Category: Writing
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Book review: Victory City
(First published in the Indian Express: read more) Victory City Salman Rushdie Penguin Random House 338 pages Rs 699 Nothing lasts. Empires crumble without leaving traces behind, much of human history is unrecorded, libraries burn, and storytellers and poets through time have lived precarious lives — shot, burned at the stake, murdered by tyrants, brutally…
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Black River
“The air crackles with dreams. Most of them are doomed to failure, but as soon as one unspoken dream dies, a thousand other migrants arrive with theirs, filling the air with a current of unceasing hope and burning longing.” Black River, now out in bookstores
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Joan Didion and writing
In the 1970s, Joan Didion did an interview with Tom Brokaw. “It’s the only aggressive act I have,” she says of writing. “It’s the only way I can be aggressive.” Didion died this week at the age of 87, leaving behind a towering legacy as a journalist, a memoir writer, a novelist. Over the years,…
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Black River, and endings
When is a novel done? When you know that you have to let go of these characters — these people, their lives, their landscapes, their hopes, their unspoken dreams and wishes, their griefs and heartbreaks, their struggles, their failures, the moments of transition and transcendence — and you are finally at peace with that.
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Our Freedoms: an anthology of stories, essays and poems on liberty
Buy Our Freedoms at Juggernaut “With the idea of freedom becoming a distant memory with each passing day, it is difficult to describe the tenor of disquieting times like this. The recently-published anthology Our Freedoms does just that while amplifying voices that hope to make India’s constitutional morality unfailingly stronger. Edited by columnist Nilanjana S. Roy,…
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A seat at the table
Where I grew up, we were taught – or we didn’t have to learn, it was in the air, something you could catch like a virus that settled in your gut – to pay attention to men. If those men were geniuses, then they were owed more than your attention. Adulation, or an unquestioned acceptance…
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Sundays with The Modern Review: Tagore and Gandhi
(Note: The Modern Review archives run from 1907, when it was founded by Ramananda Babu, to the 1960s. Since this volume was intended to commemorate Ramananda Chatterjee, we looked only at volumes published between 1907 to 1943, the year of his death, and included a few articles from the August 1947 issue as well. Patriots,…
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Booklove: Mama Amazonica, Warlight, The Recovering
This site has been left under dust covers for a while. My apologies – here are three recent pieces I did for the Financial Times on new books by Pascale Petit, Michael Ondaatje and Leslie Jamison. (You’ll need a subscription to sign in on the FT’s site – or just go and buy the books,…
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Travelling tales: The Panchatantra
For the BBC’s 100 Stories That Shaped The World, I wrote about The Panchatantra, and a subject I love – myths, fables, and how far they travel. “In the first millennium, roughly 1,500 years ago, a pair of jackals began travelling around the world. They were known in India as Karataka and Damanaka, and they were…
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The FT column: Future Shocks
The pull of dystopia might be that it allows us to explore present-day anxieties more easily by setting them safely in the future. This week’s column explored what we’re worrying about: “I am Borne. I talking talking talking.” One of the first complete sentences he says to Rachel introduces one of the great conundrums of…
nilanjana s roy 