Vintage Father: A Doorway to His Heart — Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca on Nissim Ezekiel

Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca reflects on the life and legacy of her father, Nissim Ezekiel, the Father of post-colonial Indian writing in English, an unworldly man deeply devoted to poetry and teaching, who lived simply, with minimal needs, but had a generous heart, giving freely to others

Addressed To Lord Curzon

This translation of a satirical piece by Bal Mukund Gupt offers a sharp critique of colonial administration through the allegory of a young boy’s dream

How Paris Olympic Games 2024 spotlighted global sustainability, social responsibility

The use of recycled materials, energy-efficient lighting, and messages promoting environmental conservation struck a chord with environmentally conscious audiences across the political spectrum

Painting pawprints on my compound wall: What a Doberman taught me about life

Grief is an arduous, long process but it is also a form of love. As difficult as it is, to grieve is to love

Nehru’s visit to Aligarh and a foiled assassination attempt: The stuff of Howard Hirt’s forgotten novel, The Heat of Winter

The Heat of Winter by Howard Hirt is an intriguing novel set in Aligarh, India, in 1952, featuring a plot inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal

Mumbai: My Home

Sudarshan Shetty writes how the city, when it was renamed, seemed to be in a dystopic flux

How Tishani Doshi, Arundhathi Subramaniam navigate city spaces in their poetry

The works of two Indian poets, Tishani Doshi and Arundhathi Subramaniam, are concerned, in some ways, with the navigation of space(s) and the forging of identity in its context; there is a reflection on personal experiences as well as a contemplation of the world

Breaking Free From My ‘Restaurant Voice’: A Journey of Unbelonging and Self-Discovery Across Borders

Turkish-Dutch writer Çiler İlhan reflects on her struggles with identity and belonging in Turkey and her eventual move to the Netherlands, where she discovered the freedom to let go of her contrived ‘restaurant voice’ and revel in a more authentic and unencumbered way of living. With an unflinching gaze, she peers into the complex interplay of class, privilege, and cultural capital, illuminating the profound impact of societal conditioning on one’s sense of self

The Longing to Write: An Enquiry into the Elena Ferrante Phenomenon

For the real Elena to be able to continue writing in Italian about Italy through the decades, about its political life and its class conflicts, the pseudonym is a necessity. In order to transform the real Elena effectively into a fiction, the real Elena must perforce remain a fiction.

Global Sustainability Film Award: Why women’s participation remains a key thread for sustainability

The need for concrete, transformative climate action, with female leadership and agency at the heart of decision-making is dependent on gender equality.

Love story: The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of

Looking into the mirror, it is possible to fix the small default to make you look perfect. However, when being on the romantic path of falling in love with your soulmate, it is tricky to consider moving on when the affection is frozen.

Another cup of chai: How a Muslim tailor in Kolkata made me reflect on money’s emptiness

When I was 18 years old traveling to India for the first time, I didn’t even know Muslims lived there. It wasn’t until I met Manu and his family, that I was introduced to the culture. I wasn’t just introduced; I was taken in, and I became a part of their family.

Spaces Between Words: The Unfestival, Season 3 — Stories from Ratnagiri

A special issue on The Spaces Between Words: The Unfestival (Season 3), an annual, one-of-its-kind writers’ retreat, curated by Sathya Saran, brought to you by The Punch Magazine, in association with the JSW Foundation

Menstrual Matters: Shashi Deshpande on how she grew out of the halo of shame around periods

Novelist Shashi Deshpande, whose fiction openly mentions menstruation, narrates her own story of menstruation and how she grew out of the shame and misconceptions associated with it.

How I ‘predicted’ the winner of 2022 Booker Prize

The qualifying differences of Shehan Karunatilaka’s ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’, compared to the other five books concerning various literary aspects, were pronounced

India’s creative industries: Stories of challenge and resilience

To stay afloat in the changing business and economic environment, arts companies and artists need to invent new ideas and strategies

Book Excerpt: Creativity, Productivity and Dogs

Dogs benefit human beings in multiple ways. But it is not just about stress-busting and healthy living, it is also about productivity, creativity and inspiration.

Book Excerpt — The Dreams of a Mappila Girl: A Memoir

Dreams of a Mappila Girl, the story of the first Muslim woman writer from Kerala, recounts the social mores of life in a semi-rural Kerala village

City of Fish: Why Bombay Will Always Be A New Wave To Me

No matter how long I spent there, it was always interesting, always changing, always to be loved.

