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
Most of us know Nilanjana Roy from her compelling essays on writing and gender, and her novels about imaginary cats in an old neighbourhood of Delhi. Her first book, The Wildings (2012), about a fearless band of cats in Nizamuddin, won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize and became a
Catriona Mitchell’s compilation of stories about, and more importantly, by Indian women is the book the world needs today, whether to allow those unfamiliar with India to gain some perspective on the lives of women in the country, or for Indians themselves to view their country in a clearer
I spent four days in Jaipur last month. It was my first time in the city---I'd always wanted to visit, but I made this trip with a very specific plan in mind. Instead of touring the forts and palaces, I confined myself to the resplendent Hotel Diggi Palace,
Illustration by Arshi Sayed Last night I saw Rohit again. I saw him walking on the campus lane, carrying a framed oil painting of Ambedkar under his left arm, blasé but careful in his carriage. Though what he really was, was tired. Apart from that he wasn't anything
Akhil Katyal is a bi-lingual poet and translator who grew up in Lucknow and now resides in Delhi. He brings the linguistic complexity of his world into his poems and then sends them back to be read and heard by an audience that is accustomed to speaking in tongues but