Relationships

The Conversation You Keep Postponing May Be the One You Need Most — Mary J. Nestor’s Say It Now! Say

There are conversations we avoid because we don’t know what to say.And then there are conversations we avoid because we know exactly what we want to say.The second kind is often harder.We rehearse the words in our heads. We imagine how the other person might react. We worry about sounding rude, confrontational, insensitive, or simply being misunderstood.So we wait.Tomorrow becomes next week.Next w...

Why Immensa Book Club ?

I pick up my phone to check the time, but put it down say 22 minutes later. I had laughed twice, maybe, learnt nothing (usually), and still did not know what the time is.If you are reading this and smiling, then you have done it too.We keep saying the kids these days can't focus. Have you looked at us? The kids at least are honest about it. We adults have a list of genuine excuses to justify it, o...

Can We Ever Escape the Identity We Inherit? — Am I a Dalit? by Vijhay Sundar K.G., read and reviewed

There are some questions that are asked because we don’t know the answer.And then there are questions we ask because we are afraid of what the answer might mean.Am I a Dalit? belongs to the second category.Vijhay Sundar K.G.’s novel begins in a world where caste is not an abstract idea discussed in textbooks. It is present in families, relationships, social behaviour, humiliation and the choices p...

When Love Has Secrets, How Well Do We Really Know the Person We Love? — The Almost Perfect Wife by A

We often imagine that the most dangerous secrets in a relationship are the ones someone tells us.Perhaps they aren’t.Perhaps the more dangerous ones are the secrets someone successfully keeps from us.That thought stayed with me while reading Anubha Gupta’s The Almost Perfect Wife. Because beneath the murder mystery, the twists and the ancestral house in Mashobra, this is really a story about somet...

Dear Zahira, With Love by Sachin NG — Sameer Gudhate on Love, Loss and the Human Cost of Partition

When a Border Separates Two People, What Exactly Does It Fail to Separate?Some love stories are about two people trying to find each other.Dear Zahira, With Love by Sachin NG is about something more difficult: two people trying to remain connected when history has decided they belong on opposite sides of a border.That distinction stayed with me.Because we often talk about Partition through numbers...

Crossed Wires

Desire Never Left the Kitchen: How Laura Esquivel Rewrote the Rules of the Domestic Heroine

Those who know me are aware of my unhealthy obsession with anything Latin-American. I actively seek books, content, and movies emerging from that region. In fact, I started learning Spanish because I read an extremely passionate poem by Pablo Neruda in college and was, well, obsessed. Needless to say, my brain immediately associates passion with Spanish, and it isn’t without reason. After all, the...

Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of I Cannot Say Goodbye to You by Rithvik Singh

Sometimes the hardest goodbye is not the one we say to another person. It is the goodbye we keep postponing inside ourselves.That is where I Cannot Say Goodbye to You finds its emotional strength.At first glance, the title can make you expect a familiar romance — love, separation, heartbreak, and the difficult business of moving on. But Rithvik Singh’s first romance novel reaches somewhere more un...

When Love Opens a Door to Another World: Uneetaria by Sean Walker — A Review by Sameer Gudhate

Sometimes love doesn’t just change two people.Sometimes it changes the world they are standing in.That is the intriguing idea at the centre of Sean Walker’s UNEETARIA, the first book in The Uneetaria Saga.Jalen and Amara begin with a connection.But theirs is not the kind of connection that ends with two people simply falling in love.Their bond opens a door.And behind that door is Uneetaria.A world...

When Goodbye Refuses to Be the End: Reflecting on Beyond Goodbye by Tanishka Chugera — A Literary Re

Grief changes the way we look at the world.After losing someone we love, even the smallest things begin to feel different. A butterfly crossing our path. A feather lying on the pavement. A dream so vivid that we wake up convinced we were with them again. Most of us have experienced moments like these, even if we’ve never spoken about them.Beyond Goodbye by Tanishka Chugera grows from that very hum...