When speaking of duos, I’m often reminded of a delightfully intense article on the partnership shared by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Published as 'The Power of Two’ in The Atlantic, the piece by Joshua Wolf Shenk decodes the friendly competition that existed between the writing and composing
Kutti Revathi is a prominent Tamil poet who has published nine books of poetry. Her second book of poems titled Mulaigal (Breasts) found itself in the middle of a raging controversy in Tamil Nadu for its portrayal of female sexuality and use of Tamil words like mulaigal and yoni (vagina)
In the '70s, one of our most well-known poets, Jayanta Mahapatra, started a journal of Indian Writing in English called Chandrabhaga because there was no dedicated magazine for Indian poetry. He used to send his poems abroad which proved expensive and difficult. For years, Chandrabhaga provided a platform for
An Irani and a Parsi walk into a bar... Sounds like the setup for a hilarious joke, right? And yet the mood is far from light when Dr. Simin Patel first meets me on a rooftop bar overlooking the Radio Club in Colaba. Later, as we walk down the seafront
The Living is award-winning author Anjali Joseph’s third novel. The book, she says, was an attempt at a magic trick---to deeply stimulate the reader while appearing very little to do so. Garbed in thin flesh, the novel does indeed surprise with how much it manages to say about life
Dhyaas is a five-year-old Marathi language theatre company in Pune known for its extensive and award-winning work in experimental theatre. This year saw Dhyaas stage its first official theatre festival, called Connections. The festival ran for three days, from April 9–11, at the Jyotsna Bhole Sabhagruha in Pune’s
Are Wallace Stevens' thirteen notes about a blackbird too few or too many? How many stories are enough to speak for a nation with disparate parts? Is thirteen too timid a number for the world's largest democracy? I ask these banal questions because they seem central to
H. L. Mencken, in typically acerbic fashion, skewered the concept of democracy as being "heroically absurd [...] incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing". Ninety years later, this still holds true, judging from the political shenanigans we've all witnessed in the first four months of 2016. It is
The eighteen new poems that comprise the first section of Adil Jussawalla’s recently published I Dreamt a Horse Fell From the Sky, which brings together a selection of his verse, fiction and essays, open "into each other/ like rooms that share a door". That is how the
The Dusty Bookshelf is a new series of articles on Helter Skelter that aims to spotlight little-known books from the subcontinent that are innovative, compelling, and important.In a hilltop shrine in the temple city of Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh, a 15th century poet called Annamayya composed thousands of songs
Adventures of Cheap Beer, a serialised podcast series, possesses a strange charm: it is a podcast that reminds you of all the conversations you might have had in college over cheap alcohol and chakna---and the friends that you had those conversations with. There’s a familiarity to the ravings of
Vivek Shanbhag is a well-known Kannada writer whose highly acclaimed novel Ghachar Ghochar was translated into English by Srinath Perur and published by HarperCollins. The word translation means to bear across. The recent emphasis on translation in Indian publishing has allowed us to read narratives that were earlier hidden from