Not a list of favorites. These are the shelves I actually read from, and what each book did to me.
The shelf behind Indian Exceptionalism and my work with Fortress India.
The book that made India's most painful defeat legible. Mandatory reading at the Defence Services Staff College; it should be mandatory outside it.
The war India barely remembers, told with the same refusal to look away.
Three volumes and over two thousand photographs weaving geography with myth, religion with daily life. The terrain itself, given a memory.
The Ocean of Churn, Revolutionaries, all of it. He reads India geography first, and suddenly the history makes sense. The closest thing this shelf has to a method.
The through-line of everything I work on started here.
The books I keep arguing with and keep losing to. My first paper tried to give antifragility to software. GeoLiquefy is trying to give it to the ground.
Where falsification lives. The method of the Inquiry, strongest opposing case first, is Popper in Indian clothes.
The canon of my day job.
The closest thing my field has to a scripture. My work extends it, implements it, and argues with it, usually all three in the same week.
The textbook that maps the whole territory. Everything I build sits somewhere on its table of contents.