The City Must Die Before It’s Reborn: Varun Thomas Mathew’s THE BLACK DWARVES OF THE GOOD LITTLE BAY
The Chakkar, 12 September 2024
The dystopian universe of Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019) is a prophetic chronicling of crisis as a condition of existence, and the contingency of truth as a mode of knowing or bearing witness to crisis.
An Entwined Trajectory of Bombay and a Boy
The Chakkar, 18 April 2023
Jerry Pinto’s The Education of Yuri (2022) is an atmospherically saturated, layered accordion, sounding an adventure in scale that simultaneously encompasses the chronicle of a young boy’s coming of age, and a time capsule of Bombay of a bygone era
Art Against the Algorithm: Vauhini Vara’s THE IMMORTAL KING RAO
The Chakkar, 16 September 2022
In Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, the story of the eponymous King Rao is part of larger questions of human creativity and meaning in a transhumanist world, where life is data-fied, and sentience, thought, emotion and ethics are mere products of automated and arbitrary calculations.
The Chakkar, 12 September 2024
The dystopian universe of Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019) is a prophetic chronicling of crisis as a condition of existence, and the contingency of truth as a mode of knowing or bearing witness to crisis.
An Entwined Trajectory of Bombay and a Boy
The Chakkar, 18 April 2023
Jerry Pinto’s The Education of Yuri (2022) is an atmospherically saturated, layered accordion, sounding an adventure in scale that simultaneously encompasses the chronicle of a young boy’s coming of age, and a time capsule of Bombay of a bygone era
Art Against the Algorithm: Vauhini Vara’s THE IMMORTAL KING RAO
The Chakkar, 16 September 2022
In Vauhini Vara’s debut novel, the story of the eponymous King Rao is part of larger questions of human creativity and meaning in a transhumanist world, where life is data-fied, and sentience, thought, emotion and ethics are mere products of automated and arbitrary calculations.
In THE NUTMEG’S CURSE Amitav Ghosh gives voice to our ailing planet
The Chakkar, 5 July 2022
In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh explores the epistemic gap between Enlightenment modernity’s designation of all nonhuman beings as objects meant to cater to human needs, and the indigenous worldview that identifies these ‘objects’ as active, vibrant, sentient individuals.
Naming the Unnameable: Daribha Lyndem’s NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING
The Chakkar, 14 April 2022
In Daribha Lyndem’s novel Name Place Animal Thing, the effective use of layering of time, space, and cultural practices culminate into a generational arc of south Asian female adolescence and young adulthood.
A Girlhood Lost Under Occupation: Farah Bashir’s RUMOURS OF SPRING
The Chakkar, 7 September 2021
Written of a time under armed occupation in the Kashmir valley, Farah Bashir’s memoir Rumours of Spring (2021) entwines the geographical and corporeal, the social and psychological, where the violence of the world remains painfully connected to the violence within.
The Inscrutable Oddity of Youth
The Chakkar 1 April 2021
Megha Ramaswamy’s What Are the Odds? (2019) is a film unlike any other about Indian young adults, harkening the uncertainty of youth on screen to present an experience that is at once innovative, surreal, and profound.
Liminal Subversions: Karan Madhok’s Poetics of Decay
Gulmohar Quarterly, Issue 13, March 2024
A Literary Cabinet of Curiosities: Excursions through Hybridity in Olga Tokarczuk’s 'Flights'
Gulmohar Quarterly Issue 02
Between Visibility and Precarity: Reading Audre Lorde’s ‘The Cancer Journals
Cafe Dissensus, 28 May 2021
In her assessment, cancer is a site of precarity at once individual and collective, the sources of which are at once epidemiological and environmental, raising an ethical demand in the light of which intersectional struggles and solidarities might be sought.
Attention and AI: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and The Sun
Cafe Dissensus, March 21, 2021
Eschewing stereotypes of technological domination and human-machine antagonism, Klara and The Sun offers a tender portrait of what it is to be human, even if the humanity in question is that of a robot.
