Comfortably Numb - Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Guest column: Doggone it, I say!

Stray thoughts on stray dogs In a country where casual cruelty towards animals is woefully common, increasing awareness about the need to look after our stray denizens is something to cheer about. However, for the purposes of what I wish to convey, I am training focus only on stray dogs here. Though not a currently…

Book review: The Promise by Damon Galgut

THE PROMISE by Damon Galgut. Penguin UK Books. Halfway through the book, the protagonist makes a statement: But a promise is a promise. And this 2021 Booker Prize-winning book by South African writer Damon Galgut has that promise as its pivot. A promise made to a dying wife by her distraught husband, that their longtime…

Book review: Chronicles of the Lost Daughters by Debarati Mukhopadyay

Women who wield the narach Simply put, translations of regional literature is a gift that keeps on giving. Arunava Sinha’s translation of Narach, the best-selling Bengali novel, is one such addition to the pantheon. The English title of Debarati Mukhopadhyay’s book is Chronicle of the Lost Daughters, and is a story about women and everything…

Book review: Girl A by Abigail Dean

Many years after the trauma…. Every so often a book is declared a publishing sensation. Sometimes it is a debut novel, sometimes it is a thriller and very often, it has `girl` in its title. Like Gone girl and The Girl on the Train. The book then sells for huge sums after multi-way auctions, film…

Book review: Tripping by C K Meena

TRIPPING by CK Meena, e-book. Readers of CK Meena`s regular City Lights column of yore in The Hindu will need no introduction to her wry and witty observations on life. In Tripping, she has put all that humour to great use, resulting in many LOL moments for the reader. Tripping is a travelogue detailing a…

Book review: Hymns in Blood by Nanak Singh

Trauma besides the Soan Nanak Singh, widely regarded as the father of the Punjabi novel, needs no introduction to those familiar with Punjabi literature. The Sahitya Akademi winner had little formal education but went on to create a prodigious oeuvre of 59 works spanning novels, short stories, plays, poems, essays and translations; one of his…

Book review: Villainy by Upamanyu Chatterjee

VILLAINY by Upamanyu Chatterjee. Speaking Tiger Books, 2022. What a cracker of a murder mystery, what a cracker of a book! Chatterjee is back with all his old snark, the snark we loved in `English, August` but have only caught fleeting glimpses of in the books that followed that sparkling debut novel of Chatterjee`s. This…

Book review: The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara

A dismayingly familiar dystopia Writers who create new worlds lead you to them through the proverbial Narnian cupboards. Suddenly, you are in a different world; the contours may seem vaguely familiar but the rest of the world is thrillingly new. Vauhini Vara’s `The Immortal King Rao` does just that. It is speculative fiction but the…

Guest column: Don`t Tar All Media with the Same Brush

Don`t tar all media with the same (grimy) brush You know how people constantly, relentlessly, moan about how terrible the media is, how it exists only to spread fake news, how it polarizes people? Well, you know what? India is still a free country, last time I checked. We don’t need to consume the kind…

Photo Feature: The Plitvice Lakes in Croatia

All photos by Sheila Kumar and subject to copyright. A short note on the green and white wonderland that is the Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia. Stupid fights for land, was our driver/guide`s take on the bitter fighting at the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia, and his words ring true when I read the backstory…