hopscotch

Here we are. Nine months of 2026 already gone by, amid politically-charged atmosphere. Along come a book, which opens in Spring 2016, but covers a canvas from Winter 2014 and then subsequent seasons in 2015, 2016 to conclude in 2017.  How to Date a Fanatic by Aruni Kashyap perfects the outsider -looking-inwards gaze.  Published almost a decade later (chronologically), when most of the events mentioned in the book actually took place, it gives the readers a chance to assess, ascertain if something has changed at all. Or more appropriately it intends to bring us face to face with a period, where it all began. The uncertainty, the fear, of belonging, being named and identified.  Kashyap, an academician, has chosen to set How to Date a Fanatic, amongst the university campuses in Delhi. Not just because they were actual sites of the political developments, but they are the spaces which discuss, debate on affirmative action, development, economic benefits, marginalisation,...

 Where Every Creature Has a Story What do you think the world of animals looks like? Not merely the one we glimpse through binoculars in forests, but the one they inhabit with their families and friends. In Padmini Mongia's imagination, young dolphins may squirm when their mothers fuss over them, while mice guard their homes as fiercely as children treasure their own rooms.   In I Do So I Do: Stories , she creates a world where the lives of animals, birds, insects and even pests intersect with human lives - a world where Fluffy the cat is a diva and Gugu the giraffe is looked out for by four ‘ias - Kia, Mia, Sia and Tia. Full of wonder and whimsy, I Do So I Do: Stories, is a collection of seven tales, some of which are narrated as bedtime stories to the author's niece.  The tales, which often read like modern fables, take readers from coral reefs in Capri and Cambodia to a desert town in India and a garden where two teeny-weeny cacti are jealous of each other. Not every s...

  A second chance… Two bus hijacks with more or less the same bunch of passengers involved. How will they react? Have the passengers, who are also neighbours, learnt anything from the burden on their conscience from the first episode? Or they care more about their person, to hell with the consequences? Twice in Nalanda may sound like a classic thriller. But it digs deeper, to find out about people’s equation with death. The choices they make when a pistol is pointed at their temple by the hijacker or the thoughts they harbour about bumping off their neighbour. Twice in Nalanda talks about the journey that residents of Nalanda housing society undertake every day, in a cream and red minibus, to their workplace in Nariman Point, Mumbai. The journey is omniscient narrator here. It not only details the daily drudge of the commute, but about the transformative passage that the residents of Nalanda undergo within the timespan of the two incidents - November 1998 and November 2024. ...