The Women’s Issue 2022

Women achievers on their journeys, curated by Shireen Quadri

Anushka Ahuja: Doing Up The Home, Down To The Last Detail

The home décor industry is vast, and the competition is huge. We want to stay on top of the game with our unique design, aesthetics, quality and consistency

Sonal Jetha: A Tapestry Of Heritage On The Platter

‘Kaunteya, a luxury tableware brand I started in 2018, brings a slice of history, heritage and mythology, combined with fine craftsmanship

Lavanya Jayashankar: Gin And Don’t Bear It

‘Founding Matinee, India’s first women-founded gin brand, along with my friend Anjali Shahi, helped me free myself of traditional definitions of success.

Manisha Chaudhry: My Continent Of Words

As I learn to listen better, I am able to make connections across languages and words glow with new meaning. It is this hidden power of words that makes dialogue possible across diverse spaces

Meenu Agarwal: The Art of Interiors

I founded MADS Creations 19 years ago. I realised early on that the only way to win over the clients was through keeping their lifestyle in mind, customising the interiors to the last detail and following strict timelines

Neha Kumthekar: Tender Are The Feet

‘When we started OCEEDEE, a footwear brand, there were challenges since neither I nor my co-founder Anshul Sood came from any formal background in footwear manufacturing or designing."

Rohina Anand Khera: The Art And Aesthetics Of Living

When we started the luxury home decor brand AA Living, we had just 50 products on our website. As our project enters another phase, we are geared up to go international, beginning with the Middle East

Rashi Bothra and Ruchi Gehani: Carving A Niche

Since we founded Azure Interiors in 2013, we have completed 150 projects. We are lucky to share a similar design sensibility and a seamless understanding of each other’s working style.

Shrayana Bhattacharya: Finding the ‘Field’

I spent more than a decade talking to a diverse cohort of women about a movie-star: Shah Rukh Khan. I had made friends with them through seemingly silly conversations about fandom and films.

Srimoyi Bhattacharya: The Perfect Pitch

Public relations teaches you to gravitate towards people who are dissimilar to you and create a space in which you both can have a constructive conversation

Sudha Menon: Pause, Reset, Fresh Start

I was divorced, newly unemployed, and desperate at 43. In the last 11 years, I have made a new life for myself: written six books, founded a writing workshop, and forayed into modelling and acting

Valentine’s Day for the Rest

Perhaps I’m not temperamentally suited to domestication (but don’t all Bertie Woosters say that). The manicured lawn and white picket fence have always sounded to me uncannily like the description of a sheepcote.

The Road To My First Love — My Wife

Our love that germinated in the hidden alleys of Lucknow has blossomed in the Swiss countryside before finding its way to celebrate its freshness in places as diverse as Antarctica, the Easter Islands, Cook Islands, and French Polynesia.

An Urban Romance That Unravelled On The Highway

The lanes, the cafes, and the highways in Pune and Mumbai were a witness to our slow, grilled, shy love story. They understood our heartache every time he went back to Mumbai from Pune or I did after visiting him.

My First Love

Whatever be the case, don’t let go of your first love. Your first love alone reigns supreme, those memories clasping you forever…in all those hours of solitude, in all those phases of loneliness and longing.

Never-Ending Date: A Story, An Essay, A Letter

Is it correct for the storyteller to use former lovers’ personalities and smuggle them into art? What if they have become part of the artist-author’s subconscious mind and are not other real people anymore? Ethics is law, but also emotion.

An Ode To A Gracious Lover

Chennai is not the passionate lover who coddles you with gifts and flowers or writes poetry and sings for you. But the city is a benevolent lover with a big heart who offers security and freedom, only if you learn to connect with it deeply.

2021, The Year That Was: How we realigned our goals with the new shape of things

mongst editors and booksellers, there were debates all year long on how the publishing industry was changing and would continue to change and reflect the ravages of the pandemic.

2021, The Year That Was: How Zubaan Books learnt to get back on its feet

The entire year was spent in a sort of a limbo, marking time, waiting for things to get better.

2021, The Year That Was: Trends, highlights and new strategies

Wonderful books will be written, published, read and circulated as usual. It may take time, but as long as there are people, literature surely won’t die.

