Reflections

  Heart Lamp Banu Mushtaq and Deepa Bhashti I finished reading  Heart Lamp  within a week of receiving it. In a time when sustained attention feels increasingly elusive, completing twelve short stories over seven days felt like a big win. As I read, I kept asking myself why I stayed with the book so steadily. The answer emerged gradually: the deeper I went, the more I was drawn into the lives of the men and women portrayed in these stories, and into the social worlds they inhabited. Reading them took me back to my own childhood—growing up as a young girl in a rural village in southern India, with rules and ways of living clearly charted out for her. Almost every story carried traces of my life or the lives of women I have known. Heart Lamp  is a selected collection of twelve short stories written in Kannada over three decades (1990–2023) by Banu Mushtaq, translated into English by Deepa Bhasthi. I recently listened to Bhasthi speak at a literature festival, wh...

    The light fades, the glow lingers .   He's gone now. He was 91. While the doctors around him struggled to keep him alive he must have wished for time to take over and do its part. Afterall, he saw life as just a stop gap arrangement, an interval, agreed upon by death. When I heard  the news of the gravity of his illness, I wished for him to stay on... fervently. He had many more lines to deliver before he disappeared behind the curtains or so I felt. I wasn’t yet ready for him to leave. It feels as if I lost a relative - someone who was familiar, someone who I admired from a distance and was content knowing that he was doing well. I use the word familiar consciously. MT’s friendship with my uncle and the stories I have heard about them from my dad added on a familial comfort after I had started reading his stories. I was proud to have had that connect. It made me think that when he wrote what he wrote, he was looking out for me.   When the news of his passi...

I confess that I was star struck when I booked three tickets for Hamlet - the Clown Prince directed by Rajat Kapoor. Nothing can go wrong with tried and tested names in the Hindi film world as cast and crew, or so I believed. I also believe that I am someone who is open enough to look beyond the original text and allow space for intelligent and engaging improvisation. Having said that, Hamlet has always been a great favourite of mine from among the Shakespearean tragedies and I confess to being extremely loyal to the original text. So here’s what transpired at the screening of Hamlet- the Clown Prince at Chowdaiah memorial hall on 9 th September.  It all started with the organisers' constant drilling about sticking to time, via social media and later on via SMS after the tickets were purchased. Made me hopeful that we would finally look past excuses of Bangalore traffic and start the show bang on time. Twenty minutes after the start time, we were still checking out the ceilin...

Destination Avani wasn't previously fixed. It came to me through a Google search for places within 100 kms. from Bangalore. I like that about Bangalore; there's a new place to go to no matter how many times you have headed out from the city. I should also tell you that I have a penchant for old temples; temples which are not functional but are left behind as relics from a storyful past. Avani is around 98 kms. from Bangalore and the approach is via the gold mine district of Kolar. It would have been a great idea if I had started really early in the morning. In fact the websites that I referred to suggested the same.  Lesson learnt! I was out of home by 8 am and had to make a trip to the fuel station which I have been delaying in the hope that the unrealistic fuel prices would drop any day. Looks like the hope was unrealistic, we are staying sky high with those prices for a week now. Car tanked up, I suddenly remembered that I was hungry. My plan was to stop by at one of the...

You think Kerala, you think water; just that the shades of the water have drastically changed this time. The clear warm waters which always beckoned weary travelers from all over the world have now turned cold, muddy and furious; lifelines choking on themselves in this beautiful state that I call home. It is my place of solace and I turn to it, whenever I seek for it. For those of us who do not live currently there, among the many things that make us home sick, the monsoon months of June and July pull at the nostalgic chord in us the strongest. Come August 2018 and I almost wish for no more rains in my beloved land. We have had enough to last us another 100 years! The heavy and incessant rainfalls that resulted in unprecedented floods have been wreaking havoc in this little strip of land by the sea and as I watched the news and read posts on social media a deep sense of helplessness kept growing inside me. The fact that family and friends were being affected was on one side but on th...

Last weekend I was brave enough to plunge headlong in to Bangalore traffic. Destination: HRBR layout, Goal: figure out an Improv show. The word had always looked incomplete to me… as if it missed a tooth. Even the dictionary doesn’t accept it and I had a block towards anything which the dictionary didn’t like. Yet, it came about through a random connection and I believe that random connections lead you to random experiences. So we took off, my 15 year old and I and I was at my victorious best having been able to find an activity which wasn’t obsolete or archaic or 'old – like- mom'. HRBR layout in Bangalore  is a newly developed plush neighbourhood in the city. Well laid out roads with no pot holes, the street bright with lights from shops and eateries and the smattering of green wherever there was scope for it; a far cry from the woeful look that most of our roads carried. I felt I was in a movie set, well, almost and something which never happens to me on Bangalore ro...