Not only was Kiran Nagarkar an excellent novelist, he was also an astute critic-eclectic in taste and literary in perspective. Asides, Tirades and Meditations is a selection of writings that spans decades of his work and covers a range of themes that most preoccupied him: from Bollywood and cinema to Bombay's colonial and postcolonial histories; from commentary on Indian and international politics to world religions. Nagarkar writes about other writers and books that influenced him and also provides deeply retrospective commentary on his own writing. Many of these themes can be further broken down to cover an evolving Bombay, questions of personal and collective memory, the role of the artist in today's world, and ruminations on culture, world history, and Nagarkar's own childhood, life and work.