Pragya’s Pen

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  • Why Indian fiction learned to change society before it learned to question the self.

    Every country carries a history, and in cumulative measure these histories are not so different from one another. Wars, famines, empires, revolutions — the costumes change, the wounds remain similar. What distinguishes one literature from another is not how much… Continue reading

  • Why Vincent Van Gogh Read Shakespeare Like a Painter

    When Vincent van Gogh wrote about books, he did not write like a reader. He wrote like a man holding on. Reading, for him, was not leisure. It was respiration. Among the names that recur in his letters—Dickens, Balzac, Zola—Shakespeare… Continue reading

  • Putin. Gandhi. Beckett. Noise. Symbol. Bone.

    Gandhi, for Putin, is merely a protocol stop These days I watch certain Indian intellectuals—once loud, now faint shadows in the Modi era—waiting for any passing gesture to revive their old, muddy idealism. Vladimir Putin came, placed flowers on Gandhi’s… Continue reading

  • Grammar Tilts Against the Storm

    Father’s Lesson— from my debut poetry book Lost Mother My first rolling was in nursery days. My teacher’s word was like a hammer to me when she told me to write eight. Sweat began to trail — in winter days.… Continue reading

  • NEITHER SAINT,NOR STATESMAN—BUT ABSURD

    What happens when a saint takes the reins? He spreads nothing but chaos and heaven loses its silence. Tolstoy’s letter to Gandhi in 1909 was written like a benediction sent from the last twilight of one saint to the dawn… Continue reading

  • SMOKE, THE NOSE, AND THE FUTILITY OF LABELS

    Recently, the cover of Arundhati Roy’s new memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me stirred a different kind of smoke. She appears on it holding a beedi — calm, defiant, aware of the camera. A Public Interest Litigation in Kerala claimed… Continue reading

  • Focus on Technique—

    When you grow older, when the inspiration is dismissed, you depend more on technique. If you don’t have that then everything collapses.There is no question that you write much more slowly, with much more care, and perhaps with less inspiration.… Continue reading