Posts from the art category.
There’s a certain kind of story that doesn’t begin when you open the book… it begins when you return to a world you thought you had already understood.That was my experience walking back into The Secret Keeper of Jaipur by Alka Joshi.Because this isn’t just a continuation. It’s a shift.The first time we met Lakshmi, the narrative was soaked in texture — colors, rituals, quiet survival. Here, the a...
some days are just that good. you get to experience art and intimacy. you are absorbed into detail and feel the texture of lives. once familiar faces that have a few more wrinkles, wisdom and more laughs. For one to be so fortunate. Art by the exceptional Ruta Barhate.
Years ago i attended a college cultural fest where an artist and a dancer collaborated on creating art works to the tune of a music piece. I leave it to your imagination on how it transpires.Well, a thunderstorm does much the same thing really.
I opened A Rose on the Last Page on a night that felt ordinary. No grand intention. No search for meaning. Just a gap between two heavier reads. I told myself it would be a few poems before sleep. Something light. Something quick.But sometimes the book you choose absentmindedly is the one that sits beside you longer than expected.A Rose on the Last Page by Bharti Jain is not a dramatic collection....
There are some books you read like a film. And then there are books you read like a conversation that refuses to end even after the lights come on. Bollywood, Hollywood and the Future of World Cinema by Rajesh Talwar belongs to the second category for me — less popcorn, more post-screening debate.I have journeyed through many of Talwar’s works before — from his fiction that dissects ideology and i...
There’s something unsettling about the idea that six ordinary days can reroute an entire life.Not years. Not decades. Six days.That quiet tension hums beneath Six Days in Bombay, the latest standalone from Alka Joshi, and it caught me off guard. I went in expecting historical richness and atmospheric detail. I did not expect to feel personally confronted by a young nurse’s hunger for a life larger...
There are cities you visit. And then there are cities that sit inside you like unfinished conversations.Reading Kolkata Ø KM by Swati Bhattacharyya felt less like turning pages and more like wandering through a house of echoes. Not haunted in a loud, theatrical way. Haunted the way memory is — soft-footed, patient, persistent.This is not a book that rushes. It lingers. It circles. It asks you to s...
There’s something quietly unsettling about a tree that watches you. Not in a mythical, larger-than-life way — but in the way an old house watches its inhabitants age, fracture, betray, and forgive. That was the feeling I carried through The Parijat Tree and Other Stories by Sameer Nagarajan — the sense that these stories are not merely told, they are observed. Closely. Patiently. Almost clinically...
There are some books that arrive quietly into your life, like an evening breeze you didn’t know you needed. Banaras: An Eternal Love Story felt like that to me — a slow, steady presence rather than a dramatic interruption. I didn’t rush through its pages. I read it the way one walks through an unfamiliar city at dawn, pausing often, absorbing more than just what is visible, letting the mood do mos...
I read The River Woman and Other Poems slowly, the way one reads something that does not want to be rushed. A few poems at night. One in the quiet between two tasks. Sometimes just a single page, because the lines had a way of lingering — like the aftersound of water moving past stones long after the river itself has slipped out of view.Renu Roy’s poetry does not announce itself loudly. It arrives...
