Howzzat!

Sometime in the 1600s, European travellers shifted from being explorers, pilgrims or merchants to travelling for pleasure. The 17th-century traveller Thomas Coryat was the first Englishman to visit Asia for pleasure, and he described his “ greedinesse of seeing strange countries ” as the “queen of all pleasures in the world.” Coryat is a gawky backpacker mistaken by Emperor Jahangir for a Western sadhu; assuming the visiting mendicant needed no more, the emperor handed the penniless pleasure seeker a measly 100 rupees to return home. Pleasure seekers like Coryat might have helped establish trails of the popular kind. In the 1700s, wealthy Brits went on cross-Europe trips called the “Grand Tour.” In the era of carriages but no engines, they had little choice but to tread on choppy waters. Starting from the English Channel, they halted at French ports, crossed the Alps, fawned over art in Venice, Florence or Rome, and even paid the then newly excavated Pompeii sites a visit. In the 1800...

Emily Bronte's 1847 classic Wuthering Heights, released under the male pseudonym "Ellis Bell," is remembered for its complex protagonists, its gothic elements, and the young age at which the author passed (she was thirty). But what caught Alice Munro's attention were the vivid descriptions of the farm, the house, the fields, and the little brooks brimming with melting snow (more than the lengthy accounts of the dark, brooding Heathcliff or the sad, eerie Cathy, who caught mine). Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro passed away on May 13th this year, aged 92. Over her lifetime, she published a total of fourteen short story collections, with most of them a staggering 40 pages long. (While interviewing Munro, Tamil writer A. Muthulingam quipped that her stories rarely appeared in Tamil magazines due to their reluctance to publish lengthy works.) Her works revolved around the lives of ordinary men, women, and children in rural or small-town Canad...

Making sense of every major literary trend in the west is quite a task, I hate to admit. On the brighter side, the task of tracing a trend back to its roots is well cut out thanks to all the once path-breaking essays readily available now. A not-so-beneficial effect of giving in to this elaborate spread is the urge to argue with the dead thinkers and tell them why they are no longer relevant. On this count, Roland Barthes is rather unfortunate to have been on the receiving end when he was very much alive. His essay “Death of the author” would have been spared all the backlash if it were alternatively titled “The birth of the reader” (Barthes uses the phrase in the text) but I think it wouldn’t have been his best known piece of work if not for the apocalyptic name. In “The Death of the Author”, Barthes states that the role of the author in his work’s interpretation is non-existent. Barthes makes a case for the scriptor, an entity who is alive as long as the text is being conceived. The ...

I’ve only recently started to count myself as a writer despite writing for more than a decade. A chance encounter with a writer I thought I’d never meet, has stopped me in my tracks and changed my life as I knew it (what an understatement). I’ve begun to feel lately that I’d die if I don’t write. And that’s the most liberating statement I’ve written in this space in all these years. Life has always been beautiful as it is torrid. It isn’t the same it was a couple of years back. A simple act of picking a book to read, jotting down thoughts has become more challenging than ever though. External factors like a loved one’s frown, meeting a deadline someone else has committed to etc., will persist and the most stoic part of my mind thinks it can live with that. It’s the internal factors that play havoc -   I wouldn’t prefer placing it under the omniscient “writer’s block”, the phrase has lost its sheen these days– palpitations that halt sleep, anxiety that builds up day after day cons...

One of the most endearing things about novels that span generations is the opportunity to visualize the era gone by – ambitions, ideologies, confrontations, ambiguity and (or within) religion. Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer prize winning novel Gilead (2004) is one such novel that effortlessly retains a sense of timelessness, through a style of narration that comes across as deeply contemplative. Gilead is an  epislatory , epistlery , epistolary (phew) novel, narrated in the form of a letter. The year is 1956. John Ames, an ailing third generation pastor, writes to his seven year old son - a son who, he acknowledges, will grow up not knowing him. In a tone that's confessional, affectionate but never overbearing, Ames recounts the lives of his passive father and his radical grandfather, his  sedentary life in the laid back fictional town of Gilead, his sensitivity to the Christian faith, his eventual marriage with a much younger woman and his tryst with his namesake and adversary...

'Literature of Exhaustion' by American writer John Barth, is generally considered the quintessential essay on post modernism. It was widely misinterpreted in his time as beckoning the death of the novel and he had to write a 'Literature of Replenishment' a decade later to counter it. Barth starts the essay with a disclaimer that it was the "used-upness" of certain forms that he wants to denounce and not the physical, moral, intellectual aspect of art. He doubts the then fashionable “intermedia” arts’ stand of rejecting not just the tradition in art but the traditional notion of the artist, whereby a controlling artist might run the risk of being considered a fascist in those terms. Why then is this essay often equated to a pamphlet on post modernism? I think it comes down to his argument – a writer whose work is technically “out of date is likely to be a genuine defect” he says, even Beethoven might sound outdated if he weren’t put forth in “the Borgesian spir...

Presence is a great mystery, and presence in absence, which Jesus promised and has epitomized, is, at a human scale, a great reality for all of us in the course of ordinary life. I am persuaded for the moment that this is in fact the basis of community.   “Imagination and Community” is an essay by contemporary American novelist Marilynne Robinson published in 2012 among her collection of essays “When I was a child I read books”. Robinson believes “the more generous the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be.” She insists it is imagination which spearheads a community, into loving people who are not personally acquainted with one another, on several “grounds”. It is with these conditions that she finds a problem with, as they cause boundaries to be drawn, limiting the role of imagination. “… They insist that the imagination must stay within the boundaries they establish for it, that sympathy and identification are only allowabl...