Any arrival of an alien, out-of-the-ordinary phenomenon is greeted with a peculiar curiosity gushing out of ogling human eyes, making a quick distinction between Self and Other (anything deemed non-relatable). As a by-product of this curiosity, a certain judgment is passed where every non-normal attribution displayed by the Other somehow rows them further away from…
Category: Essays
Probing the Indian Heartland for Humour in Shrilal Shukla’s The Selected Satire: Fifty Years of Ignorance
Shrilal Shukla’s book, The Selected Satire: Fifty Years of Ignorance, is an English-language collection of 25 short prose pieces written to read like a mirror image of North Indian society. These pieces have been translated into English by Matt Reeck for Penguin Random House, India. Fifty Years of Ignorance, spanning over 427 pages, is a…
Sidney Sheldon Grayed My Brain: A Reflective Essay on his Novels
Sidney Sheldon Grayed My Brain: A Reflective Essay on his Novels – My father was actively involved in raising me and passively involved in inculcating in me a habit of reading while taking a dump. A multi-tasking, ‘starts the day with a to-do list stained by his chai’ kind of a person, he enjoys making…
How Feminist Retellings are Quickly Shaping our Understanding of Myths
How Feminist Retellings are Quickly Shaping our Understanding of Myths: When Adrienne Rich wrote in her popular essay, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,’ that re-visioning would be an act of survival for women, she was possibly envisioning a future when a massive wave of revisionist storytelling was going to ebb into the world…
Understanding how Form is Content in ‘Waiting for Godot’
“At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.” While trying to understand the text, Waiting for Godot, 1953, one often finds themselves in a myriad of possibilities or lenses to look at it through. Although it is all but an attempt…