2021, The Year That Was: How Tulika Books ramped up its online sales

Tulika Books completed 25 years in publishing in 2020, which we continue to celebrate on our website and social media platforms through campaigns, special sales and focused events

The Year That Was: Udayan Mitra on why 2021 was a watershed year for the publishing world

2021, The Year That Was: ‘We got more book ideas and manuscripts than ever before’

An editor at HarperCollins India on the trends, challenges and new ways of getting books to readers

Chasing the Skirts of the Departing Year

The bicentenary +1 of Charles Lamb’s essay “New Year’s Eve”

Reflections on Leaving the Goan Casa Grande

Goa remains an ambiguous concept, still forming and reforming into a whole which writers of Goan origins are striving to understand

Song of Many Combs and a Single Mirror

How I came to see that being split is a human condition, that we are all made of pieces hungering to become whole, like the dazzling shards of a “sheesh mahal” ceiling

In Search of Wildlife Around Tea Gardens

Excerpts from Tea of Life: Stories from the Goodricke Gardens by Sathya Saran (HarperCollins)

On Shared Grief: A Pandemic Story

This has been a devastating time of collapse, yet also a stark reminder that our survival is acutely interweaved and connected with one another

World Heritage Day: How Mumbai Got Its Third World Heritage Site Tag

April 18 is celebrated as UNESCO International Day of Monuments and Sites, or World Heritage Day. For many Mumbaikars, it’s a time to savour a 14-year-long hard-fought battle that gave the city its third World Heritage Site inscription in 2018 for its Victorian Gothic and Art Deco ensemble

Aishwarya Gupta: There is Something Romantic About Carpets

During the lockdown, when everyone was home-bound, and was looking to do up their spaces, I decided to take our carpets to homes in India through the e-commerce route. Thus, was born the House of Rugs online platform

Alka Joshi: My Hero’s (or Harrowing) Journey to Publication

It took me over 10 years to birth my first book. There were so many times when I wanted to give up — and did. Like Homer’s Odyssey, The Henna Artist was my personal hero’s journey, filled with seemingly insurmountable obstacles

Aparna Kaushik: Women Are Creators, Possess Intrinsic Understanding of Aesthetics

With my intuitive sense of aesthetics and proportions, I knew I could be an architect. I was inspired by names like Zaha Hadid, Kelly Hoppen and Kelly Wearstler and was waiting to surround myself with beauty and elegance, something that exuded positive energy and creativity.

Apra Kuchhal: Mentoring — A Bridge To Leadership

Women bring a different perspective to the whole concept of mentoring due to their unique aspirations and distinct obstacles. I was fortunate to experience the power of having women mentors who have invested in my learning

Bindu Subramaniam: My Journey Summed Up in Three Life Lessons

Things are overlapping in such interesting ways that if you put blinders on yourself, you will never actually discover what you can do

Joyeeta Dutta: The Road Ahead is One With Mysteries

On my journey as an actor, I hope to stumble upon ordinary stories of ordinary people and have the opportunity to deliver an extraordinary performance in depicting them. For there lies my greatest inspiration, the most simple moments with the most powerful emotions

Kaavita Das: Body and Soul

Through yoga and dance, I aimed to blend all my training and life experiences to create a therapeutic-aesthetic discipline that heals the body and awakens the soul

Mallika Tarkas Parekh: Specialty Healthcare For Women

My purpose is to put science-backed, best-in-class health and wellness into the hands of the female consumer, guided by the most credible experts

Monica Chawla: Design and Aesthetics As a Way of Life

I build spaces that the clients enjoy and appreciate. It feels great to be able to imagine and desire something and then deliver it in tangible terms

Nimmy Raphel: Transitions Are a Key Aspect of an Artist’s Life

As an artist, I liked the evening better. The slow transition that one goes through from light to darkness; for me, this was where I felt Time

Priyanka Khanna: Seeing the World Through the Lens of Design

There are lessons everywhere, and there’s inspiration everywhere. You don’t stop designing when you go out for dinner or when you go to a museum or walk down the street. It’s very much a 24/7 way of thinking.

Reshmi Dey: A Woman is Like Glass — Born Out of Fire, Fragile yet Strong

My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, compassion, humour and some style

Ritu Menon: A Life in Feminist Publishing

My Address Book for South Asia is a kind of (personalised) history of the issues and challenges we faced as women, and as feminists, in the region, and our response to them as writers and publishers

Riva Razdan, On Ownership: Where is India’s Katniss Everdeen?

I am determined to be part of a culture of storytelling that places Indian heroines at the center of the narrative.

Sahar Mansoor: My Journey to Zero Waste

I wanted to create a company that mirrored the values of zero waste, ethical consumption and sustainability. Thus, Bare Necessities was born.

Shereen Saif: My Life, My Choices

Artists have not one but many reasons to create. I perform and make arts imply because I am compelled to do so.

Shovana Narayan: Living Life at Several Levels

Life has been full of sweet and not-so-sweet experiences. There have been several obstacles; if each of them presented a challenge, they also brought home some learning. Today, the process of learning continues unabated. So does my sadhna through dance.

