Author’s Lounge
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The Annual Independence Lecture, 2022
By Sumana RamananThe Anil Dharker Literature Live! Independence Lecture commemorated the 75th year of Indian Independence with Dr Palanivel Thiaga Rajan, Tamil Nadu’s finance minister.
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From the pages of The Paris Review
By Sumana RamananInterviews with Ralph Ellison and Edward P. Jones, and an essay on John Coltrane’s classic composition Alabama offer insights into the African-American condition in the US, at a time of unprecedented protests against racism
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Focus On Poetry
By Sumana RamananRead about some women poets through the ages, poems about silence, and poetry as therapy
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In Praise of the Indian Voter
By Shashi TharoorThe redeeming surprises of a volatile democracy
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SHELF LIFE: Thought for food
By Sumana RamananWhy some cookbooks have survived food blogs and YouTube channels
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SHELF LIFE: Husbands and wives, parents and children
By Sumana RamananNadine Gordimer relentlessly explored the intersection of personal lives with politics. She was also a master at shining a light on bonds within families.
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Don’t Be Listless
By Sumana RamananHumans like lists, and if you want to know why, here is a list of reasons.
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SHELF LIFE: The power of good writing
By Sumana RamananHow a lucid book on Hindustani music spurred me to begin learning
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Migrating/Covid-19 – II
By Gulzarकुछ ऐसे कारवां देखे हैं सैंतालिस में भी मैने
ये गांव भाग रहे हैं अपने वतन में
हम अपने गांव से भागे थे, जब निकले थे वतन कोहमें शरणार्थी कह के…
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BJP hates Nehru and his legacy, not the Congress, its leaders or even its policies
By Kumar KetkarBJP’s anti-Congress-ism is confined to spewing venom on Nehru, Nehruvian legacy and the Nehru-Gandhi family. It is not a Congress-mukt Bharat but a Nehru-legacy-mukt Bharat that it is pursuing
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Covid-19 has made migrant workers’ plight, state apathy visible
By Anil DharkerIt’s only now, with the images we see everywhere, that we have begun to see them: An exhausted child asleep on his mother’s suitcase as she drags it along, a young man cradling his friend as he breathes his last after walking hundreds of miles.
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SHELF LIFE: When the truth frighteningly lives up to fiction
By Sumana RamananPhilip Roth, who passed away two years ago, said his novel The Plot Against America, the basis of a TV series that premiered on HBO in March and April, was a ‘false memoir’. That was before the rise of Trump.
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The Art of Solitude: When life becomes about breathing well – and doing good
By Saumya BalsariA big discovery during the coronavirus lockdown: life is – quite literally – about breath.
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SHELF LIFE : How ‘manufacturing consent’ passed into daily usage
By Sumana RamananA film based on a seminal book with that title helped popularise the phrase. It was shown online in early May by a Mumbai documentary collective.
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SHELF LIFE : The fatal flaws of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes
By Sumana RamananWhy actor Irrfan Khan, who passed away on April 29, was crucial to the success of Maqbool, a 2004 Hindi film adaptation of Shakepeare’s Macbeth.
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Heart-warming story of the Hamieds, who set up CIPLA and have been saving lives
By Sujata AnandanWhen CIPLA started producing generic medicine, the US complained of patent-violation. Indira Gandhi stood by CIPLA. It is ironical therefore that the US should now dial India for supply of HCQ
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Mumbai Notebook
By Anil DharkerAll of us saw the television visuals and heard the accompanying reports of 2000 people gathered outside the railway’s Bandra Terminus. All of us saw a small group of policemen standing helplessly by while someone seemed to be addressing the crowd. Finally, we saw the cops lathi charging the men who then ran helter-skelter.
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Pandemics And Maps
By Charles Correa FoundationIn the wake of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the CCF team came across a collection of maps that spatially visualise outbreaks, and did a little research around the analytics that illustrate pandemic movements. As it turns out, there has been an effort to document pandemics since as early as the 1600s.
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