Sheila Kumar - Comfortably Numb

Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Breaking Barriers by Nafees Fazal with Sandhya Mendonca

Breaking Barriers by Nafees Fazal with Sandhya Mendonca, Konark Books. Breaking Barriers is the memoir of Nafees Fazal, the first Muslim woman minister in south India, and one feisty, irrepressible politician. Kudos to co-author Sandhya Mendonca for letting that frank and no- holds- barred voice comes through loud and clear, all through the book. For…

Guest column: Why are we so loud?

Why are we so loud? I recently watched a video, purportedly a spoof, where an Indian aunty adopts a hectoring tone and shows us how ginger tea is brewed back home in India. I say `back home` because the woman is standing in an American kitchen, heaping much unbridled derision on Americans. Personally, I found…

Guest column: Selective offerings in the time of cancel culture

The art vs the artiste: that old divide The other day, I revisited that classic, Gerald Durrell`s My Family and Other Animals, an old-gold favourite. After the read I fell into a rabbit hole of info on the Durrell family, and was dumbfounded to find that much of what I had devoured as the —…

Book review: Between You, Me and the Four Walls by Moni Mohsin

When gossip carries a sting The queen of malapropisms is back in our midst, with the third iteration of the chatty outpourings of the Social Butterfly, whose carefully curated gossip is, if you look hard, nothing but a sharp send-up of people, policies and lifestyles. In this book, Butterfly throws shade on a lot of…

Book review: Man`s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

Sometimes you wonder why it took so long for you to come to a book. That`s just how I feel right now, after having read MAN`S SEARCH FOR MEANING, The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust by Viktor E. Frankl. Dr Frankl was Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical…

Book review: The Body by the Shore by Tabish Khair

Terror on an oil rig Tabish Khair`s new book is a scientific thriller where the action mostly takes place on an oil rig turned dubious resort in the North Sea just off Denmark. Set around 2030, with frequent references to the coronavirus pandemic that hit the world a decade ago, the reader sees that the…

Book review: The Greatest Enemy of Rain by Manu Bhattathiri

Flaunting their foibles Over the course of the three books he has written, this one being the fourth, Manu Bhattathiri has become the Small Town Adept. He creates interesting characters who invariably live in picturesque hamlets in Kerala, at the edge of which a river runs, meanders or flows sluggishly. Not all these characters are…

Guest column: In praise of gratitude

Gratitude comes with side benefits now Gratitude, thankfulness, an awareness of received grace. From time immemorial, this sentiment`s virtues have been extolled far and wide. On the ground though, we all know it is but a fleeting emotion, which sweeps over us at the time of the received grace but doesn’t stay too long afterwards….

Feature: NIFT Bangalore pays a wonderful tribute to India`s amazing textile heritage

When a piece of cloth is gateway to a magical world The Vignette: Viswakarma Textiles: Art & Artistry exhibition that was recently on at Bangalore`s National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), was a powerful emphasis of an immutable fact: that India`s textile heritage is one that benefits from repeated outings to fix itself in the…

Opinion: No catchers in the rye anymore

No catchers in the rye anymore Just the other day, a line in a news report caught my eye. The article was an update on the death, five years ago, of a courageous activist who had been dear to us here in Bangalore. The case was proceeding at a pace that would put most common…