What this site is
pop10.com is an independent site about world culture — ten sections, from heritage and food to textiles and architecture. I research and write it myself. There is no newsroom, no pool of freelance writers, and no content agency behind it.
How I work
I'm not an academic, and this site doesn't pretend to be a journal. What I do is read the primary material — Archaeological Survey of India site records, census tables, UNESCO nomination dossiers, museum catalogues, colonial-era district gazetteers — and then try to explain, in plain English, what a place or a practice actually is and why it works the way it does.
Two rules hold this section together.
Every sourceable claim gets a source. It goes at the foot of the page with the date I last checked it. If you find a factual claim with nothing behind it, that's a mistake rather than a style choice — tell me and I'll fix it.
Corrections are made in the open. When something is wrong I change the page and say what changed. Quietly rewriting a paragraph so it looks as if I was right from the start is the one thing this section will not do.
Why India
India is now the most populous country in the world, and the material about its culture splits into two halves that are both hard to use: travel writing that tells you where to go and what to eat, and specialist literature that assumes you already have a research library. The explainer in the middle — what a thing is, how it works, why it looks the way it does — is thin. About India is an attempt to fill that gap.
I don't claim to have stood in every place I write about. Where a page rests on documents rather than on direct observation, it should say so.
Argue with me
The best outcome for any page here is a reader who knows the subject better than I do telling me where I got it wrong. Corrections, sources I've missed, and disagreements about interpretation are all welcome: contact@pop10.com.