In Banu Mushtaq’s "Heart Lamp", one encounters experiences of patriarchy, tradition, misogyny, and age-old customs.

Besides these, I have also read this novella by Banana Yoshimoto, titled Kitchen, published in 1988 and translated in 1993.This book is lovely. I won’t write anything about it here. Perhaps, if you ...

I am writing this newsletter about how I became a runner and how my journey has come to shape me. Today has been good so far. I did the Parkrun today. In South Bank Parkrun, where I ...

Every once in a while, I put my head down and write the most boring things in the world. That seems like a good catharsis away from all PhD work. And today is one such. In this newsletter, I try ...

Apart from this one book, I have not meaningfully read any other book. Even when I tried to read a few pages from Ram Guha’s Gandhi Before India to make sense of how Gandhi’s life was and what ...

Things Orhan Pamuk Tells Us About Writing Well. The first author I introduce here today is Orhan Pamuk. I stumbled upon Orhan Pamuk’s essay in the New Yorker through my PhD supervisor, Roland Bleiker ...

In every neighbourhood, there are detectives and the supposed mysterious characters. Every family holds that one character who tends to get sceptical of everything and does not and will not accept ...

Dinjith Ayyathan’s ‘Kishkindha Kaandam’, a 2024 Malayalam thriller, enmeshes emotions, familial relations, and mystery in his storytelling.Monikered after Ramayana’s Kishkindha Kaandam, where Lord ...

Mehta asks: “Despite having a functioning democracy for almost five decades, does the entire repertoire of our habits and practices outside the sphere of formal politics conduce to the formation of ...

Even the educated ones, the educated ones mainly, follow these dictums religiously. And so, when I watched Jeo Baby’s directional 2021 Malayalam-language movie “The Great Indian Kitchen”, I felt a ...

The papal elections are a grandiose affair: all cardinals are required to vote by secret ballot in the Sistine Chapel. The results of each round are counted aloud. If no candidate has the required two ...

I prompted the AI to tell me what content China censors on DeepSeek. And DeepSeek said: ‘Chinese law requires companies to comply with strict content regulations, including censorship on politically ...