Wanderlust, when fed by occasion and experience, translates into memories in the mind, and for many – myself included – also results in a hoarding of ephemera. The souvenirs of my travels tend not to be fancy objects capable of
I knew not a soul in Copenhagen when I landed there one cold wintry night many years ago. It was snowing and I have dim memories of alighting from a Scandinavian airlines plane and taking the public transport to an
In Sanskrit there is a verb, aranyarodhan, which means “weeping in the wilderness”. I discovered the word two and a half years into working with the archetypes of Sita and Lucifer, admired its succinct eloquence, the affirmation that there is
“I have bathed the darkness Of many a night And washed the redness With the yellow vermillion of the evening…” From Neehar (The Mist) Almost like the multitude within oneself, the polyphony inside the mono-tone, Mahadevi Verma contains inside her
The River in my backyard and the ocean in my mind… Is Sufism the last faith standing? Yes it is. Emphatically. Egypt, 9/11, Turkey, Lebanon, Libya, AfPak (the fashionable United States coinage), Bahrain… democracy’s stepchildren wanting to assert their identity.
The month of January owes its name to Janus, a two-faced Roman God who is connected to doors and transitions; the faces of Janus look simultaneously behind and ahead, just as the beginning of the year is a time to
Here’s a little detour. This isn’t a chronicle of a life or the retelling of a journey. But this is an idea, a question, a life, a choice, a quest into the within… What are your notions of motherhood? Procreation
The vibrant, pulsating, scorching sunshine landscape of Van Gogh is also a story of suffering, in kaleidoscopic village colours, where a dark silhouette is slowly turning anti-clockwise in slow motion, celebrating perhaps the insanity of invisibility and the insanity of
This is not a review. It shall not offer a discursive, exacting dissection of the form, shape, content and intent of Siddhartha Deb’s new book of essays on the emergence of a post-globalisation, post-liberalisation modern India, intriguingly titled, ‘The Beautiful
Pakistanis love Bollywood. There is no question about that. In the love-hate perceptions, Indian cinema has for decades fed public imagination. Prior to the 1965 war, Indian films were released in Pakistan regularly. They competed with the local cinema and