those cult favourites where you’ll either passionately love the book, or vehemently hate it. Everything depends upon how much are you willing to invest - when you have to read the words upside down or sometimes vertically, when there are pages after pages after pages of incomprehensible texts, when you lose control of story at every step of the way and wonder what’s really happening, are the characters losing their minds or is it you - you have to remember that this is just a book. Nothing more, nothing less. Otherwise, you’ll end up like me, obsessing over every tiny detail, wondering at midnight whether the emptiness and coldness you feel is just because the temperature is low or are there other factors in play.

I know. I sound paranoid. But this is exactly what the author intended.

On surface, House of Leaves is a book about a house which expands on the inside while remaining unchanged on the outside, the vast empty space consisting of nothing but darkness accompanied by a vicious and nerve-wrecking growl. But it is so much more than that. This is the story of a famous photojournalist who is retiring from his life to fix his broken marriage in a quiet, suburb place. What he gets instead is a haunted house which initially intrigues his interest, but later on consumes him completely with its idiosyncrasies. How the paranoia creeps into his wife and his friends, threatening to break their entire relations. Eventually, it becomes a tale of how love redeems him and brings them closer than ever. All this sounds like a normal story, except the way Mark presents it makes it special. You find footnotes to footnotes of a book inside the book, with narrator consistently interrupting the flow with his own, fucked up life, slowly spiralling out of control from reality.

I’m glad I picked it up. The only letdown was that I read it on kindle, ‘cause I couldn’t afford the paperback version at this time. But, this is a book that is meant to be read on paper. I will surely revisit it once I have the paperback in my collection.

Proficient Motorcycling by David L. Hough

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 22:15:16 +0530

Started on: July 12th, 2024
Finished on: Aug 29th, 2024
Time to read: 9 hours, 9 minutes

Also published on Goodreads

I have been riding motorcycles for past 7 years. I’ve had so many crashes in the early days that people were afraid of sitting as a pillion on my bike. Slowly I started internalizing few things and gradually the accidents stopped. This is a typical journey of how you learn any skill. However, it becomes a problem if you never give yourself a chance to see your skills from first principles and examine bad patterns that you might have internalized.

Reading this book was a refreshing reminder to examine how I ride a motorcycle.

This didn’t teach me anything extraordinary, but it explained so many things that I had, just sort of, accepted as given. Like how tyre pressure affects a bike’s traction, why counter-steering works, why front brakes are much more powerful (and should be used more frequently) than rear brakes, and on and on.

Pick up this book if you’d like to improve, and understand, how you ride.

Freezing Apps on Non Rooted Phones (Without a PC)

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 13:30:50 +0530

Recently when my mom got a new phone, I wanted to remove some system applications from the phone which are bloatware. Now doing this with a laptop is fairly easy, we can just use adb to uninstall, however the task becomes difficult if you cannot use a PC.

Found a way to do this via Shizuku + Hail:

Install Shizuku
Starting with android 11, you can use ADB on the device without using a PC. You’ll have to enable wireless debugging first and then connect the app through the wireless debugging.
Go to About phone -> build number and keep clicking it to enable developer mode
Once enabled, search for wireless debugging in settings -> enable that -> click on the left side of the panel to go inside wireless debugging
Open Shizuku and click on pairing under wireless debugging
Give notification access
Click on developer options -> go to wireless debugging -> pair device with pairing code -> note down the pairing code
Give that code in the notification bar -> pairing should be successful
Go back to the home screen in Shizuku and click on Start
- If you get the following error, simply restart Shizuku:
Shuzuku should be running now.
Install Hail -> go to settings -> click on working mode -> select Shizuku - Disable -> Allow all the time
Go to Apps from the bottom navigation in Hail -> select the system apps you want to freeze -> go back to home after selecting these apps
- By default only User apps are listed. Click on three dots and select system apps to list all apps
Click on the right hand corner icon to freeze these apps. Voilà, all these system applications should be disabled.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Sun, 21 Apr 2024 19:53:52 +0530

Started on: Jan 31st, 2023
Finished on: Mar 19th, 2023
Time to read: 15 hours, 55 minutes

Also published on Goodreads

A phenomenally written book! Mr. Rushdie is a master of using metaphors and he went all in in this book. Weaving together multiple narratives, using India’s post-colonial history in a postmodern prose to deliver a magical realism masterpiece, there’s no wonder why this book was awarded as the Best of the Bookers.

In my previous piece about Shame by Mr. Rushdie, I’d written:

Rushdie has a peculiar way with words, an authoritative stance where the sentences bend over backwards to dance to the master’s tunes. He weaves them in and out and creates intricate relationships between the story, storyteller and reader. You need to be acquainted with the history of India and Pakistan, or at least be familiar with the events surrounding the partition, in order to grasp fully what he has set out here to do. The book is filled with brilliant uses of metaphors and similes, creating a parallel universe of Pakistan during the tumultuous years after partition. The sentences are measured and precise, neatly packed with an intricate plot and the social commentary (with a tinge of satire) leading you towards the destination.

The best kind of writing is fueled by personal experiences and Rushdie employs all the powers of language to bring that out in a full frontal display. It’s unfortunate when authors like him are targeted and threatened for merely exposing the underlying hypocrisy in the way we deal with our beliefs and ideologies.

I wish more people read him (if they aren’t already) and in general I wish more people read fiction. I’ve “demonized” fiction books for such a long time and now feel angry at my younger self for wasting the opportunities earlier. There’s such a wealth of insight hidden between these yellow pages; we just need to open our eyes and see.

Chup: Breaking the Silence About India's Women by Deepa Narayan

sid@siddharthagolu.com (Siddhartha Golu) — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 21:05:39 +0530

Siddhartha Golu

The Age of Faith, by Will Durant

Sinners (2025), by Ryan Coogler

On Killing by Dave Grossman

Jugnuma/The Fable (2024) by Raam Reddy

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Sonatine (1993) by Takeshi Kitano

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Update from my 2nd reading

Original notes from my 1st reading

Proficient Motorcycling by David L. Hough

Freezing Apps on Non Rooted Phones (Without a PC)

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

Chup: Breaking the Silence About India's Women by Deepa Narayan

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

So Good They Can't Ignore You - Cal Newport

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

After Life (1998) by Hirokazu Kore-eda

Life Between Buildings by Jan Gehl

3 Iron (2004) by Kim Ki-duk

Anxious People, by Fredrik Backman

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter by Peter Singer

Shame by Salman Rushdie

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

Annihilation of Caste(Annotated Edition) by Arundhati Roy

Second Sex

Delusions of Gender

Parenting Beyond Belief by Dale McGowan

Winter Sleep (2014) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006) by Gaurav Jani

I Do What I Do by Raghuram Rajan

Waking Life (2001) by Richard Linklater

Azadi by Arundhati Roy

Stoner by John Williams

A Beautiful Woman

Martin Freeman

Einstein

Mother Teresa

Charlie Chaplin (um... not quite)

Gandhi

Oslo, August 31st (2011) by Joachim Trier

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

How to fool the world and become a Billionaire

Fear

Waking Up by Sam Harris

A disappointing jumble of thoughts

Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru

World history in a nutshell

The Darjeeling Limited (2007) by Wes Anderson

Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music by Robert Greenberg

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky

Context, context, context. Everything is dependant on the context.

Range by David Epstein

Deference vs. Indifference

Deference vs. Indifference

The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

The Stranger and The Plague by Albert Camus

Preamble

What does it actually mean?

A meeting with The Stranger

An Encounter with The Plague

The Conclusion and the path ahead