A Literary Jazz Quartet: ‘The Toni Morrison Book Club’ (2020)
February 25, 2021
The Toni Morrison Book Club testifies to the enduring relevance of Morrison’s works as an atlas for navigating the racialized topographies of the present.
On the Impossibility of a Room of One’s Own: Rethinking Virginia Woolf’s Spatial Politics
February 10, 2021
The desired room in ‘A Room’ is then not just a reference to conditions of isolation and solitude required for creative work; it is more importantly a meditation on the politics of inhabitation, coexistence, and collective occupation of human geographies as concerns at the heart of feminist epistemology.
Book Review: Sickness and the Snail in Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s ‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating’
The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating, although written a decade ago, appears to be particularly relevant in terms of the concerns and perspectives it raises for the altered landscape of the pandemic-inflected present.
Here’s what’s special about Madhuri Vijay’s ‘The Far Field’, winner of the Rs 25-lakh JCB Prize
The novel does not offer easy, totalising, and predictable resolutions.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Nov 03, 2019
Will we read Toni Morrison in troubled times? Yes, we will read Toni Morrison on troubled times
The works of the Nobel Laureate who died on August 5, 2019 are a navigational compass through our own treacherous landscapes.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Aug 17, 2019
Colson Whitehead returns with a novel uncovering a brutal, buried story of Black history
The writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Underground Railroad’ excavates a violent history of racialism.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Aug 10, 2019
How are humans damaging the earth? This book goes beneath the ground to reveal a slow violence
Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Underland’ explores underground structures both literally and metaphorically to unearth a story of destruction wrought by human beings.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Jul 28, 2019
Toni Morrison's therapeutic radicalism imbued her writing with a timbre that resonates across time and place
Paromita Patranobish
Firstpost, August 11, 2019
Toni Morrison’s prose is also an engagement with the ways in which the erosion of language, autonomy, tradition, and community has profound implications for the psychological lives of black subjects
Between the iconic and the precarious: Notes on Soumitra Chatterjee's six-decade-long filmography
Paromita Patranobish
Firstpost, November 25, 2020
In a filmography extending to more than 60 roles, Soumitra Chatterjee brought to bear upon each performance the cadence of his versatility
Shuggie Bain’ is a scathing commentary on childhood abuse, homophobia, toxic masculinity, marital rape & misogyny.
Paromita Patranobish
The Quint, 23 Nov 2020
The Chakkar, 5 July 2022
In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh explores the epistemic gap between Enlightenment modernity’s designation of all nonhuman beings as objects meant to cater to human needs, and the indigenous worldview that identifies these ‘objects’ as active, vibrant, sentient individuals.
Naming the Unnameable: Daribha Lyndem’s NAME PLACE ANIMAL THING
The Chakkar, 14 April 2022
In Daribha Lyndem’s novel Name Place Animal Thing, the effective use of layering of time, space, and cultural practices culminate into a generational arc of south Asian female adolescence and young adulthood.
A Girlhood Lost Under Occupation: Farah Bashir’s RUMOURS OF SPRING
The Chakkar, 7 September 2021
Written of a time under armed occupation in the Kashmir valley, Farah Bashir’s memoir Rumours of Spring (2021) entwines the geographical and corporeal, the social and psychological, where the violence of the world remains painfully connected to the violence within.
The Inscrutable Oddity of Youth
The Chakkar 1 April 2021
Megha Ramaswamy’s What Are the Odds? (2019) is a film unlike any other about Indian young adults, harkening the uncertainty of youth on screen to present an experience that is at once innovative, surreal, and profound.