Simi Kohli: Blending Passion for Food and Travel with Photography

Food for me is nothing less than art and I thrive on the limitless possibilities that come with it. I believe in not just creating sumptuous recipes, but also presenting them in an appetizing way.

Smita Bharti: In Search of the Seed

My six-year-old is holding on to my adult finger, and pulling me forward and onwards. I look at her. She is smiling. And with a deep sense of calmness within me, I continue to take responsible steps for my accountable self.

Sukriti Jindal Khaitan: Bringing Sustainability to Cosmetics

asa, the luxury beauty brand I co-founded, was born with a desire to help the contemporary Indian woman to embrace her true potential through clean formulations of makeup with deep-rooted beliefs steeped in its core values of ‘purposeful beauty, purposeful luxury and purposeful living’

Tara Menon: My Schooling in Kenya Taught Me Courage, Resilience and Empathy

My education is something I will treasure for as long as I live and it is what motivates me to work in education every day.

Trisha Niyogi: Success, to Me, is the Ability to Dream

Publishing, indeed, is a microcosm of the entire world and, perhaps, if I were ever asked to do anything else, I would, without a second thought, say — Never!

Politics of Sexual Identity: How Contemporary Indian Literature Dispels Any Need For Differentiation

Touch, in the works of Janice Pariat, is the trail to love. In Saikat Majumdar’s novels, it is love. Pariat’s loves are successive; Majumdar’s are not so much promiscuous, with that label’s judgmentalism, as generous, joyful, all-loving

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, My Awe-Inspiring Friend and Father

Abba was the magician who introduced me to the wide and varied wonders of the world, taught me everything about life and its customs and kept me enamoured of his extraordinary personality.

Mourid Barghouti: The Poet of Exile

Separation is a theme that runs through Mourid’s poetry and his memoirs, a condition he knew intimately. His poetry is never bitter, but always compelling and compassionate, a sustained and philosophical reflection on loss and separation.

Why I Really Love Libraries

When I read, I’m a voyeur, not a part of the story. I can watch without being worried about how I am seen. Reading, to me, feels like disappearing.

Tennessee Williams: Looking At Life Through Women’s Eyes

One of the most prolific American playwrights, Williams explores the gender nuances exquisitely in his major plays. In a world filled with toxic masculinity, the relevance of Williams, a poet of the outcast and the oppressed, remains timeless

How the manuscripts of Ghalib’s early divans were found, 50 years after his death

The Early Divans: 1821 and 1826 — Excerpts from Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep, A Critical Biography by Mehr Afshan Farooqi (Penguin Random House), pp. 416, Rs 799

Death in the Time of Pandemic: How Do We Accord the Final Rite of Respect to Our Dead?

With scores dying of Covid, how do we grasp death? How do we grieve?

How Jasmine Helped Me Reclaim a Part of My Self

We were proud Bombayites, but retained the culinary, sartorial and cultural habits that were part of our Tamilian heritage

How We Organised tve Global Sustainability Film Awards in the Shadow of the Pandemic

The week-long virtual edition of the tve Global Sustainability Film Awards puts the spotlight on global sustainability through dialogues, debates and films

Odds & Ends: Life in the Hills and other stories

A monthly column about miscellaneous things, curated by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

A Monsoon Reading of Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet — Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer

Critical reflection is the one important tool that we need to develop if we are to make sense of the increasingly meaningless world. While reading the quartet, one realizes that the whole exercise was to see the connections when there appear to be none. Ali Smith wrote the quartet so that we could see that, in fact, we are all one.

Encounter with Durga: The Story of an American Hippie couple drawn together by their mutual passion for India

An excerpt from a forthcoming memoir that records a lifetime of sojourns to India: spiritual seeking, breathing in a bit of its heat and dust, weaving one’s way through its crushing crowds, trekking, consulting and writing

The Outsider as an Alternative and the Dilemma of Those Who Can’t Take Sides

Sometimes, in our personal lives as much as it is politics, the inability to take a stand stems from a lack of choice

Odds and Ends: In Praise of Cake

A monthly column about miscellaneous things, curated by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

My Daughters, My Republics

An excerpt from the memoir by the well-known Hindi writer and journalist whose books include Main Bonsai Apne Samay Ka (memoir), Hastkshep, Videsh Reporting: Siddhant Aur Vyavhar, Admi Bail Aur Sapne, Mediya: Mishan Se Bazarikaran Tak, etc

Do Indians have Tagore’s identity of being an Asian?

The exhausted world desperately needs an alternate vision, an evolved worldview and a better path that can be contributed towards, and perhaps delivered, by the Asian mind, the Asian Renaissance and the Asian Century

What Makes an Officers’ Mess 'Real'?

