Posts from the literature category.
We like principles when they are free.That may be one of the easiest things about being principled.You can say you believe in something.You can talk about integrity.You can admire people who refuse to bend.But then comes the uncomfortable part.What happens when standing by that principle actually costs you something?That was the question I kept returning to while reading Gauri Grover's The Unyield...
Zombie stories have a familiar equation.Something infects people.People become dangerous.The survivors try to stop them.Code 103 Redacted: Patient Zer0 by Sidhant Khanna changes one important variable.The infected are children.And the tactical unit sent into the school has one rule:No lethal force.That immediately makes the story more interesting.Because the people they are fighting are also the p...
काही दिवसांपूर्वी एका पुस्तकाचं नाव वाचलं.गुज अंतरी.मनातलं काहीतरी.नाव वाचून पहिला विचार आला, आपण सगळेच काही ना काही मनात ठेवतो.काही गोष्टी सांगतो.काही अर्धवट सांगतो.आणि काही कुणालाच सांगत नाही.पण बाईच्या बाबतीत हा न सांगितलेला भाग थोडा मोठा असतो का?Ruchita Sahil यांचा Antariche Guj वाचताना हा प्रश्न पुन्हा पुन्हा समोर येत राहिला.आपल्याला आपल्या घरातल्या बायका माहीत असतात.आई काय करते हे माहीत असतं...
There are people who have been gone for years and still occupy a chair in our minds.We know they are dead.There is no confusion about that.And yet we still know what they would have said.We still remember how they laughed.Sometimes we catch ourselves wanting to tell them something.That is the strange thing about human absence.The body can disappear much faster than the relationship.I kept thinking...
There is a strange privilege in modern civilisation.We can depend on something without ever seeing it.Turn on a tap and water appears.Open an app and information appears.Order food and a complex supply chain disappears behind a delivery notification.Walk into an office and we rarely think about the infrastructure that makes the building functional.The more sophisticated a system becomes, the easie...
There is a particular kind of “yes” that does not come from generosity.It comes from fear.Fear of disappointing someone.Fear of being called selfish.Fear of becoming less important.Fear that if you stop being available, someone might stop needing you.That thought kept returning to me while reading Aurora S.’s First You, Then the Rest.The title sounds straightforward: put yourself first.But real li...
There is something almost absurd about a life being reduced to ten inches.Twenty-two years of pouring tea.Twenty-two years of remembering who wants extra ginger, who will pay tomorrow, who needs a cup on credit and who comes to the cart simply because there is nowhere else to go.Then someone draws a chalk line on the pavement.Ten inches.And suddenly those ten inches matter more than everything tha...
There is a particular kind of love that looks beautiful from a distance.Someone waits.Someone remembers.Someone notices everything.Someone keeps showing up.And because they ask for nothing, we assume their love must be deeper.The Unsaid made me question that assumption.Kartikeya Dhar places Kabir Sharma in Shimla in 2003, a schoolboy with an unusual ability to notice what others miss. He sees unha...
We call someone a stranger when we know nothing about them.But perhaps the more accurate definition is this:A stranger is someone whose story we haven’t heard yet.Jay Divyam’s None of Us Are Strangers begins with a little girl, an absent mother and a man who never intended to become responsible for either of them.Veer Mehra is at a Mumbai party when a woman asks him to look after her daughter, Aar...
“What’s your price?”It is an uncomfortable question because we are used to putting prices on almost everything. A house has a price. A car has a price. A company has a valuation. Even our time is increasingly measured in money.But what happens when the question is directed at a human being?That discomfort is precisely where Dr. Manjit Hans begins in What’s Your Price? Understanding Your Worth. The...
