Hello my lovely people
I’m back and still reluctant to sink into regular life. How wonderful it would be if life was a poetry festival! But then, anything permanent loses charm, I suppose. Anyway, longer posts about Poetry...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Notes from Patiala: androgyny, social engagement, feminism
I’m back from the Sahitya Akademi Women Writers Conference in Patiala. It was one-and-a-half days of frenetic talk and poetry with about 50 women from 21 states descending on the gorgeous and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Notes from Patiala (2): poets & poetry
Besides the talks on writing and feminism, we also had poetry readings. Because poets must, after all, do what they do best. And making speeches is not it. Highlights: Tamil poet Salma. There were...
View ArticleOn abortion and mental illness
Jennie Bristow on abortion and mental illness: The glib assumption that life’s difficulties lead directly to mental illness is a problem on two main fronts. Firstly, it simplifies this extremely...
View ArticleVOICES AGAINST VIOLENCE
For Mumbai folks, I’m speaking / reading (more reading than speaking) on Friday at the Press Club. Do come by! Here’s the official invite: VOICES AGAINST VIOLENCE Culture Beat of the Mumbai Press Club...
View ArticleCommenting at the Guardian
My first post for the Guardian blog, ‘Comment is Free’, is up. Do read :). It’s about something fairly talked about here, which is the whole point. I also chose to talk about this — yet again damn it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Rude Reality
The blogging resolution seems to have flagged already. But in my defence, I finally moved to my own domain. It’s been a bought plot lying vacant for a while so I’m feeling a real sense of achievement...
View ArticleBring them chaddis out
It’s cool. It’s cheeky. It’s clever. I’m talking about the Pink Chaddi Campaign. Women all over the country are gathering pink chaddis and sending them to Muthalik as a Valentine’s Day present. The...
View ArticleCoorg diary (ii) or travelling sideways
In Kakkabe, high up on a mountain at the foot of Thadiyendamol, I meet E. Girl-woman who’s into peace and climbing peaks. I fall in love with the way she speaks — I think I keep her talking just to...
View ArticleOn hair and other things
It’s still hanging over our heads: the neat hair argument. I remember when the hair-straightening craze started a few years back, I felt increasingly uncomfortable with my hair which is wavy and...
View ArticleAnd related thoughts
One of the challenges of writing for a foreign media product is that context-setting eats up a lot of words and one has less space for actual opinion. So here are some related thoughts. Before writing...
View ArticleWalcott
The poetosphere has been abuzz with news about Derek Walcott’s dropping out of the Oxford Poetry Professor race because according to The Guardian, a “100 academics mailed organizers missives an 1982...
View ArticleOkay, one more word
…on this whole Oxford Poetry fiasco, and then I’ll stop (or maybe, not). But apparently our nominee AK Mehrotra had this to say: “From India where I live, these extra-literary goings-on appear more...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A severed head and other things
On the surface, Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is about a bunch of tangled relationships. At the centre is Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a man who’s comically deluded about a vast number of things in his life....
View ArticleThe women’s poetry question. Again.
I thought Courtney Queeney’s essay ‘The Kings Are Boring: Some Thoughts on Women’s Poetry’ was a confused, rambling piece, unsure of what it wanted to say. There are two questions here — ‘women’s...
View Article