A glimpse into the portraits, paintings and caricatures commonly seen in the messes across arms

Why not to fall in love: A satire

The question will remain, eternally — what is love, anyway? Why do you need it? When hate is more honest why should we fool us and others of falling in love when we can rise in hate? Let us rather, pretend a fall, but not actually falling.

Portrait of the Poet as Patient

A personal essay by Saleem Peeradina, poet and Professor Emeritus at Siena Heights University, Adrian, Michigan

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld: The Hollows of Grief

The first Dutch writer to have won the Booker International Prize, mixes the sacred and the profane, sexuality and religion, in her novel The Discomfort of Evening, which is a meditation on mourning

Lessons Through Loneliness

Loneliness can be hard. But it is a fact of life. If you can punch it by enjoying the solitude and accepting it as a normal part of life, it can soothe you. Here’s how it taught me to find myself

Modern Love: Our Long-Distance Relationship Has No Label And We Like It Like That

We’re too busy and disinterested to figure out a label that defines our relationship. We like talking to each other. We really like meeting each other for wonderful conversations. Right now, that’s all that matters.

In Memoriam: Asif Aslam Farrukhi

As an eminent writer of fiction, literary critic and translator of world literature Asif Farrukhi enriched Urdu literature more than most of his time and age

Odds and Ends: The Hawai Chappal

Why the hawai chappal eventually becomes the extension of our feet, taking on the shape of the soles of our feet, forming a personalized mould, a receptacle for our feet to safely snuggle into. An essay as part of a monthly column about miscellaneous things, curated by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Vasily Grossman and Graham Greene: The Nature of Doubt

When we have no certainty to depend on — when doubt is an inseparable part of the human condition — we can only latch on to hope, hope that God — or someone or something else — will show us the way with compassion and justice. Losing hope is akin to — or can even be worse than — losing children.

Ode to a Teacher

If we were the stray leaves in a gale — flapping around for all that we were worth; yearning for a sense of purpose and direction — she was the tree trunk

Odds and Ends: The Bucket and the Shower

Probably, the only jolly the shower cannot provide as compared to the bucket, is the unalloyed joy of tipping the contents of the bucket on our head at the end of our bath

Freedom of Thoughts

Thoughts jeer at stonewalls of jails and guffaw at the iron bars of prisons. Thoughts are migratory birds. Thoughts fly from the incarcerated towards their friends afar.

About Values: Why Hinduism-loving citizens tolerate the unrighteous or the devilish?

In the ‘New India’, all the values of the righteous — as enumerated in The Bhagavad Gita — appear to have become penal offences

Odds and Ends: The Humble Balloon

While most toys look like a toy version of life-size items, the balloon looks like itself. It speaks to the child in all of us. The balloon is an antidote for adulthood that hardens us.

Mirza Ghalib at Jamia Square

An imaginary conversation with Urdu’s best-known poet — about the police brutality in Jamia Millia Islamia, CAA, Sedition, Shaheen Bagh, and much more — that flits between the past and the present

What Literary Prizes Are All About

I have been sitting on various literary juries for the last two or three decades but this year it all came together with the kind of fortuitous intensity that obliges one to stop and reflect on what exactly one is up to and what it’s all about anyhow. Why do we award literary prizes at all? What is their purpose and function?

Odds and Ends: The Bus Rides of Bombay

A column about miscellaneous things, curated by Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Mulk Raj Anand: Curator of Child’s Consciousness

Anand’s diagnosis of decadence is the stagnancy of the adult world which inhibits, limits and finally reduces the realm of childhood naivety and imagination in an oppressive and relentless manner. Anand is tortured by this pronounced sense of deprivation and denial which constricts the world of a child

The Story of the Hazrat Nizam-ud Din Baoli

The baoli in Hazrat Nizam-ud-Din Basti or Nizam-ud-Din West was built in AD 1321–22, during the lifetime of Khwaja Nizam-ud-Din Auliya. In 1379, one Muhammad Maruf, son of the minister Wahiduddin Qureshi, built mud houses in the nearby streets of this baoli and inscribed the name of Feroz Shah Tughlaq on a stone slab. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan mentions seeing this slab (mid-nineteenth century). He also says that there are several graves and dwellings around the baoli.

Women in South Asian Writing

The traditions, complexities and dysfunctionalities of a rapidly globalizing South Asia as described in the literature by women can become empowering or used to subjugate women further. Women writers from this region need to look at its western readers and not only inform them but condemn such practices as archaic and out of context.

