essay

To read as an academic: The transformative journey of a reader turned student

I became curious as to how the experience of reading might change for someone who studied it for a living, and how the lens of a literature student might differ from that of a creative writing one
22 March 2024

Between falling and failing

Although there is much merit to the representation of women’s pain, the evolution of the heavily aestheticised “sad girl” trope in popular culture has started to make a mawkish caricature of real women’s suffering
9 March 2024

The promises and pitfalls of decolonial thinking

The craze that once prevailed in academia over postcolonialism no longer seems to hover around there anymore.
28 February 2024

“Dostoevsky” by Ahmed Sofa

A translation of Ahmed Sofa's essay on Dostoyevsky
23 February 2024

Romance and unfulfillment in the past and the present

Much like most media geared toward women, romance novels have frequently received flack for its supposed shallowness, absurdity, and flamboyancy.
16 February 2024

On ‘Gaza Monologues, the Land of Sad Oranges’: A theatrical performance by Prachyanat

How do you attempt to understand testimonies of mass public trauma?
2 February 2024

The first semester is your shitty first draft

Like many veterans, I joined a creative writing MFA program because I wanted to evolve as a writer.
24 January 2024

Sad girl lit and trivialising women’s writing

When I read the title of Charlotte Stroud’s article “The curse of the cool girl novelist” and the accompanying description of said type of novelist, I had a solid image of what she was referring to. Stroud describes “cool girl novelists” as “depressed and alienated”, “incurably downcast”, and “terminally sad”. It had similarities with “sad girl” literature, a supposedly new genre captivating readers and publishers alike.
17 January 2024

The controversial legacy of Nabokov’s ‘Lolita’

Readers often look for relatability in the stories and characters they are reading but Nabokov doesn’t give his readers that comfort or spoon feed them. Rather, he challenges them to eschew feeling compelled by Humbert’s justification of his innocence
16 January 2024

Nailing your university essays: The dos and don’ts

Making sure to stick to the prompt and ticking all your requirements can massively streamline your writing process.
28 December 2023

On wars and words

These words are not just some veils adorning the valour and victory of our freedom fighters; they're not just tributes but testaments to the rare occasion of the oppressed overpowering the oppressor.
13 December 2023

Ludic space for Tagore’s fictive children

An interesting concern in contemporary children’s literature criticism is the discussion of power. Do the fictive children in children’s books, conceived and delivered by the adult author, have the ability to exercise their will and possess a voice?
8 December 2023

Sultana’s Dream and the issue with feminist utopias

“They should not do anything, excuse me; they are fit for nothing.”
6 December 2023

On the many flavours of horror in children’s literature

What do we make of the mysterious thread that connects these stories not by genre, but by an imagination so wondrous they leave room for an underlying horror, and the many things that can mean?
5 December 2023

The progressive depiction of women in ‘Devdas’

In some ways, Sharatchandra places the blame for Devdas's ensuing sorrow on his lack of courage, made all the more noticeable in comparison to Parbati's courage in breaking social norms despite the dire consequences it could have for her.
17 November 2023

Being a third culture kid

As the title suggests, I am a third culture kid, a TCK, or a TCI (I for individual), the phrase literally translates to “people who were raised in a culture other than their parents’ or the culture of their country of nationality, and also those who live in a different environment during a significant part of their child development years”.
1 November 2023

Music and the space it creates for literature

I cannot, for the life of me, definitively describe what makes music. Growing up in a family where music of any form was not typically paid any reverence, my exposure to it was tunnelled into mainstream pop songs for the longest time.
4 October 2023

T.S. Eliot and on living in unreal cities

I once again find myself drawn to "The Waste Land"—though this isn’t about just the one poem, not really—where so much of the old world exists in motifs in a tattered landscape.
26 September 2023

RRReading

Even if you are not a film enthusiast, chances are high that you have watched the 2022 Telegu blockbuster RRR. At the very least, you should have heard about it.
20 September 2023

The alterities of hunger

In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.
8 September 2023