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I had spoken about Elias Canetti’s novel, Auto Da Fe, in my earlier column about marital relationships. In fact, Elias Canetti, Nobel laureate, has another fascinating small book in his oeuvre. This is Kafka’s Other Trial. In this rivetting read, Canetti talks about the problems between Franz Kafka and his fiancée, Felice. Canetti traces how […]
Let me start by telling you that I’m not qualified to speak about mental health from a medical or a psychiatric perspective. I also do not possess a degree in psychology, nor did I formally study it as a subject in my college as a young man. However, I do speak from personal experience, as […]
In the last column, I spoke about ‘Stories that Open our Eyes’. I would like to continue from last week but with a difference. It’s like a leitmotif in Western Classical symphonic music, where something on a similar theme ends up lending us newer insights. In times of hunger, in times of ever-reducing cost or […]
There are a lot of stories that open our eyes, make a deep imprint on our minds, and stay with us for years. That is the power of literature. I think this is what novelist, poet, Tabish Khair meant when he wrote to me in a tweet about the ‘need to propagate strong literature’. So, […]
Writing a column about marital relationships in a literary way can be rather fraught with risks for a columnist. I have always believed that any action taken with the best of intentions is acceptable. So, I’ll call it a ‘hedged risk’, using stock market parlance. In India, we hold the family sacrosanct as a unit. […]
Writing about identity in today’s times is a sure shot recipe for disaster. Also, the moment, one utters the word ‘identity’, terms such as ‘fractured identity’, various social identities and a lot more come to the fore. Have you ever thought about the concept of tabula rasa (blank slate) that the English philosopher, John Locke […]
A human is because a human is resilient. Resilience is everything. It is the core of what makes us humans. There is a fine example of human resilience in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, The Old Man and the Sea. Santiago, the protagonist, is an old man. His age has not been defined but the lines on his face […]
Rashid Irani is no more. In the last year or so, which has seen so many pass away, Rashid Irani joins them. With him, perhaps, one of the best chroniclers of Mumbai cinema has moved to another abode. Rashid Irani would be best described as a consummate lover of Mumbai cinema just as the late […]
In pandemic enforced times, our first thoughts are those of fear, deprivation, death, grief and a range of emotions over which we have no control. Traumas of different kinds come to reside in our beings. These intense experiences should not be taken lightly. However, in the annals of literature, we find various ways of coping […]