The Alchemy of Love

As a queer, I am linked to these three histories in my postcolonial reckoning of myself: the British, the Indian, the Guyanese. With me, I carry my queerness, my multiple belongings, my migrations. Like my parents and their parents and their parents’ parents. One of the texts that I find to haunt me personally is the anti-sodomy laws, all coded in language from Britain in the 1500s

If You Are Out There

The need to be accepted is in direct proportion to the anxiety of outing oneself

A Letter from an Indian in Exile

I am “queer” for two reasons: because I am gay and because my body — a half-Pakistani body by law if not by blood or ancestry — lies out the mainstream of what the mother country now considers acceptable

The Saffron Closet

The long fight against Article 377 is a reminder of the truth that naming non-normative forms of sexuality is important for purposes of political mobilisation. But this should also be a moment to remember that there are forms of intimacy that are hard to name, and hence too easily pushed into the shadows

A Walk to Remember

Being a promoter of inclusivity and equality, I seek a world where basic human rights are not flouted

The Ballad of the Literary Cafe

Literary cafés act as a useful heuristic device to find out how writers make sense of the unique social and cultural phenomenon of the café. Viennese cafés, for instance, have been an indispensable part of the literary and cultural history of Austria

Down the Rabbit Hole: Reflections of Self in a Writers' Residency

When I was accepted into the International Writers Residency at the University of Iowa, I entered into a crucible. Was it now time to come out of the closet, own my place as a writer and confidently spend this Residency surrounded by what I believed were ‘real writers?’

A Tale of Turkish Asylum Seekers in London

Refugees transform their host and lost countries alike. Since the Victorian era, London has been importing refugees, many of them Turks, and exporting liberal ideas. A comparative study of the stories of two journalists from the past, Ziya Pasha and Namik Kemal, from the Ottoman era, and two from the present — Tarik Toros and Turan Goruryilmaz — all from Turkey, all asylum seekers in London, with 150 years difference

Kashmir: An Unending Story of Tragedy and Trauma

Article 370 strips Jammu & Kashmir of its special status, but the story of tragedy and trauma in the world’s most militarised zone continues unabated

KSLF London, 2019: A Tryst with the Aesthetes

The two-day literary fest, which has earlier been held in Kasauli, was organised at the King’s College, London, Khushwant Singh’s alma mater

Two Images

Aboard a train that shuttles between darkened tunnels, a writer finds two contrasting images of couples, one a picture of indifference and bone-weary enervation, and the other of life, and vital sexual animation

The Search for Inspiration

A cricketer-author returns from a writer’s residency in Vidyanagar township in Karnataka, touched, inspired and filled with the urge to do something different and better — fearlessly

Romance by Rickshaw

Despite the uncustomary attention I received, Shankar’s affections for me were not immediately obvious

The Magical World of Murakami

What Haruki Murakami, whose books sell in millions, means and why he matters

The Exile of Pessoa & Camus

While both Pessoa and Camus looked upon themselves as exiles, a significant difference in their rootlessness lies in the way they dealt with their situation

Why you must read South Asian literature

South Asian literature in English is important and must be encouraged so that our cultures find understanding and recognition in the global context

An Anthropologist in New York

In the late 19th and early 20th century American anthropologists travelled to Polynesia and wrote vivid accounts of their encounters with strange cultures and practices. Reverse traffic began to flow in the 21st century.

On writing: Seeking Kodhai (In Srivilliputtur & Beyond)

Among the 12 canonised Tamil Vaishnavite poets known as the Alvars, Andal is the only woman. In her own lifetime, she was known by the name Kodhai. It is Kodhai, the teenaged author of the Tiruppavai and the Nachiyar Tirumoli, who is the subject of my novel, The Queen of Jasmine Country.

Ingmar Bergman: Through A Life Darkly

2018 marks the birth centenary of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), arguably the last great European auteur. A tribute to the master of psychological dramas whose world existed under the precipice separating dreams and reality and who considered films to be fragments of dreams

On Writing: Discovering Virinara

Usha Alexander on writing The Legend of Virinara which stirs up timeless questions about war and peace

The End of the Queue in Sight

From the archives: Meeting Mann in Cambridge

Snatches from a conversation with Thomas Mann and Jawaharlal Nehru at Cambridge: "Every writer carries on his shoulder the burden of understanding. He looks around comprehending the world with all its complexities and contradictions

Michael Ondaatje: Shards of Memory

Reading Warlight is like wading through a blanket of fog and mist, with light surfacing at the end

The ravines of Phaphund

I met a small town contractor 20 years ago. He had the aura of a man on an epic journey. This is his story.

