I am overhauling all my writing spaces and shifting most of my reflective indulgences to Medium for broader engagement and readership. This blog, as a result, will remain archived. Since I am now going back to more frequent posting, it is probably a good idea to go to a wider and more conventional space. Thank… Read More Moving On
Intimacy and Integrity by Thomas P. Kasulis is an insightful exploration of Eastern and Western Weltanschauung. Kadulis delves into the rich fabric of cultural identity, epistemology, and aesthetics, and offers a broad canvas to sketch how these diverse orientations shape our interactions with the world and how we conceive knowledge and art in our particular… Read More Intimacy or Integrity
(a quick story I wrote for my nieces.) The sun was directly overhead when the fourth rice field caught fire. Men, women, and children, carrying casks, wineskins, and pots full of water, rushed through the muddy tracks leading to the fields. But it was already too late. The ready-to-harvest crop was reduced to ashes in… Read More The Battle of Khushboo Nagar
“Son, the biopsy results have arrived,” I said without any pleasantries. “I have cancer.” Silence lingered on the other end of the line. “Hello, are you there? Can you hear me?” I asked, trying to break the stillness. “Dad,” my son’s voice finally broke through, sounding desolate. “Is it confirmed, or do they need to… Read More Thunderbolt Scene
In nine different stories published in the 1940s, the inimitable science fiction author Isaac Asimov explored the ethical implications of technology by way of imagining a world increasingly inhabited by humanoid autonomous systems. All these stories chart different threads of a singular narrative where a reporter interviews a ‘robopsychologist’. All these stories somehow converge on… Read More Is it possible to preserve the art of war?
Structural dynamics of the stories remain a less explored dimension within literary criticism. The Saussurean model, for instance, pretty much restricts itself to the semiotics with an aim to get interpretive insights using relational tools. The so-called ‘structure’ within Structuralism doesn’t concern itself with geometry, physics, or what Kurt Vonnegut called the ‘Shape of Stories’… Read More Recoloring Literary Tapestries in Translation
The protagonist in one of Max Shulman’s short stories is extremely proud of his precise thinking. The girl he desires is dumb and prior to proposing, he decides to woo her into an education of logical fallacies. The coaching continues for the next five evenings. On the sixth eve, she returns his advances by demonstrating… Read More Celebrating Restrained Irrationality
Even the closest reading of a translation is indirectly effected by a tendency to pronounce invisibility of the translator. Any critical evaluation of a translation cannot possibly speak about its merits and shortcomings without repeatedly referring to the original narrative. Lens of a critic always focuses on an overlapping semantic space where authorial voice merges… Read More Transporting the Ineffable and Transmuting the Observable
Born in 1927 in an Agarwal family of Jalandhar, he was probably named Bheesham after the Kuru warrior Bhisma of Mahabharata. His father used to visit progressive scholarly gatherings of socio-religious nature. I am not aware of the details, but circa 1935, in one such gathering, where Allama Muhammad Iqbal was also present, he converted… Read More The hedgehog who didn’t know what it means to be a fox
Imam was giving a brief sermon on death. A friend’s mother died last night and we were lining up for the funeral prayer. “And now the last thing brothers,” Imam wrapped it up, “not that it’s obligatory, but better to stand in odd number of files; Allah is odd and likes it.” “Why does He… Read More Random Encounters in the City (4): The Odd One
Hanging Odes 