National Novel Writing Month
In a couple of hours from now, the National Novel Writing Month or the NaNoWriMo will begin in India. For a whole month, aspiring writers across the globe dedicate their time to writing: some setting targets as high as one million words. And achieving them. The goal is to give yourself that extra push, to […]
Before, and Then After by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
Pablo Neruda, that famed poet of love, has a lesser-known collection titled ‘Ode to Common Things’. Here, he takes commonplace objects like onions or spectacles and elevates them to the proverbial grecian urns of old. Consider this line from Ode to an Onion: You make us cry without hurting us.I have praised everything that exists,but […]
Maps for a Mortal Moon by Adil Jussawalla
Maps for a Mortal Moon is a collection of journalistic writings by Adil Jussawalla on a sprawling range of subjects – from the importance of literary agents and the Salman Rushdie fatwa controversy to the death of Marilyn Monroe and the ambience of shady desi bars in Bombay. Indeed I had to re-consult the article […]
Rishika Aggarwal: on poetry and being a self-published poet
I think we’re beginning to remember that the first poets didn’t come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savannah or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem. –Lucille Clifton I stumbled into poetry by accident. […]
Vidya Premkumar: on teaching literature
Literature today presents itself as that elusive, satisfying, cool profession. “You’re an author? That’s cool.” “I want to do something creative, like write,” have become cool catchphrases with a generation saturated with their mundane corporate jobs. But what most people fail to notice is that the world of literature is so much like a job […]
The Golden House by Salman Rushdie
Think of Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House as a travelling theatre and a mobile culture library, situated primarily in the Macdougal-Sullivan Gardens Historic District or simply the Gardens, and making interim stops at the rest of New York and Bombay. Or Think of the narrative as a collective dream coming crashing down, a dream the […]
On J.K. Rowling
I was vacationing with two of my brothers last week, corporate bigwigs who sashay down the airports every month, eat meals at the lounge and keep their cars parked at the airport every weekend. During dinner, we got talking about lifestyle, and how it was not so difficult to subvert money and find a way. […]
On Harry Potter
Yet another July 31 is here and my social media is filled, cheerfully, in reverence to the boy who lived, to the queen of the magical world; bringing back to a generation of kids who waited for their Hogwarts letters (I, curiously, never did), who tediously and religiously decoded every hidden meaning behind the world […]
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Some books are known more by their quotes, snippets of awesome that become bigger than the author and the source and find their immortality in Facebook posts, WhatsApp statuses and wallpapers on the screens of the many digital devices we use. Jack Kerouac’s cult classic falls squarely under this category. It is a bustling, energy-filled […]
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
There is something, not quite serendipity, about reading a book of contemporary relevance, with jingoistic headlines spamming my background, the noise of hyper news anchors rising above the din of the traffic and the crescendo of the city rains. Kashmir in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Kashmir on the TV. Jantar Mantar is everywhere. At […]