Spaces Between Words: The Unfestival

At Kaladham in Karnataka, a clutch of writers spend 10 days, working on new material

Where Writerliness Matters: Notes from a Writer's Retreat

Spaces Between Words, the writer’s conclave at Vidyanagar, was mentored by Sathya Saran

A funeral, and a belly of memories

Gender issues: My trysts

Founder of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, Surina Narula, on her journey and experiences with gender inequality, policy and advocacy

52nd Shankar-Shad Mushaira today; no poet from Pakistan invited

Pakistani poets are notably absent at this year's poetic soiree, an important event on the city's cultural calendar

Novel possibilities

Ishiguro is prepared to reinvent himself with each novel

The mirror of truth

To read Ishiguro is to read the anti-lyrical. It is to read the story of what feels like any one of us, told by any one of us. To read Ishiguro is to face the mirror of truth.

The glory and depth of Ish

With each new novel, Kazuo Ishiguro probes deeply into the fundamental human dramas of affection, loss and misunderstanding

Kazuo Ishiguro: A writer of the floating world

Kazuo Ishiguro, the winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, blends public and private realms to explore the texture of memory

I Come Bearing Dreams: NM Rashid and Modernist Urdu Poetry

He began his poetic career with a youngster’s contempt for established mores and ended it with an expression of ambiguity, managing to imbue it with ineffable optimism

'When we fall in love, we each feel our story is unique'

An excerpt from The Epic City: The World on the Streets of Calcutta by Kushanava Choudhury, published by Bloomsbury India

Naiyer Masud: Hefting the Stone of Pain

Mehr Afshan Farooqi, daughter of Urdu doyen Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and a professor at the University of Virginia, on her memories associated with Naiyer Masud

Arundhati Roy and Her Suicidal Mission: A Conspiracy Theory

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Roy challenges the format of the novel

Why Faiz must be read today more than ever

A new translation of selected poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Colours of My Heart (Penguin Random House) by Baran Farooqi, shows how his poetry remains relevant in every age and why we need it today more than ever before

In The Shadow Of The Devi Kumaon: An extract

Uttarakhand has been host for centuries to ascetics and mendicants who sought peace as they trekked the Kailash-Manasarovar and Kedarnath-Badrinath pilgrim routes

My Meandering Mobile

How many times can a lost phone return? There’s something my meandering mobile has already taught me: keep a check on its place in your life.

The Many Homelands of the Mind

Two literary journals, in their recent issues, put together interesting perspectives on home and belonging

An excerpt from Mir Khalid's Jaffna Street

In 1989, an adolescent schoolboy from downtown Srinagar watched as his elders extricated themselves from university campuses, high-school grounds, handloom machines and farms to bear arms and fight a war of attrition against the Indian state. Twenty-two years on, Jaffna Street was born from his explorations of the human dimension of the conflict appositely termed the Kashmir tragedy.

The Big Gulmohar

A yellow moon, entangled in the Gulmohar’s branches, sees no hope of freedom. The Gulmohar is in pristine splendour, even when not abloom. The moon blushes upon rising over the horizon in the evenings. She has no fear of getting caught in the Gulmohar’s branches for they aren’t bare any more.

The night reporter: Chronicling murders that shook the country

In The Front Page Murders: A True Story, Puja Changoiwala, who covered the gruesome murder of a senior citizen in a wealthy Mumbai neighbourhood, recounts the story behind the sensational case of multiple murders. She explores the murky depths of a serial killer’s mind and the media's frenzy for a juicy story

Dibai, the qasba where Intizar Husain was born

Remembering Intizar Husain (1925-2016), considered to be one of the most significant fiction writers in Urdu of the 20th century. A book on Husain by Mahmood Farooqui, published by Yoda Press, explores his writings and his times, his style and oeuvre.

The Language of Ashes: The stories around Aghori babas

On New Year’s Day, we are on a boat in Varanasi, being steered in the night from Dashashwamedh Ghat to Assi Ghat. It is almost as though ghosts are travelling with us.

Rushdie’s Colliding Worlds

All of Rushdie’s stories are, in a wider sense, about the act of telling stories itself. “We are all trapped in stories…each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each family locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history,” declares Blue Yasmeen, a graffiti and installation artist in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.

On Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel and The Festival of Insignificance: An Essay in Seven Parts

True literature — that has layers within it, offers many ambiguous trails to invisible treasures, pulsates with the possibility of diverse meanings and contains hidden stories within the story — demands that we forget of our being, so that it can reveal to us, the truths of our being

Art of Translation: An Act of Rediscovery

The art of translation is the art of turning the strangers into the familiar, the known and the knowable. Each work of translation is an act of rediscovery, a sojourn at someone else’s turf

Art of Translation: Artists as Translators

Nowadays we translate quite differently, at least much of the time, or at least we try to. But the possibility of the existence of a truly 'faithful, accurate' translation tends to be much overstated

Art of Translation: There is a One-Eyed Man in the House

Translation is a solitary pursuit, and one for which the translator receives scant praise. If the translation is really good, the praise goes to the author of the original text. If it’s unsuccessful, the translator may be blamed, but readers might just assume the original author is not worth reading.

