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A list from memory:
Here we are, reader, at the end of a year that taught us many things, most importantly perhaps about the lesson of time. Both its reality and its fantastical qualities. At its most persevering moments, time is glacial and slow and extremely painful because it demands of us what we feel most restless about: trust.…
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Cities in Books
This is a sample of the city-related books I have read this year. While I have reviewed Amita Baviskar’s Uncivity City in detail for the LSE Review of Books (link here), regarding the others, I have only been able to write about in snatches. With the exception of Shanta Gokhale’s Shivaji Nagar, however, I have…
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Writing means being overheard: a review of Zadie Smith’s “Intimations”
Smith’s essays are full of quotable sentences overflowing with bold claims, offering corny hopeful eyes-glazed view of the future, that disaster will demand a new dawn.
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Book Review: “The Corpse Washer” by Sinan Antoon
History is a struggle of statues and monuments, Father. I will not have a share in all of this, because I have yet to sculpt anything important. Even Saddam’s huge statue in Firdaws Square was brought down right after your death. I thought I would be happy since I detested him so much, but I…
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Book Review: “Schoolgirl” by Osamu Dazai (trans. Allison Markin Powell)
Osamu Dazai’s “Schoolgirl” has an iridescence to it, at an angle it’s a deep-dive into the psychological state of the beginnings of grief and at another, it is about living in an authoritarian society. The latter, however, is buried text, it appears but in snatches. The first time I read “Schoolgirl” I naturally chose to…
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Book Review: “Sleepless Nights” by Elizabeth Hardwick
A vivid image I have is of holding a bioscope; a crude device made of plastic — at least mine was — with tiny pictures inside. If you held the device tight enough you could deceive your eight year old brain that it was a real camera, and the pictures in it reflected real images…
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Book Review: “Tamil Characters” by A.R. Venkatachalapathy
“Logically speaking, such a state should be a laggard, low down on the development scale. Yet, it is exactly during the time of Dravidian politics that the state has made great strides in development. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, in An Uncertain Glory (2013), summarise these achievements in the clearest terms. Describing the ‘rapid progress in a…
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