Review: Viva Santiago by Colin Fernandes

At the outset, Viva Santiago has a lot going for it. There are its pleasingly psychedelic cover and long lunch-friendly 137 pages, for a start. More importantly, there is its promise, as can be deduced from the synopsis, to be that rare thing in Indian literary fiction: a jovial, light-hearted read that doesn’t take itself [...]

The Pretentious Breakfast

Chandrachoodan and I really want to be pretentious. We’re found it helps alot in matters of productivity-evasion and general world domination. So we’re going to have breakfast/brunch at Amethyst tomorrow and do the Pinky and the Brain routine as per usual. The difference is, come join us! Drop by if you’re interested in the readings [...]

The Venus Flytrap: Between Bread and Betelnut

I was raised by my Sri Lankan Tamil maternal grandparents, and among my various cultural heirlooms comes that famously recognizable accent. That conversation-stopping, glint-in-the-eye, connotations-stirring, “Yaarlpanam-ah?” accent. The one my mother, in her less matriotic moments, tries to pass for Malayali. That political, poetic, deeply personal dialect that I call my mother tongue.
As fiercely in [...]

On Spoken Word As A Sort Of Shamanism

This appeared in the Chennai edition of The Times of India today, under the “What’s Hot” section.

Years ago, I read that when a woman weaves out of her iyari, she doesn’t need to copy a design. I took this to heart, or took it back into my heart, rather – iyari is the Huichol concept [...]

The Venus Flytrap: Hoping For A Revolution

A friend of mine says you either have a soul, or you don’t. It’s a dispassionate way of looking at compassion, as contradictory and yet as perfectly truthful as when Tori Amos sang, “I believe in peace, bitch”.
Faith in humanity, in the face of the obvious proof that some people really are that irredeemable, is [...]

A Writing God

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world. — Mother Teresa

Pix by SM

A Little Live-Blogging

I’ve seen Julie Taymor’s Frida maybe 25 or 30 times, for what I assume would be obvious reasons.
I’m watching it right now on the World Movies channel. There’s a good deal of expected censorship, and some quaint re-subtitling, like “fucking revolution” becoming “stupid revolution” (the expletive inaudible). Cutely enough, some expletives, like pinche, are not [...]

The Venus Flytrap: The Great Indian Guilt Trip

I have a proposal (actually, my friend the professional alliterater Deesh Mariwala, alleged by one publication to be the most charming man in Chennai, has a proposal, but I’m the one with the column). As a passionately patriotic poetess, I’ve spent a preposterous period of time pondering the position of the paise. Poor punnery aside, [...]

If You Forget Me

But if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you [...]

Review: Hanif Kureishi’s Something To Tell You

Hanif Kureishi’s latest novel is a startlingly clear-minded, often hedonistic, but ultimately believable look at the complications of life, love and sex. Jamal, a middle-aged psychoanalyst, remains obsessed with the loss of his college girlfriend Ajita and lives in guilt over his own participation in the murder of her father. Despite his own neuroses, or [...]

The Venus Flytrap: No Love In This Democracy

At their most basic, our survival needs have at least three components: food, shelter and love. The first and second are physical necessities. The third appears almost as a technical error – in no medical book will you find a prescription for causing or curing love. Yet, we know it is possible to die of [...]

RIP Toni Kasim

I will not pretend to have known Toni very well. But I admired her for years, and cherish the few times we spoke. She was warm, friendly, passionate — and with a notable absence of the sanctimony that many self-proclaimed warriors carry.
I saw her a few days before moving back to India. She had spotted [...]

Remembering Paula Gunn Allen

Paula Gunn Allen, the revolutionary writer, teacher and cultural historian passed away of lung cancer on May 29.
THE TEXT IS FLESH
by Paula Gunn Allen
They tell me that in Beirut
men lounger around the tables
over thick syrupy coffee
and recite poetry.
Not the ones they’ve made themselves,
but everyone’s poems.
These are people who know
poems are word in flesh, incarnate.
In safer, [...]