I don’t remember the exact time in my life. That time I first picked up a book. Smelled the pages, inhaled the story, and fell in love. I must have been 5. I have never stopped loving since then. Books have been the companions who I know will never abandon me. I can trust books – waiting patiently for me, accepting my flaws because they judge you not. You […]
I first heard of Ruth Ozeki’s masterpiece, ‘A Tale For The Time Being,’ a few years ago. It lay on my mind’s shelf, and although I had heard of it, I never came around to reading it. Until a few weeks ago, I was traversing books hungrily, flipping from one to another in a frenzy […]
Tucked away in the bylanes of Bangalore’s old colonial past is a quaint little bookstore cafe called Champaca. One day, a friend, who curates books there, asked me to follow their social media feed. I did, but I didn’t follow them. (Hush, don’t tell the friend). But because I had checked out their Instagram page, […]
I grew up reading ‘Gone With The Wind.’ Then, I thought of slavery in a romanticized, removed manner that had nothing to do with reality. That classic tome, written by a white woman, made me think of slaves as dancing around in the grand, white mansions while their white owners indulged them. The Mammas were […]
There are some books that are beautiful and transformative. With gentle kindness, they invite us to embrace ourselves. They call on us to accept change. They allow us to free ourselves. Vanessa Zuisei’s ‘Still Running’ is one of those books. When I read this last month, I had no idea that this book would take […]
The recent death of a popular actor by suicide triggered a wave of conversations in India around mental health in the last few weeks. I don’t watch too many Bollywood movies, but the young actor’s death seemed to have struck a chord across the country. I don’t know why it was so. Was it because […]
There are a lot of people who take pride in the number of books they read. They diligently set reading targets and knock off every book they read on Goodreads. I am not one of them. For a long time, I didn’t have Goodreads or Shelfari or any way of tracking the books I have […]
The last month of 2018 went by in a rush as did the whole of the year. Well, who cares about 2018? The Gregorian calendar! Despite having the Chinese New Year, and our own Indian celebrations of a new year, we follow this old Gregorian calendar. Greg who? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Shouldn’t matter. Because […]
A writer, they say, writes for an audience. We are supposed to be intrinsically vain. We are doomed if we have no audience. In today’s world, that audience has expanded to having a social media ‘following.’ Can you imagine how many more plays Shakespeare would have written if he had an audience on Instagram? Imagine […]