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Showing posts from July, 2022

An Intimate Enemy?

He always had an uneasy feeling that there was someone following him. Some phantom, that he can't describe or explain away, but could vividly feel, always lurking in the back of his mind constantly making him feel that way. He always had an inkling who it was but he never dared to turn behind lest he may confirm his worst fears. - I could vividly remember the first time I met him. When we met I found him quite dull, short in height and pitifully ordinary in first glance. Yet, there was something in him that was unsettling. He was the living essence of Fitzgerald's lines, "He smiled and said understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare conversations with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. He faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. He understood you just as far as you wanted to b...

To read but what to read? That’s the question!

(The Veiled Suit: The collected poems of Agha Shahid Ali) This year has proved itself to be the Annus Mirablis for Indian literature with Geetanjli Shri's eloquently and masterfully written Hindi novella Ret Samadhi becoming the first book of any Indian language to win International Man Booker prize for it’s equally skillful and beautiful translation The Tomb of Sand by Daisy Rockwell. Yet a creeping feeling can’t be denied but felt that we have now firmly entered the “Age of mediocrity” where reading is looked down with a tired often apathetic gaze of bewildering boredom where only those books deemed worth reading which are sold with byline of this or that competitive exam. This pathos of apathy towards reading culture is even more tragic in light of boons conferred on our generation by information revolution in form of easy availability of PDFs & EPUBS of all latest books available on internet. Gone are the days when you had to pay a hefty ransom to be a vocife...