Touch-tone love
For all that we complain about people talking on cellphones in public places, there is a seductive unfinishedness about one-sided monologues. To the voyeur, the banal becomes elevated and not just because of your desire to join the dots. It is this secret failing of ours that Abhinandita Mathur’s Telephone Pyaar feeds. Twenty-eight-year-old Mathur’s audio...
Two Diary Products
Prashant Miranda paints with rainwater, ganga jal, beer and icy trickles from Canadian taps. He paints all the time. His watercolour journals began as a way of remembering. Slowly he allowed his curious friends at National Institute of Design to peek in. The 32-year-old moved and became an artist in Canada’s first stop-motion animation series....
The Past is a Foreign Country
In some ways, Stranger to History was written before Aatish Taseer was born. It was written when Aatish’s mother, journalist Tavleen Singh fell in love with a visiting Pakistani, Salman Taseer, who already had a wife and three children. It was written when Salman Taseer met Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in London and became a great...
Read Poets’ Society
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is at home in Allahabad working on a fresh tranlation of Kabir because, he says, no poet (as opposed to academic) has translated Kabir since Tagore.Mehrotra once said that if poets are struck down by one generation of readers they are sure to bounce back with the next. It is a truth...
Marilyn French:1929-2009
It was in reading the feminist canon that I was first lured away from the unabashed pursuit of fiction. And Marilyn French was a presiding deity. must have been 19 when I first read The Women’s Room. It was an old Abacus edition with an afterword by Susan Faludi. I could see the patches of...
Hurts only a little bit
Though we spend a greater part of our lives working, few novels really examine work. In recent times Joshua Ferris explored (with a poetic first person plural voice) the tender, comical insides of an ad agency in the throes of recession. In And Then We Came to The End, Ferris dwelt on the idiosyncracies of...
Mridula Koshy
Mridula Koshy, writer, coffee-shop lurker, writing group fiend, union organiser and mother of three has a collection of short stories, If It Is Sweetout next month. Look out, world. You can read the story she wrote for Tehelka’s Fiction special here. A prize-winning story here. And fabulous recommendations: In these stories, families are seen in...
Lords and Ladies of the Dance
Used to the electronic, portable possession of music, we return to the awe of primitive people only when we see real people open their mouths and sing. It is this awe for universal but still mysterious abilities like singing or dancing that once powered talent shows in early, unsophisticated television. New television in India and...
Sita’s House of Blues
GODDESS LAKSHMI appears bejewelled, curvy and sloe-eyed out of a watercolour sea on a pink lotus. A peacock gramophone appears next to her and she begins dancing to the sound of 1920s blues singer Annette Hanshaw’s Moaning Low. Nineteen seconds later, the record gets stuck at the phrase ‘a woman like me, a woman like...
The Lightening Rod Strikes Twice
A week ago, a beautiful young woman dining in a small Versova restaurant asked, “Who is Anurag Kashyap? Is he the director of Fashion?” Gasps rose from the crowded table. It was an exceptionally bad place to ask this question since Kashyap was sitting at the same table and all around were the fanatic Passion...
Why Anurag Kashyap needs to make friends and influence people
It is quite something to sit in a South Delhi cinema and watch Dev ask Paro whether she touches herself. This is 15 minutes into the movie and not one person in the audience is breathing. Paro (gorgeous Mahi Gill) whimpers in response and her toes curl tight. Next Paro is on a mission because...
Amaar aaguney legechhey aagun – aami oshustho
From the best session in Jaipur, the best reflection of my life as it is now, gripped in adolescent self-pity Too Much I’m sick Too many joints in my music box Too much black beer in my golden tap Too many pennies in my pockets Too many pockets in my broke-down-pants My fire is on...
