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Group Activity: Staring at the Sea
No matter the state of your mind or the strength of your being you’ll have to agree that being in a crowd alone is most often a peculiar experience. Whether this is in a cinema hall, in a garden, or under a clear patch of sky against the sea, where you think you’ll be among…
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What Marge Taught Me
There are probably two relevant truths in each person’s life. Mine is that I am a writer and that I struggle to write. Everything else I’ve discovered about myself returns to these two points. It’s the center of my universe, from where it would seem all my neuroses flow, like white puss from under a…
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Faint Promise in Richard Sennet’s ‘The Uses of Disorder’
“The fruit of this conflict— a paradox which is the essence of this book— is that in extricating the city from pre-planned control, man will become more in control of themselves and more aware of each other. That is the promise, and the justification, of disorder.” Richard Sennet’s ‘The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and…
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Note: I miss reading
I miss reading for leisure, I tell my friend. I am sitting on a bench, whose back is slightly broken and bent against a tree. A copy of Fleur Jaeggy’s ‘Proleterka‘ is on my lap. Behind me is a gorgeous sunset, just dipping into darkness. I keep switching the phone between my hands, because every…
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Spectre as Spectrum: On Caste Discrimination in Higher Education
This month, I wrote two articles about caste discrimination in Indian higher education. The first, published in the Wire, reviews N Sukumar’s book “Caste Discrimination and Exclusion in Higher Education: A Critical Reflection”. This book is a crucial contribution to research on higher education, it locates caste discrimination in multiple spaces, including in classrooms, hostels,…
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The pessimistic courage of Sebald: on a natural history of destruction (review)
For many years after the Second World War, German writers avoided writing about its actual horrors. “On the Natural History of Destruction” by W.G Sebald (trans. Anthea Bell) inquires this avoidance. Based on a series of lectures given in 1997 it is a collection of four expository essays that discuss both the trauma of the…
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The undefeated relevance of hope in Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s “You have not yet been defeated”
A version of this essay was published by The Hindu on 8 July 2022. Click here to read. The relevance of Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s “You have not yet been defeated” A few years ago, philosophers and activists alike warned that there was a global push towards the right. Democracies across the world were electing governments led…
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The un-complex politics of Fred Uhlman’s “Reunion”
First published in 1971, Fred Uhlman’s Reunion is about the life and death of the friendship between two teenage boys. Hans, the son of a Jewish-German doctor and Konradin, the son of a Christian-German aristocrat. The novella begins with Hans recounting a day in Feburary 1932, when he first met Konradin. Their friendship runs along…
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A gathering of names
Perhaps, serendipity is too theatrical a word, but it best describes the following thread of names that has now emerged like a group of women, friends. At the heart of the gathering is the book “Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf” by Sina Queyras, which I recently finished reading. Rooms is, as the title suggests, a book…
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Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking: Does loss count our love?
About fifty pages into the Year of Magical Thinking, I looked up a few reviews. One of them described Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as a masterpiece in two genres– ‘memoir and investigative reporting’. Since I am not a journalist, this description confused me. What has this book investigative-ly reported on? I wondered. To…
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