My Articles 

There are places we visit and places we merely pass through. The distinction becomes apparent much later. I had passed through Santiniketan in 2010, on a motorcycle, during a long ride aimed at the mysterious and beautiful North East of India. I remember the journey more clearly than I remember Santiniketan itself. There was a certain restlessness to those days. I was young enough to believe that travelling meant moving from one place to another, collecting landscapes, roads,

The first copies of Tea and Tombs: Poems on Hyderabad arrived today. A speed post parcel from Kolkata. Brown paper. Fresh ink. Crisp pages. A cover I had only seen on screens until now. I held the book for a long time before opening it. There is something deeply unsettling about seeing your own poems in print. These were once loose sheets tucked into diaries, forgotten notebooks, computer folders, and Google Docs. They belonged to years that had already passed. Suddenly they

Literature is full of characters who discover that being loved and being understood are not the same thing. Some spend their lives standing at the edge of their own family's narrative, present but unseen. They are spoken to but not listened to. Remembered, but not considered. Included in the language of belonging yet excluded from its practice. Perhaps that is why certain characters remain with us long after we close their books. Among them, Ivan Ilyich has always lingered

Yesterday was International Reading Day. I thought about it for a while and realized that I had a problem. I have never had a reading year that felt so fragmented. When the year began, I was reading philosophy. Considering it was my birth month, that was perhaps an unusually gloomy way to celebrate being alive. Yet it made sense. Over the last few years, my reading has increasingly shifted toward philosophy, politics and history. Somewhere along the way, those three areas qui

Last evening, while gazing upon the Hyderabad skyline from my window, I found myself momentarily arrested by the sight of a crescent moon suspended delicately above the city. It was one of those rare evenings when the heavens briefly forgive urban planning. The moon floated there with old world serenity while beneath it rose the contemporary ambitions of mankind in concrete, glass, and questionable architectural confidence. Cranes stood like mechanical giraffes. Apartment tow