Despite having a successful career in banking as the head of marketing at H.S.B.C., Shoma Narayanan chose to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. On a whim, she decided to enter the Mills & Boon 'Passions' contest in 2010. Not only did her entry
Founded in 2010 by Bidisha Basu, Koel Chatterjee, and Utsa Shome, Leaping Windows began life as an Internet-only lending library for comics books, graphic novels, and manga in Mumbai. In just two years, it has grown to become a full-blown brick-and-mortar library and café---it is the place to be if
If there is a required reading list for Indian writing in English, P. Sivakami’s masterful first novel The Grip of Change (published originally in Tamil in 1989, translated into English by the author herself) should be on it. In what was a watershed moment for dalit narratives in India,
Eschewing all the usual clichés about how once upon a time Sunday morning meant B. R. Chopra’s Mahabharat on Doordarshan and how it was so much more viewable than Ramayan, let me pose you a question: do you remember how non-dramatic the background score of Mahabharat is? I recently
A writer, an art critic, a journalist, and an editor all rolled into one, Janice Pariat’s work has appeared in magazines and newspapers as renowned and varied as Eclectica, The Caravan, Nether, Open, and The Asian Age. She founded and edits an online literary journal called Pyrta and contributes
I have always wanted a tattoo. Nascent pictographs created from the controlled symbiosis of needle and ink on nothing but bare skin---yes, it has held a certain allure for me. But, of course, it was off limits. Read: strictly forbidden by my parents. My mom: “You will get A.I.
If it is anything to go by, the blurb at the back of The Book of Destruction by Anand tells you exactly what to expect from this slim, eerie text. It outlines the narrative trajectory from the first story to the third story in the book without giving anything away.
Years ago, as a child in the pre-Y2K world, I remember being subjected to a whole lot of speculation as we inched closer to the end of the millennium. The world will end! Classrooms will be electronic! Books will be replaced by technology! All computers will be infected by viruses!
If you’ve been in and around Bangalore or Pune for the past few years, you might have already heard of Gowri Jayakumar. A regular girl with a nine-to-five job, Ms Jayakumar seemingly transforms into an alternate version of herself on the weekends: Gowri, alias Kozmi Cow, a songstress with
You’re wary of T. S. Tirumurti’s Chennaivaasi when you pick it up. The plot sounds like so many others: traditional south Indian couple strives to build a happier world for their children; sends son off to America, only to have him commit the biggest blasphemy a Tam-Brahm could---falling
The process of biological evolution proceeded at a snail’s pace at first. It took billions of years to evolve from the earliest single-celled animals to multicellular organisms but it took only a fraction of that time for prehistoric mammals to evolve into humans. And there are not a whole