Indie in India

Everywhere, the acceptance for the alternative has only grown and indie rock has seen unprecedented efflorescence. Everywhere, just not in India.

Terry Pratchett: Flight of Fantasy

His words were literary fireworks, he punned like nobody I had ever read and he invented crazy worlds and characters and winked me out of myself

The Gathering: A look at the mushrooming litfests

Are litfests pivoted on books, or just on ideas creatively expressed, or a blend of both?

Fathers in Fiction

Fiction allows you to turn fathers or filial figures into murderers, lovers, criminals, thieves, benefactors, badass bisexual beasts or just regular everyday heroes

Reading Father: Abba, the Legend

Ustad Vilayat Khan was a sensitive, dynamic and refined man, perhaps even more refined as an artiste

Reading Father: An Inspiration

There isn’t a single day that goes by when I don't continue learning from his vast experience, which enables me to take his legacy forward

Reading Father: A Cut Above the Rest

His movement, his action and act — you just take it and that's a lesson in your life. I've seen him working so hard that this has entered my bloodstream

Reading Father: Dance Chose Him

My father sees me clearer than I do myself. He knows exactly how to push me and how far to push me

Reading Father: An Advocate of Love

Ahmad Faraz believed that love was the true religion which could unite all the people around the world

Reading Father: Life After Life

My father has been the greatest influence in my life, instilling in me the values that are indispensable. In fact, we need them to face the tempests in our life

Reading Father: An Absentee Father

Faiz speaks to us in despair, in the individuality of romance and in the collective of a nation's desolation

Reading Father: He Was a Peculiar Man

Among his freedoms were buying a Porsche during the seventies' fuel crisis, squandering his inheritance

Reading Father: The Accidental Businessman

He said he entered the book industry out of passion and became a businessman by accident. I can still feel the presence of the accidental businessman in me.

Reading Father: The Best Times I Never Had

Dad could draw, he was a walking Hollywood dictionary, and owned the best comics in the world

Reading Father: Trading Business

Father, expert in antique carpets, said: 'We've always been traders. You must learn to be a businessman'

Reading Father: Sifting Sand

My father had used the phrase mitti chhanana to express the futility of an endeavour and yet, one which was nevertheless worth pursuing

Reading Father: The Roof is Gone, the House Uncovered

Who are we, that God plays such games with us? But then there is hope.

Reading Father: 'He Insisted That We Live'

My father gave me the liberty to be what I wanted to be, unlike Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, my grandfather, who never gave his sons the same freedom. I wish they had been allowed to live their own lives.

Reading Father: Baba

I've embarked on making a film on Manto, and the more I get into his life, the more I realise why I may have been drawn to him. I feel like my father is Manto's kindred soul and that I am from that same legacy.

Reading Father: My Ear at His Heart

Khushwant Singh managed to communicate with all kinds of people, from intellectuals to ordinary peasants

Zubin Mehta's Musical Discovery

Zubin Mehta's first concert was when he sang under Karajan who was conducting Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Zubin made his first recording not as a conductor, or even an instrumentalist, but as a singer.

My Aunt Maya

What they told me about her life, when they were in the mood, was like a series of sepia pictures, someone’s brittle leather-bound album flipping past your eyes

A Collaboration: Shashi Kapoor, Merchant-Ivory & Ruth Jhabvala

James Ivory gave me the confidence to do things my way, to use my talent, my intelligence, my sensibilities to portray characters in his films: Shashi Kapoor

The Lamenting Image: A Hallmark of Faiz's Poetry

Love and Revolution, Faiz Ahmed Faiz: The Authorized Biography is a portrait of the man behind the poetry — activist, revolutionary, family man, connoisseur of life — and a reading of his poetry in the context of his life and times.

Drawing the Map of a City on Two Feet

The maps of Madikeri, a hill town in Karnataka, imbued with personal journeys and marked with histories & lived experiences, each like personal tattoos

Subimal Misra: Social Realism in a New Aesthetic

Subimal Misra’s stories document West Bengal and the city of Calcutta in the last four decades, its marginalised people, its degeneration, its hungers and lusts, and its hyper-violent reality

The Writer As A Father

On occasion, I write about Ila. As I’m doing right now. This is what writers do, they write about the world, and because their children often loom large in their world, they end up putting them into their stories too.