Dan Brown’s Wikiprose
Inferno, Dan Brown, Bantam Press, Rs 750, 461 pages From the first sentence of Chapter One—“The memories materialized slowly… like bubbles surfacing from the darkness of a bottomless well”—to the […]
Category Archives: Journalism
Speaking Volumes: The contested ground of Anandamath
(Published in the Business Standard, May 14, 2013) If it were not for the refusal of Shafique-ur-Rehman Barq, BSP member of Parliament, to join in with the singing of […]
Speaking Volumes: The unchaste page
(Published in the Business Standard, May 7, 2013) The reading was at a sedate mela; literature was tucked in sideways, between the food stalls and the sellers of heavy machinery. […]
The crisis in our community
(Published by The Hindu on April 22, 2013. To read the final edited version with comments, please click here.) Why “stopping rape” isn’t possible unless we change the way we […]
Speaking Volumes: The biases we miss
(Published in the Business Standard, 23 April, 2013) “You need to learn to think like a fox,” writes Nate Silver, New York Times political forecaster. I went to Silver to […]
Wave: Writing about the unimaginable
Midway through the first written story known to the world, The Epic of Gilgamesh, there occurs a passage of terrible grief. Gilgamesh, the hero, loses his closest friend and fellow […]
Achebe and the war of stories
One day, when Chinua Achebe was a young boy, his teacher took the whole class outside for a change. They sat under the spreading branches of a mango tree; in […]
Reading the word of God
(Published in the Business Standard, March 19, 2013) “In the beginning was the Word, and it was inscribed upon ye parietal lobe.” No religious scriptures begin with this line, but […]
Our bodies, ourselves
For ten years, I wrote on gender issues (in the Kolkata Telegraph and then the International Herald Tribune), without feeling the need to share my story. It was bad […]
Speaking Volumes: Freedom For The Thought We Hate
(A shorter version of this was published in the Business Standard, 4th February, 2013. This is only a brief and partial look at some judgements on free speech and artistic […]
