Aishwarya writes about Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman, something like a fictional account of the history of the Civil Rights movement, but with the colours reversed:
…..Blackman’s biggest achievement is in her portrayal of the numerous seemingly minor things that go into racial constructions. Possibly my favourite moment in the book is when Persephone (whose [...]
Author Archive for Anirudh
Alok writes about Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (The Earth Trembles), a classic of Italian neo-realist cinema:
It was shot on real location, in a sea-side fishermen community of Sicily. The title sequence proudly announces that the actors are fishermen of Sicily themselves….The language of the film is not Italian but rather a Sicilian dialect because [...]
Vinod Khare writes about how Robert Jordan’s enormous Wheel of Time has “some peculiar properties when compared to other giant works of fantasy”.
The Wise Old Man, the staple archetype of every fantasy novel, is conspicuously missing in Wheel of Time. In LOTR we have good old Gandalf, in Harry Potter we have Dumbledore but there [...]
On Translating the Progressives
Published by July 7th, 2007 in Literature, Poetry and Politics. 0 CommentsNakul Krishna writes on translating the writers of the PWA (Progressive Writers’ Association) and also translates some lines by Viqaar Ambalavi
They eat the workers’ share
(barking at the working man)
work them dead by day
(drain them of their tears by night)
and their hungry children wail
(and [...]
A slightly absurd story by Kaushik Vishwanath, which I did not like a lot, but which held my interest. But who knows, you might like it.
Once upon a time, there lived a man.
This man knew everything.
….
He was eating breakfast with his fork and knife. As he ate, he thought, I know everything there is [...]
A very short story (by Falstaff) but a very important point.
How To Write About India?
Published by December 28th, 2006 in Globalisation, Humour and Media. 11 CommentsNeelakantan has a funny post on how to write about India for the foreign media.
Your piece has to start well. Therefore you first create, with good vocabulary, a nice paragraph on the social inequities in India. Keywords to be used are caste, poverty, illiteracy. Statistics like 80% of India lives on farms or 50% of [...]
It is the end of the year and therefore, the time for year-end lists. Chandrahas Choudhury, one of my favourite literature bloggers, has an interesting year-end book list.
Bhavna writes of the problems she had with directions.
I had a hard time telling left from right. Ironically, I understood cardinal directions very well. But if I was told to turn left, I would have to stop and think. Even then, much to my embarassment, I would end up getting it wrong some times.
And how [...]
Why Defend Free Markets
Published by December 3rd, 2006 in Economy, Environment and Globalisation. 0 CommentsIn reply to Gautam Bastian’s post defending free markets (which itself was in reply to Guha’s piece), Ashutosh asks why we have to always defend free markets. He says that Ram Guha is right but that doesn’t make free markets any less good. Like democracy, the free market system has its flaws but is better [...]
Shantanu Dutta writes about Kanu Sanyal and how, even though he disagrees with the Naxalites’ violent methods, he cannot help but admire people like him.
But I can never cease to admire the likes of Kanu Sanyal and the many unknowns that films like Hazar Chaurasi ki Ma and Hazaron Khwaishen Aise depict - people who [...]
Tapan writes about how mp3s have replaced audio cassettes, allowing everybody to become a rock fan in a week. (That’s something I’ve noticed these days; everybody has huge music collections, nobody listens to them.) He remembers his days of hunting down audio cassettes
The music store guys would hardly ever have heard of them, and would [...]
Blog A has written of the various methods which people have suggested that children be taught, or learn. The post, being only an introduction, merely touches the surface of the various strands of thought- from Rousseau to Neill and Holt. (For instance, the book that he cites by Holt is How Children Fail. This was [...]
I like almost everything that Chandrahas Choudhury writes for his blog. But this interview of Samrat Upadhyay, the writer of Royal Ghosts, is particularly well-done. If only all interviewers could be this probing and all interviewees as honest.
Shubhir’s account of the first time he and his teenage classmates saw a blue film and experimented with a condom.
We were thirteen or more, and puberty was a burning issue. It was also the biggest of bothers. We were curious as hell, and didn’t know what to ask, or to whom. The dog- eared issues [...]
I’ve never found chemistry particularly interesting. School managed to ruin a lot of things but I’ve enjoyed most subjects at some point or the other. Even biology, which I abhorred because one had to draw diagrams seemed more exciting as I grew older- perhaps because it was no longer in the school curriculum. Never chemistry [...]
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