About - Schandillia
A scholarly endeavor to make history more accessible to those who don’t particularly enjoy the domain, that’s how I’d describe this exercise. Here, you’ll find essays and stories primarily from India but also from other places that inspire wonder, awe, and thrill, all at once. Stories you either never heard of, or did but not the way they went down.
History is boring. Just a confusing, sleep-inducing collection of dates and names nobody feels driven enough to care about today. But history is also stories. Stories with the power to thrill, to shock, to mesmerize—to inspire awe. My objective is to trigger strong emotions with each story I tell. Not of contempt but of wonder. Every story you read here will make you go “damn!” at least once if not multiple times before it ends. If it makes you exclaim, my job is done.
Because after exclamation, comes exploration.
You are signing up for a captivating exploration of the historical landscape, delivered directly to your inbox. Expect enthralling narratives drawn from across the globe and through time, spanning prehistory, antiquity, at times even the last decade. Peer into both the rich heritage of India and the broader currents of world history. Prepare to have your understanding challenged, as I mostly debunk popular myths, both those acquiring a life of their own on social media and those entrenched in traditional scholarship.
I also do Twitter threads on similar topics. But I’ll actively endeavor to keep the two formats separate even if broadly in the same realm, i.e. history.
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Delightful as the process may be, it still takes time to research and write. It takes elbow oil. It takes sacrifices. So yes, there is a paid subscription. Having said that, knowledge ought to flow freely. Just because I can’t pay, shouldn’t mean I can’t learn. I have benefitted tremendously from free resources, and it’s only fair that so do you. In other words, I cannot afford to do this for free but I also wish sincerely to give back to the community—is there a sweet spot we can all agree upon?
I guess.
So here’s the deal. There will be two kinds of articles, thus tagged—research and story. While the latter comprises fun, shocking, at times mind-bending nuggets from history, either unknown to you or known in a very different light. These do not exceed 2,000 words as a general rule of thumb. Research articles, on the other hand, go right into the belly of controversies and attempt to demystify, debunk, and upend close-to-heart narratives. These pieces come with no word limit and often run upward of 5,000 words. Some have even crossed 30,000. Research articles are demanding of both readers as well as the researcher, which is why they take days, sometimes even weeks, to put together. Let’s keep these behind a paywall. Fair enough? Stories free, research paid.
I maintain an active presence on two platforms and have no plans of entering a third anytime soon. I am @schandillia on both.
While the microblogging platform is for general soapboxing, I do sometimes tweet interesting threads on the subject—mostly history but sometimes also other random topics like philosophy, science, and current affairs. These threads do not follow a strict routine so at times you’ll find two to three in a single week, and then none for over a month. But the goal is to corral the practice into a more disciplined, predictable quantum.
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