Somak Ghoshal

Mintlounge • 31st January 2021

Avasthe by UR Ananthamurthy: a jigsaw puzzle called life

In an astute Afterword to the late U.R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Avasthe, writer Prayaag Akbar sums up the theme of the book in a powerful phrase. First published in Kannada in 1978 and translated into English by Narayan Hegde recently, Avasthe, like its...

Mintlounge • 31st January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends 'Padmavati the Harlot & Other Stories' by Kamala Das

The name of Kamala Das (1934-2009) usually tends to evoke memories of her unabashed prose and fiery poetry, exploring women’s lives and sexualities in often disturbingly vivid details. Her life was dramatic, even mythical, depicted with great panache...

Mintlounge • 31st January 2021

Sunday Lounge | Indians are inescapably multilingual: Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh has an amusing anecdote to tell about the power of translations. In 1983, when he was living in Kerala and working on his first novel, The Circle Of Reason, he was pleasantly surprised by the immense popularity enjoyed by the Bengali...

Mintlounge • 31st January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends Raagam Taanam Pallavi by Kalpana Swaminathan

Murder and music don’t seem to make for obvious bedfellows. But throw myth and memory—those wily tricksters—into the mix and they may set off an odd alchemy.

Mintlounge • 31st January 2021

A south Indian wildlife safari beyond tigers and leopards

For most people, the word “wildlife” tends to conjure up visions of large mammals—tigers, leopards elephants, maybe a few birds. But beyond these conspicuously visible species of vertebrates, an incredibly diverse ecosystem of smaller creatures lurks...

Mintlounge • 31st January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends Island Dreams by Gavin Francis

"No man is an island," the English poet and cleric John Donne assured us four centuries ago, his words meant to provide solace to the lonely and despairing. But what if some of us like to seek out islands, and are inexorably drawn to the promise of...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

A geeky young-adult decides to teach her peers a lesson

What is a precocious 16-year-old to do when she discovers that her mother is planning to get married for the second time—and that too to the father of her sworn enemy at school? How is she to react to this news, since her own father has already moved...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends ‘The Cock is the Culprit’ by Unni R

Earlier this year when a “spy” pigeon, belonging to a Pakistani national, was “arrested” by India for flying across the line of control, I wasn’t really surprised. It wasn’t the first time an animal had been accused of espionage by either India or...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

Why a good literary essay never gathers dust

In the 16th century, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who is considered to be the progenitor of the modern essay, explained that his “ ” (the French word means “attempt”) were meant to record “some traits of my character and of my humours”. A...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

What do India’s children wish for?

What do India’s children wish for? How do they understand ideas like freedom and equality? What does democracy mean to them?

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends ‘Principles of Prediction’ by Anushka Jasraj

It's been an unusual year for Indian publishing, and not least because of the pandemic. Seldom does one encounter a handful of short story collections in the annual calendar of English-language publishing, but this year has been an embarrassment of...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

How to protect yourself from the virus of failure

It’s not surprising that “coronavirus”, “covid-19” and “pandemic” are among the most frequently used words this year, according to the recently released Oxford Language Report 2020. But covid-watchers may have encountered another word just as...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

2020 was hard enough—then I read Rupi Kaur’s new ‘poems’

In a year that the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to a poet—which is seldom the case—there are more articles on Rupi Kaur’s latest volume of poetry floating around the internet than about Louise Glück, who was chosen for the highest literary...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

Lounge picks: 10 books from India we loved in 2020

As the pandemic pushed us indoors in 2020, it also sent some of us back to our bookshelves, to forage in our TBR piles or in search of new releases. In this year of anxiety, tragedy and volatile shifts, reading expanded our sense of the world and gave...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends 'White Bird' by RJ Palacio

In 2012, when American writer R.J. Palacio published her first novel, , little did she expect it to hit the best-seller list and then stay there for weeks, selling 16 million copies to date. Although the book was classified as young-adult fiction, it...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends ‘Shadow City’ by Taran N. Khan

A couple of days after the renowned travel writer Jan Morris died at the age of 94 on 20 November, journalist Taran N. Khan’s won the Tata Literature Live! first book award in the non-fiction category. As it happens, I have been reading both these...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

What the Tata Literature Live! controversy says about lit fests

The recent uproar over Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest cancelling a session featuring scholars Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad has opened a familiar can of worms. In fact, even the sequence of events leading up to it would hardly surprise...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

'Phoolsunghi': a Bhojpuri classic revived in English

In the popular imagination, Bhojpuri culture is associated with bawdy songs, rustic humour and titillating cinema. But a world of surprises awaits the reader of Pandey Kapil’s , a celebrated Bhojpuri, arguably the first one ever to be rendered into...

Mint Lounge • 8th January 2021

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends ‘Bhairavi’ by Shivani

To most readers of Hindi, the name of Shivani, the nom de plume of writer Gaura Pant (1923-2003), does not need an introduction. Prolific and popular, she wrote hundreds of articles, essays and stories for a variety of magazines, as well as 40 novels,...

Mintlounge • 19th November 2020

Your weekend fix: Lounge recommends ‘Essential Items’ by Udayan Mukherjee

In the early days of the covid-19 pandemic, as most of the world went into lockdown mode, essayist Sloane Crosley hurled a couple of hard questions at the writing community in an article for . “But what happens when every writer on the planet starts...