Liminal Subversions: Karan Madhok’s Poetics of Decay
Gulmohar Quarterly, Issue 13, March 2024
A Literary Cabinet of Curiosities: Excursions through Hybridity in Olga Tokarczuk’s 'Flights'
Gulmohar Quarterly Issue 02
Between Visibility and Precarity: Reading Audre Lorde’s ‘The Cancer Journals
Cafe Dissensus, 28 May 2021
In her assessment, cancer is a site of precarity at once individual and collective, the sources of which are at once epidemiological and environmental, raising an ethical demand in the light of which intersectional struggles and solidarities might be sought.
Attention and AI: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and The Sun
Cafe Dissensus, March 21, 2021
Eschewing stereotypes of technological domination and human-machine antagonism, Klara and The Sun offers a tender portrait of what it is to be human, even if the humanity in question is that of a robot.
A Literary Jazz Quartet: ‘The Toni Morrison Book Club’ (2020)
February 25, 2021
The Toni Morrison Book Club testifies to the enduring relevance of Morrison’s works as an atlas for navigating the racialized topographies of the present.
On the Impossibility of a Room of One’s Own: Rethinking Virginia Woolf’s Spatial Politics
February 10, 2021
The desired room in ‘A Room’ is then not just a reference to conditions of isolation and solitude required for creative work; it is more importantly a meditation on the politics of inhabitation, coexistence, and collective occupation of human geographies as concerns at the heart of feminist epistemology.
Book Review: Sickness and the Snail in Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s ‘The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating’
The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating, although written a decade ago, appears to be particularly relevant in terms of the concerns and perspectives it raises for the altered landscape of the pandemic-inflected present.
Here’s what’s special about Madhuri Vijay’s ‘The Far Field’, winner of the Rs 25-lakh JCB Prize
The novel does not offer easy, totalising, and predictable resolutions.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Nov 03, 2019
Will we read Toni Morrison in troubled times? Yes, we will read Toni Morrison on troubled times
The works of the Nobel Laureate who died on August 5, 2019 are a navigational compass through our own treacherous landscapes.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Aug 17, 2019
Colson Whitehead returns with a novel uncovering a brutal, buried story of Black history
The writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Underground Railroad’ excavates a violent history of racialism.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Aug 10, 2019
How are humans damaging the earth? This book goes beneath the ground to reveal a slow violence
Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Underland’ explores underground structures both literally and metaphorically to unearth a story of destruction wrought by human beings.
Paromita Patranobish
Scroll, Jul 28, 2019
Toni Morrison's therapeutic radicalism imbued her writing with a timbre that resonates across time and place
Paromita Patranobish
Firstpost, August 11, 2019
Toni Morrison’s prose is also an engagement with the ways in which the erosion of language, autonomy, tradition, and community has profound implications for the psychological lives of black subjects
Between the iconic and the precarious: Notes on Soumitra Chatterjee's six-decade-long filmography
Paromita Patranobish
Firstpost, November 25, 2020
In a filmography extending to more than 60 roles, Soumitra Chatterjee brought to bear upon each performance the cadence of his versatility
Shuggie Bain’ is a scathing commentary on childhood abuse, homophobia, toxic masculinity, marital rape & misogyny.
Paromita Patranobish
The Quint, 23 Nov 2020
Rethinking abstraction: Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women
A review of Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, a book discussing the lives and work of five women Abstract Expressionists, and their role in the development of American modernism.
Paromita Patranobish
Stir World, Oct 24, 2019
A review of Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women, a book discussing the lives and work of five women Abstract Expressionists, and their role in the development of American modernism.
Paromita Patranobish
Stir World, Oct 24, 2019
Loving Mrs Bennet: What Teaching Jane Austen Taught Me About Feminism
Austen never had ‘a room of one’s own,’ often having to hide her work under a cushion in the event of an interruption. Perhaps this is what gives her work its communal, open-ended character.
Feminism in India, December 18, 2020
Austen never had ‘a room of one’s own,’ often having to hide her work under a cushion in the event of an interruption. Perhaps this is what gives her work its communal, open-ended character.
Feminism in India, December 18, 2020