books
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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
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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
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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
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Jane Austen, Naipaul, and the Teacup of History
Author’s Note: This column grew from a memory I carried quietly for years—Naipaul’s remark on Austen, and the strange irony it held. Writing it helped me understand how literature outlives the noise around it, and how gentle voices endure longer… Continue reading
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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
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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
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THE THREE NATIONS OF FICTION
Every art has its capitals. Painters look back to Florence and Paris, musicians to Vienna and Leipzig. But if you ask where fiction — the novel and the short story — found its continuous home, you will not wander across… Continue reading
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A DIARY OF FRAGMENTS, WHERE THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY MEET IN SCATTERED RHYTHM
[This column gathers fragments I shared through August and September—notes from Kashi in progress, meditations on language, editing, memory, and literature. They came daily, like scattered pebbles; together they form a diary of two months’ writing and reflection.] A LANGUAGE… Continue reading
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Writers as Yogis: From Muscle to Mind, From Narration to Silence
Greatness, whether in the path of yoga or in the path of art, lies in one direction only: inward. The yogi leaves behind the body, then the mind, and finally the soul dissolves into its own essence. Body, mind, soul… Continue reading
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DEPTH OUTLASTS FASHION—FROM DICKENS TO KAFKA TO TODAY
What is better or worse for literature? The quiet tyranny of prizes or the constant demands of the market. Between both poles, the writer digs the hole like a mole. To be somewhere, or to be nowhere. Yes, the nowhere… Continue reading
Pragya’s Pen 