How I went from being scared of Hindi to owning it
India is woven from many threads of customs, culture, languages and dialects—a noisy tapestry of unity in diversity. Growing up between Malayalam at home and Hindi in school, I kept tripping over one of those threads. Hindi was everywhere around me, yet it refused to sit easily on my tongue – it was not easily […]
“Anything we study about society, we have to be the prime suspect in.”: Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Saharu Nusaiba Kannanari at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. If you’ve ever been to the Jaipur Literature Festival, you’d know the ceaseless hustle and bustle that is at the core of the festival. If you’re a journalist, that hustling becomes even more incessant. Amidst that epicentre […]
“I’m not a judge. I’m not a jury. And I’m certainly not an executioner. I’m a historian.”: Janaki Bakhle
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Janaki Bakhle at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. We live in a world of binaries, a world of good and bad, that side and this side. Nuance dies a thousand times in our world of social media discourse and political propaganda. Nothing is untouched by this, […]
“If you see injustice as a monolith, it’s impossible to act. You have to break it into its component parts.”: Aruna Roy
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Aruna Roy at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. The personal is political. It’s a statement we’ve oft heard, you and I, but what does it truly mean? Does it simply mean posting about a sociopolitical injustice from the comfort of our homes, air-conditioned air blasting away […]
“Reverence should not mean treating the Constitution like a religious text. Respect comes from reading, questioning, and interpreting it freely.”: Arghya Sengupta
Amritesh Mukherjee from Team P3 was in conversation with Arghya Sengupta at the Jaipur Literature Festival, 2025. Are we citizens or are we subjects? Did we break the shackles of our Colonial past or just inherited that dark legacy? Arghya Sengupta, through his book The Colonial Constitution: An Origin Story, questions that foundational text of […]
Do you like reading Kipling? A powerful reimagination of his character
What happens when a literary classic erases you? Hiemannk’s Lispeth of Kotgarh resuscitates a character that Kipling rendered voiceless for 130 years, and Kipling may not even remember. Lispeth of Kotgarh by Hiemannk is a reimagination of Rudyard Kipling’s short story from 1886, published in November. Hiemannk has not changed the basic plot of the story: it […]
How is the short story collection ‘Pilgrims of Reflection’?
What happens when ordinary people are forced to become experts in their own devastation? Adrija Chatterjee’s debut collection Pilgrims of Reflection, a short story collection, asks this question across seven stories, never offering easy answers. The last few years have been very difficult for India’s middle class. They have been through the pandemic through grief, […]
Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life by Upamanyu Chatterjee
“To everything, turn, turn, turn,There is a season, turn, turn, turn,And a time to every purpose under heaven.” This song by The Byrds, which I’ve always loved and happen to be listening to as I write, came back to me as I turned the last page of Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life. To embrace […]
Poetry like a painting: Firefly Memories by Jonaki Ray
E.E. Cummings once wrote, “since feeling is first who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Years ago, when I first read this poem, I was struck by the metaphor of emotion over reason, substance over form, and feeling over the prescribed “syntax” of how a poem should be […]
These Hindi to English short stories are not for the emotionally soft folks
A Bouquet of Dead Flowers is a collection of ten Hindi to English stories by Swadesh Deepak, translated by Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt and Sukant Deepak. This story collection is the second work by Deepak to appear in English after Maine Mandu Nahi Dekha (I Have Not Seen Mandu), a memoir which described […]
