Conversations with self
To even try and explain what remains indefinable to many or, at least, has all possible definitions and explanations safely cocooned on a distant shelf that is beyond the reach of many, needs not just writing skills but also an intuitive understanding of things. Attempting to investigate relationships and the struggle ‘to sculpt them to...
Monsters on the screen
Monsters on the screen I was in school when I watched my first horror film and I remember being afraid of darkness even months later. That was also the time when the name Ramsay stuck to my mind as a synonym for horror. This may appear strange but after that experience windows nearly always creaked...
Where passion meets education
How many students in these past few decades in independent India use words line zest, excitement, energy, fervour, eagerness, enjoyment, delight, zeal, liveliness, vitality, vigour, and devotion for their teachers and their school days? I am one of those who will say yes, but when we look around and probe hard, the truth is that...
Baahubalis everywhere – left, right, and centre
Baahubalis create stories, act in them, power them all, and sometimes live the stories in their story. This breed, so firmly entrenched in Indian politics for decades now, has completely over-hauled the way democracy interacts with the way social activism behaves, the directions that justice for those in need must adopt, and even the art...
There is only now
Spiritual consciousness has no boundaries and there is no running away from past-life lessons. Outwitting the universe or manipulating our destiny do not have the answers that we need to be searching for because ‘instead of thinking of ways to escape the situation, it is better to face it gracefully, doing whatever we can’ and...
Go with the flow
Trends in book writing keep changing ever so often. The readership patterns shifts from one genre to another and so most of us discover that sales graphs shift strangely from romances to thrillers to spy craft to horror to science fiction to historical fiction or to biographies, self-improvement, and other genres. It is obviously the...
A cocktail of stories that charm the mind
I love reading short stories because they resemble a couple on a park bench watching an ephemeral sunset (or a sunrise, if you prefer) waiting eagerly to discover at least one startling moment every time they are there. ‘It happens’ is a collection of short stories written by Bhaswar Mukherjee that I have just finished...
Stories from Uttarakhand
Stories are good when they connect with readers and thus to say that some are only for children can sometimes lead us to miss out those that have been written well. ‘Tales from the Himalayas’ is a collection of 17 stories by Priyanka Pradhan that many may miss if they assume the volume is for...
A bit of yoga with lots of storytelling
We live in a world with 300 million traumatized by depression and nearly 250 million fighting their daily battle with anxiety disorders. This is one of the reasons why people have started taking the highest concentration of CBD, as people want to feel less stressed every day, redirect to DigiDrs if you think cbd will...
Turning the other cheek for another slap
If Gandhi-ism is about turning the other cheek for another slap, I am sure the fundamentalists, the terrorists, the arsonists, the agitators, the rioters, the criminals, and even the hooligans and violators are going to smile and wish every law enforcement personnel steps out in white dhotis and a few mild words every time they...
The drama never ends
Memoirs can be superbly entertaining and, many times, be full of quaint incidents or snippets that inform as well. They aren’t all going around in some formulaic way because ‘Becoming’ by Michele Obama, ‘Kitchen Confidential’ by Anthony Bourdain, ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ by Mitch Albom, and even ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’...
Life finds a way… it always does
This book tells me that even when ‘every inconvenient truth, every wrinkle has been smothered’, life can twist and turn in ways that can transmute a delicate Murano wine glass into an aluminum bowl in a jail cell… just as it has transformed Kamini Pratap Singh, a ‘girl from the dingy gullies of Varanasi’ to‘learn...
