A Series of Backhanded Compliments

A Series of Backhanded Compliments

“Before I met you, south Indian people made me cringe.” Just as my roommate uttered one of her most ignorant remarks to date, I bit…

Read Article →
Stairs to the Sundial

Stairs to the Sundial

(Poetry Collection ‘Available Light’ by CP Surendran – A Review)   With ‘Available Light’, CP Surendran unleashes on us, verses set to the eternal ticks…

Read Article →
#DoGoodForBlaze

#DoGoodForBlaze

I did not know Blaze Bernstein personally until this morning. Yet, this morning, when I belatedly came to know of his untimely death, I could…

Read Article →
BLOODLINE

BLOODLINE

I picked Washington Square1 from a low shelf in my parents’ living room, having courted the idea for a while, as the book looked pretty. I…

Read Article →
The Thing about Mumbai Locals

The Thing about Mumbai Locals

Every morning I wake up at 8 am. I get dressed, wear my expensive tie and shiny watch. Then I roll my sleeves and walk…

Read Article →
From Samuel Goldwyn to Andrea Arnold: the transformation of Heathcliff’s filmic identity

From Samuel Goldwyn to Andrea Arnold: the transformation of Heathcliff’s filmic identity

Emily Bronte’s Heathcliff is ‘a Lascar’ and a ‘dark-skinned gipsy in aspect’. With the arrival of Heathcliff, the idea associated with him is that of…

Read Article →
Leonardo Da Vinci: The New Biography

Leonardo Da Vinci: The New Biography

Suhail Rasheed shares his experience of reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s new biography by Walter Isaacson

Read Article →
Teaching the Harlem Renaissance

Teaching the Harlem Renaissance

I Skyped with four eighth graders seated in someone’s living room while someone’s grandma puttered around in the background, obviously eavesdropping on our chat about…

Read Article →
What They (Don’t) See

What They (Don’t) See

Starting in level 1, we began getting evaluations each spring. They checked boxes to indicate our progress in four categories, and now I can’t remember…

Read Article →
King and Queen of the Weekend: The Glorious Revisionism of Lorde’s Melodrama

King and Queen of the Weekend: The Glorious Revisionism of Lorde’s Melodrama

In 2013, Pure Heroine burst into pop culture with a precocious “Royals” that was more acutely aware of the limitations of adolescence and the humility…

Read Article →
Accidental Landlord

Accidental Landlord

Enticed by stories of people who were flipping houses and making piles of money, I bought a run-down house on Montrose Avenue in spring 2006….

Read Article →
ZAYDE

ZAYDE

  My grandfather had died. I was four years old. I rested my elbows on my mother’s knees and gazed up at the strange men….

Read Article →
Temple of Irreverence

Temple of Irreverence

I am neither religious nor especially spiritual nor convinced that God exists. Jewish by background, I am secular in practice. And while I appreciate the…

Read Article →
An interview with Shailaja Padindala

An interview with Shailaja Padindala

The short film ‘Memories of a Machine’ was screened on 15th Oct, 2016 at the Seattle South Asian Film Festival. Written and directed by Shailaja Padindala,…

Read Article →
Mehnat and Mazdoori in Barcelona

Mehnat and Mazdoori in Barcelona

My husband and I are on our way from Madras to Paris. Chennai, actually. Calling the city Madras is more like responding to our pet…

Read Article →
Educating Oneself

Educating Oneself

I went to the University of Texas because it’s where my mother would have gone if she’d had the chance to go to school beyond…

Read Article →
The Sway

The Sway

  In Ecuador I keep seeing a trace of 17th Century handcarts known, at one time, to have carried Confucius.  But now we’ve come to…

Read Article →
A Magical Review: Harry Potter and The Cursed Child

A Magical Review: Harry Potter and The Cursed Child

  Harry Potter and The Cursed Child hit the bookstores on 31st July, 2016 and it has been causing an insane amount of excitement  across…

Read Article →
The Commune

The Commune

America has a long history of utopian experiments, a history that stretches far beyond the hippie communes of the 1960s. Some of the earliest European…

Read Article →
Mahasweta Devi: Writing as Protest

Mahasweta Devi (1926-2016)

Embed from Getty Images   When I first read Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi, it created a minor explosion in my ‘reading’ life. The theme and starkness…

Read Article →