History is hardly ever cool. Sam Dalrymple might just change it. The debutante author of Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (HarperCollins) does not dress or talk like an academic. “We live in scary-ass times,” he quips at one point, getting the slang of a new generation pat down. Then again, Dalrymple never did aspire to be a historian. It was a happy accident.

He might as well have been a physicist. “I was originally planning to be a particle physicist. I did a student internship at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and applied for Physics and Philosophy as my degree. I did not get in,” he reveals. Stubborn, he decided to take a gap year in travel. “I worked in a bookshop, saved money, and studied Farsi in Purani Dilli. Then, my friends, Emma, Omi, and Sam decided to travel, and I joined them on a road trip to Kanyakumari. It changed my perception of the country,” he laughs. It put him on the path to study languages, including Sanskrit.