My books have grown out of different parts of my life—medicine, Assam, literature, history, philosophy and the experience of living between societies. I did not begin with a single plan for them, but looking back, certain questions recur.

I have long been interested in the gap between what appears to be true and what can reasonably be said to be true.

Medicine probably sharpened that instinct. A laboratory result is not necessarily a diagnosis; an association is not necessarily a cause; evidence has to be interpreted in context. Over time, that way of thinking naturally entered my writing about society, history and human behaviour as well.

Essays Across 2012–2025

A substantial part of my published writing is contained in three volumes of Assamese essays spanning 2012–2025.

Taken together, they are less a systematic philosophy than a record of what I found myself thinking about over those years: science, medicine, society, politics, philosophy, technology, identity, belief, public behaviour and the ordinary contradictions of life.

Some essays arose from particular events and arguments. Others returned to older questions: how convictions are formed, how categories become accepted, how public narratives acquire authority, and how easily certainty can exceed the evidence behind it.

In উদ্বেগ আৰু অনুদ্বেগ (Udweg Aru Anudweg), for example, scientific and philosophical questions often meet: consciousness and matter, reason and belief, anxiety and equanimity, individual experience and received wisdom. Across the three volumes, the field of observation gradually widens—from individual questions to institutions, systems and public life.

ইংলেণ্ডৰ চিঠি (Englandar Chitthi) came from another position: living in Britain while continuing to look back towards Assam and India. The comparison was never mainly about deciding which society was better. It was a way of seeing each through the other.

Three Translations, Three Different Worlds

The three literary translations—Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave—may at first seem an unlikely group.

They come from different authors, different centuries and very different cultural circumstances. I did not choose them because they belonged to a single tradition. Yet, seen together, they seem to ask related questions about freedom, dignity, illusion, power and the search for a meaningful life.

Siddhartha turns inward. It asks what can be learned only through experience and whether wisdom can really be handed from one person to another.

Gulliver’s Travels looks outward, using satire to expose vanity, politics, prejudice and the absurdities that societies learn not to notice.

Twelve Years a Slave confronts something more brutal: what happens to human dignity when laws, institutions and ordinary habits are organised to deny another person’s humanity.

That is perhaps what links the three for me. They approach life from different directions, but all three resist easy appearances.

Translation also creates an unusual relationship with time. A translator reads from a later world. I cannot encounter Swift, Northup or Hesse exactly as their first readers did, because I inevitably know something of the history that followed them.

That does not make the translator wiser than the author. It simply creates another vantage point.

In that sense, translating these works into Assamese became a conversation between different authors, different cultures, different periods—and a later observer looking back. The Assamese language provides yet another perspective from which these works can be encountered.

For me, translation has therefore been more than moving words between languages. It has been a way of bringing worlds into conversation.

From the Laboratory Outwards

My professional writing began much closer to the laboratory.

Over the years, however, I found myself following questions outward: from microorganism to patient, from patient to hospital, and from hospital to the larger systems in which medicine operates.

A microorganism exists within an ecology. A laboratory result acquires meaning only in relation to a patient. Clinical decisions are made within institutions, and institutions operate within societies shaped by incentives, fear, trust, memory and unintended consequences.

That widening perspective has influenced much of my later writing.

A Forthcoming English Book on COVID-19

My forthcoming English book on COVID-19 grows directly from my work as a clinical microbiologist during the pandemic, but it is not intended as another chronological history of COVID-19.

At its centre is a simple question:

What did a positive test actually mean?

During the pandemic, laboratory categories acquired extraordinary social power. Detection could become diagnosis; diagnosis could become identity; and uncertainty could disappear as a result travelled from laboratory to ward, database, policy document, television screen and public imagination.

Drawing on experiences in British and Indian laboratories and hospitals, the book examines PCR testing, prevalence, clinical interpretation, hospital transmission, persistence of positivity, fear, nocebo, lockdown, inequality and public policy.

What began as a microbiological question gradually became a wider one: how do people and institutions make decisions when the evidence is incomplete but action cannot wait?

COVID-19 provided an unusually intense example, but the problem itself is much older.

A Forthcoming History of Assam

My forthcoming English work on the history of Assam starts from a very different subject, but again the concern is with how explanations are formed.

Assam is often described through large inherited narratives—kingdoms, invasions, migrations, colonial rule, nationalism, ethnicity, language and political movements. These narratives contain important truths, but they can also become too neat.

Categories created in one period are easily projected backwards into another. Identities that were once fluid can come to appear fixed and ancient. Later political concerns can influence how earlier events are remembered.

The book therefore approaches Assam as a historical process rather than a finished identity.

Geography is central to that process. The Brahmaputra valley was never an isolated container. Peoples, languages, religions, technologies and political systems moved through it, interacted and changed.

The result is not simply a history of rulers and dates, but an enquiry into how Assam took shape, how identities were made and remade, and why interpretations of the past continue to matter so much in the present.

The Essays Continue

The three published essay volumes cover the period from 2012 to 2025, but the essay writing has continued beyond them.

In recent years, much of it has moved into English, particularly through my Substack and columns for India Today North East.

The subjects are varied: evidence and belief, political and social movements, philanthropy, technology, AI and consciousness, public morality, history, identity, diaspora, institutions and the difference between intention and consequence.

These newer pieces often begin with something immediate—a news event, a public claim, an argument, a social-media controversy—but the event is usually only the doorway into a larger question.

The audience has also widened. Much of my earlier essay writing was consciously addressed to Assamese readers. The newer English writing still often begins in Assam or India, but increasingly places those questions within a wider international conversation.

I do not see this as a new phase replacing the old one. It is simply the essay continuing in another language, another medium and a somewhat larger room.

Looking Back

These books occupy different shelves: essays, translations, medicine and history. I would be reluctant to claim that they were all produced according to one grand design.

But looking back, I can see certain habits recurring.

I tend to distrust explanations that become too complete. I am drawn to the point where categories begin to obscure what they were originally meant to clarify. I am interested in how evidence, experience, memory and belief interact, and in what happens when human beings have to act without possessing the certainty they would prefer.

The subjects have changed over the years.

The questions, perhaps, have changed less.

From the three volumes of essays spanning 2012–2025, through the three translations from very different literary worlds, to the more recent Substack and India Today North East writing and the forthcoming books on COVID-19 and the history of Assam, these books are best understood as records of an ongoing curiosity.

They are simply the things I have found worth looking at more closely.