Comfortably Numb

Sheila Kumar's Storehouse

Book review: Chandni Chowk The Mughal City of Old Delhi by Swapna Liddle

CHANDNI CHOWK, The Mughal City of Old Delhi by Swapna Liddle. Speaking Tiger Books, out in 2017. In all the years I lived and worked in Delhi, the old parts of the city always had me in thrall, even as much of the new city repelled me. Now I live far away from Delhi but…

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Book review: After the Messiah by Aakar Patel

In the aftermath Aakar Patel`s first attempt at fiction is interesting to say the least. This political fiction is premised on the sudden demise of a strongman leader, the Big Man,  and what happens in the vacuum left in his wake. This vacuum is primarily defined by utter confusion since the departed leader,  who had…

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Book review: Feeling Kerala, anthology edited by J Devika

Kerala Stories Contemporary really is the keyword here. The short stories in this anthology, translated by feminist historian and social researcher J Devika, deals with some of the issues that Kerala is grappling with today. In her foreword, Devika clarifies that neither were the writers for this collection picked from an exhaustive list nor does…

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Book review: Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal

My Wednesday Book Look is this little gem of a book, SUGARBREAD, by Balli Kaur Jaswal, a 2016 release, HarperCollins Books. Set in Singapore of the early 1990s, the narrator is a ten- year- old girl Pin, Parveen Kaur. In sharp, clear tones, Pin tells us the  story of her life, her easygoing lottery-addicted father,…

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Book review: Soft Animal by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan

Love in the time of lockdown Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan spins a most readable tale of how a woman in her late thirties, married to Mukund, who seems to be quite a nice guy, jobless and facing an endless number of lockdown days back when Covid-19 raged, is forced to take a close, grim look at…

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Book review: Digesting India by Zac O`Yeah

When food and literature mix….. Travel-writer Zac O`Yeah has travelled the length and breadth of India, stopping for double breakfasts,  a handful of lunches, many a bottle of stuff that ranges from grog to branded liquor at many a pub or what passes for a pub in the hinterlands, as well as several dinners, all…

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Column: On the Sanitisation of Well-loved Books

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater I recently watched Roger Waters, former Pink Floyd songwriter and bassist, the man who wrote the most scathing lyrics that shone a spotlight on war, violence, twisted men and women, twisted politics,  defending himself against charges of anti-Semitism. After I intently searched Waters` monologue  for any signs of…

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Book review: The Woman Who Climbed Trees

The Woman Who Climbed Trees In this sprawling multi-generational saga of a family based in Nepal, it is Meena the child-bride who is clearly the protagonist. Smriti Ravindra deftly combines the personal with the political in her debut novel; the main concern of this book, however, is women, and the love, loss and pain they…

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Book review: Spare by Prince Harry

The Spare strikes back So here are the facts as we know it: The book flew off the shelves in the prince`s home country, as fast as that other Harry`s broomstick on the Quidditch field, selling 1. 4 million copies on its launch day itself. That it`s one big whinge-fest from a seriously troubled not-so-young…

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Book review: Where My Feet Fall by Duncan Minshull

Paeans to the pleasures of walking This  collection of walking stories quite lives up to the book`s irresistible title. All twenty contributors, including some names familiar to readers in the sub-continent like Pico Iyer, Kamila Shamsie and Keshava Guha, write crisp pieces on where their feet fall by routine/with deliberation/some getting over a reluctance to…

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