Reading and three bones
We live in a world where formulas are most sought after. Formulas reign. From film makers to writers, from politicians to the common man on the streets, and from here to there and everywhere, the demand for formulas is high. It isn’t that this demand has appeared only now when the race to succeed and...
Readers, killers, and the extended queue of writers
Try and imagine a killer sitting on a bench at some railway station waiting for his victim to come. Not many will visualize this killer holding a book up and reading. Many will imagine furtive and restless glances, twitching fingers, uneasy shifting of the body, cold and disinterested eyes, and so on. The point I’m...
The mimicry of passion
If one were to believe the updates on the social media, the speeches of politicians, and the jokes of stand-up comedians, the world today is one massive tidal wave of passion. Passion has suddenly transformed into some sort of a uniform that everyone is racing to beg, borrow, steal, or buy because wearing it makes...
The learners are missing
The basic problem today is that everyone searches for a teacher. There are people who want someone to teach them how to write, how to invest, how to paint or draw or sketch, how to read faster, how to overcome fear or even how to think logically. These people assume that some teacher will magically...
Let Holmes and Watson teach you
Books are magical. Every book has something to tell me and I am hardly the sort who will snootily say, ‘No, no, this one isn’t for me.’ This, however, doesn’t mean that I will keep reading only politically-motivated non-fiction that every politician and every retired bureaucrat seems to be eager to push… or keep picking...
Politics inside a bottomless well
The days preceding elections are the ones that are brimming with crisis analysis and hypothetical solutions. Thus every article emerging out of the media boombox is yelling about every issue from corruption, unemployment, development, farmer’s issues, education, health, and pollution, carelessly meandering through jargon that includes coalition governments, caste politics, dynastic ambitions, and business interests...
Parenting in the midst of social media
When I say ‘look around’ today, all that I mean is to keep your eyes glued on the screen of your laptop or smartphone and hop from one social media platform to another. This is what parenting has come to mean now. You want to disagree? Well, all you need to do is to look...
Don’t allow terror to spread panic
Noam Chomsky wrote: ‘Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.’ This may shock or stun you because you obviously thought you were making all the right motions by lighting candles, marching through your city, pasting #SayNoToWar all over the social media, and probably asking everyone else to...
Power is toxic to culture
Power and culture are in perennial conflict with each other. Countries experience this and so do homes. States and Union Territories in India know this. Politicians too understand the phenomenon and yet go on stoking power conflagrations. Corporates get into the heart of power contests more readily than adopting a culturally friendly attitude. Families are...
Must writers shut-up and shut-off while writing?
These days when I pick up a work of fiction I am literally dragged into a net of words where characters seem comfortable with Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and sometimes even Instagram and I find this strange. Plots hover around villains communicating on Gmail, heroes are Whatsapping poetry to their girl-friends, and long-distance conversations are happening...
A maverick trapped in a body
Life is a fun-loving sentence that doesn’t follow any rules of sublime grammar. No rules of nouns and pronouns or conjunctions and prepositions asking words to follow a specified pattern. I have seen full-stops popping up even before pauses have existed. There are times when adjectives pile up in comic sequences without even attempting to...
The way stories unfold
Ideas for stories believe in a 360 degree freedom to enter. This is more than the mind being like a fortress that is besieged because inspirations for plots do not need the fortress gates to open. Ideas have the power to come in anyway and they could very well walk through the walls as if...
