December 7, 2016
To Kill An Arab A Short Story by Sándor Jászberényi We put the two machine guns on the kitchen table. “I’ll take them to headquarters,” said the colonel to the boys, who then stepped back outside as he closed the door. The engine started up and the jeep took off, carrying the fellows we’d […]
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December 3, 2016
This article was originally posted in The Huffington Post on 17th November 2016 Anybody who’s somebody in India’s sprawling literary world — author, auteur, acolyte — will be at, or will want to be at, the Tata Lit Live, which runs November 17-20. Can’t get in? Keep trying. Its founder, the veteran columnist and […]
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December 1, 2016
Shakespeare Raise the curtain, Shakespeare, Your characters wait in the wings, Adorned in their costumes Their make-up done Their lines memorized – Lines that resonate Four-hundred years later With the same conflicts: To be or not be – Aware that the world’s a stage And we are merely actors. Even today, naïve Juliet Leans […]
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November 30, 2016
THE SAME NEWS Every day the same newspaper column Gulps of the same brackish news Every day the same mouthful of promises; Sentences dissected Each word chewed again and again How long can one masticate The chewing gum of daily statements? Now one has come to learn: Just spit it out If the […]
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November 5, 2016
Shobhaa De: I will always remain a curious journalist, permanently in search of a story (Interview by Prayag Arora – Desai on November 5, 2016) You can’t talk about literature in the city of Mumbai without mentioning Shobhaa De. Shobhaa has been credited with changing film journalism in India, has dabbled in fiction, penned […]
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November 4, 2016
On Stage November 2016 Every November, Tata Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest attaches itself firmly to almost all venues of NCPA. That`s because Mumbai’s international literary festival is not just a Literature Live! event, or a Tata event, but very much NCPA`s event too. (Full disclosure: I am the Founder and Director of the litfest). So it has […]
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October 28, 2016
1st Prize – Existentialist Conspiracy Club by Kalpak Bhave Yesterday, I saw you look at the stars, Our bottoms cold on the marble floor, A garden of light above our head, None of us saying much, Me itching to get up and go, You shooting a look, dare I moved. “Is everything alright?” They’d […]
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October 26, 2016
1st Prize – “LORD OF THE RINGS AN UNTOLD STORY” (parody) By Aditya Mewati and Isha Mahajan The irony of life is that everyone is going to die but unexpected things tend to occur at the most bizarre times like it happened with Jeanine Mathews. She thought she was going to change the system, make […]
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October 21, 2016
Dad’s the Word (Excerpt from the Fatherhood Memoir) I was sitting in the rocking chair that no longer rocks, twisting myself around so that my book caught the best of the light from the lamp on the small glass table alongside the chair. She slipped into the room, her bare feet making no sound, and […]
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October 19, 2016
Reading to Borges THROUGH a series of strange circumstances, I had the opportunity as a British schoolboy to read aloud to Jorge Luis Borges. I was 16 when I first climbed the staircase to his small, dark drawing room in Avenida Maipu, in a flat that he shared with his mother. The adolescent who […]
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October 17, 2016
In the 2016 edition of the Tata Literature Live MyStory Contest, we had over 1850 entries and 30,000 votes. Below are the five winners picked by our jury on the basis of merit. They are not in order of positions. Kirti Swarup Rath REGRET “Faster,faster”,I kept urging him from the moment I got […]
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