Mir Kashif Iqbal, Gehraiyaan, and Chandan Pandey - What’s The Chakkar?
What’s The Chakkar? Episode 17: We’re listening to Mir Kashif Iqbal; watching Gehraiyaan; and reading Chandan Pandey and Alice Munro. Featuring Anurag Tagat, Prateek Santram, and Shaista Vaishnav. Hosted by Karan Madhok.
The Performance of Trauma in Fiction
Priyanka Chakrabarty dives into examples of contemporary South Asian literature to explore the blurred line between trauma and ‘trauma porn’. Can fiction account for lived experiences and realities of trauma without making the plot performative?
A Mature Portrayal of Science and Sensibility
SonyLIV web series Rocket Boys is a rare exception among recent dramas, where an entertaining story of post-Independent India also holds up a mirror of truths. - By Atulya Pathak
Literary Hoomans and their Best Friends
A collection of 45 essays and stories written by several Indian writers, The Book of Dog brings the canine-human connection front-and-centre: the dogs we love, adopt, lose, and remember forever. By Chittajit Mitra
SIPPING LETTERS
A poem by Sayani Mukherjee: ‘where Jargons kept our brew alive and we sat cross legged with armours high up from howling screams’
Portrait of Australia (as a Young Man)
Personal essay by Dhani Muniz: ‘What is Australia then? The name itself conveys a ruddy blankness. Deserts rising out of ocean like heat from a radiator. Twenty months since I’ve left India and the old-Old World of the East.’
Empowering The Marginalised
The Advaita Bodhi Foundation—working in digital literacy and rural enterprise—has set about pushing entrepreneurship among the Lodha community in West Bengal. By Medha Dutta Yadav
Grief at the Ghats
For centuries, Varanasi has welcomed all visitors into the same all-encompassing embrace. With aggressive forces of politics and religion threatening to segregate his hometown, Karan Madhok argues for the need to preserve the city’s true harmonious spirit.
Dreaming Among Debris
Sayan Aich Bhowmik’s debut collection, I Will Come with a Lighthouse (Hawakal Publishers) dissolves the space between innate and extraneous, past and present, dreams and disillusionments, commonplace and cosmic, seamlessly flitting through rooms, cities, memory, borders and history. By Ritoshree Chatterjee
Where the darkness blooms into jasmine: The poetry of Zilka Joseph
In Zilka Joseph’s new collection In Our Beautiful Bones, Chintan Girish Modi celebrates the in-betweenness of cultures, the confluence of food, culture, politics, religion, and beauty from the vantage point of an Indian displaced abroad.
‘My carbon is dated to everything fleeting’ – Three poems by Harsh Anand
Poetry by Harsh Anand: ‘everyone pointed out, / the crevices in my bones, / as if I am unaware of my own biology, / as if my suffering is more endurance than expression.’
Short story by Debi Mukherjee: “Unlike the little girls I see outside temples, draped in their pano bhaju’s stringing garlands of Marigolds, I dare not play with the flowers in our garden. Papa cautions me against the rows of Mogras, Shoe-flowers, Frangipanis and a multitude of others. He says that I must not be lured by a flower’s fragrance.”