Unwild Rumpus

I want to write about Natsume Soseki. I want to write about Kokoro. But how can I possibly write anything about the book without giving away spoilers? How can I say what I loved about it without robbing you of the experience that I had while reading it without knowing a thing? I don't know when Kokoro stopped being a fictional narrative and started becoming an intensely personal one; when the characters in the book started jumping out to steal faces of acquaintances from my past. Soseki bravely ventures into the murky areas of different relationships, the emotions we sometimes feel but prefer to not address - the secrets we hide from spouses, the feelings of resentment towards best friends, disappointment in the actions or words of those we look up to, hidden feelings of love, distrust in those that mean no harm.. the list is long. But it's a list that makes me uneasy. Only because I've felt them all. I don't want to talk about envying/resenting one of my closest ...

Reading a novel in Tamil is a completely different reading experience. For one, I am forced to read much much slower than I do in English. I read most sections twice, once to get the words right and the second time for the flow of the story. And I take breaks between chapters. Because I am tired by the time I finish the 5 or 6 pages that comprises a chapter. But this has just meant that I invest more deeply in the story. I think more about it. I mull over the characters, their interactions, their actions more. I observe language, structure, and the beauty of descriptions. It's such a contrast to my typical reading. When reading a book in English, I breeze through it. I consume as much as I can in one sitting. Usually, multiple chapters. Occasionally, an entire book. And then I spend some time chewing on it. A quick post about it. Next book. Now I want to slow my English reading as well. Read less, mull more. I kinda like that. My head is bursting with things I want to dissect and...

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off  course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.  Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds, many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea, fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home. The man of twists and turns - The polytropos one, as Homer supposedly refers to him. Fondly, I am sure because Odysseus seems to be a beloved hero. Polytropos - a word that hints at a man meandering, both, in his travels as well as in his mind. And it is this meandering of the mind that caught my attention (as it always seems to do). A restless mind that thinks of the most ingenious schemes to attack/escape from an enemy and the most fascinating tales to mask real identities. A mind that is torn between the need to indulge in new experiences and the urge to return home. I find nothing more endearing than the conflicted mind. It shows a propensity for rumination. A...

When I first finished reading Samskara, I thought I had it all figured out. A book about the personal transformation of a priest set against the backdrop of an orthodox brahmin community, is what I thought. Seemed simple enough. But I knew I was off the mark when I couldn’t tie it all together with that being the central theme. A few probing questions and I was fumbling, mumbling, and completely out of my comfort zone. What makes an English professor pick up his pen and write his ground breaking, controversial novel in his native tongue? His intended audience, of course. Not the readers from the western world attempting to get a peep into small town life in a remote South Indian village, but his own people. The community he grew up with up and lived in. URA, in an interview mentions, "My text does not exist in free space that some Westener can read and understand; it exists in my context. I am a critical insider". And I realized where I went wrong when I understood wh...

I sometimes think I live my life constantly testing the borders of what's considered acceptable and what's not. Having spent all my formative years in a Catholic convent, I became more than just a little familiar with a lot of their practices. And the one that frazzled me the most? Confessions. Not because I had things to hide, but rather because I had nothing. I remember standing in line to confess, working up a sweat, because I didn't have anything to confess and somehow, that seemed like a bigger sin than others. The tension was real. So real that soon my life revolved around collecting little sins so I could add them to my confession arsenal. Ones that were safe enough to not get me into trouble but still significant enough to "confess": sneaking in a piece of chocolate during mass, reading a Mills and Boon under the desk during class, reading under the quilt with a flashlight after lights were turned off in the dorms.. Somewhere in the next twenty years, ...

My high school, a gorgeous yellow building with a sloping red tiled roof, was nestled among the trees and overlooked a calm lake. Idyllic. We had a skating rink, a basketball courts, a sports field, woods all around, a cemetary, a convent with austere nuns, residential quarters with affluential boarding kids, and best of all - a calm, quiet library. The library was my haven. Wooden cupboards with glass doors lined the walls. The books arranged alphabetically by authors last name in each cupboard and increasing in difficulty and reading level as you went from one cupboard to the next. We started at the first cupboard near the entry way in sixth grade and then slowly made our way to the hallowed shelves at the back right next to the desk of the stern librarian. Shelves to which access was restricted. In a very Oliver Twist porridge scene style, I remember standing in front of the strict librarian asking "Please ma'am, may I have the keys to the cupboards with the classics?"...

When I posted my short review on Instagram, I started off by saying this - There are books that make you want to read differently; there are books that make you want to write differently; and then there are books that make you want to live differently. For me, Karukku by Bama definitely falls under the third category. I can safely say that it is the first book that made me pause and look back at my life through a different lens. All my life, I've been privileged enough to not have to pay any attention to casteism or bother about caste based discrimination. It didn't affect me at all. Actually, I take that back. It affected me. Once. When my ignorant ass ranted against the reservation system because I didn't get admitted to the medical college of my choice but a "less deserving" classmate of mine did because of reservation. She was a person from the Scheduled Caste community. It has taken me 18 years to realize how spoilt and ignorant I was then. How blind. Ho...