Madhavi Menon
Delhi: another time, another clime
How does one become two? How did Hindustan get divided into India and Pakistan? What goes into a partition? What gets taken out, ravaged, savaged, bloodied, battered, maimed, murdered, lost? What happens to a soul that straddles nations and religions? What happens to the language in which Hindustan has been written and translated?
Mother, do you love me?
A Direct Question: Can a graphic novelist also be a philosopher, feminist, queer theorist, artist and humorist?
A Tangential Answer: In a 1985 comic strip titled The Rule, one of the characters says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:
The literary and the sentimental
I resisted reading this book for a long time because I have no interest in pehalwans or akharas. Then one day the electricity went for several hours during the heat of a Delhi afternoon and I was not able to work at my computer.
Me and the small Mooh
Everyone wants to write about their mother. Is that what they’re calling it these days: “writing”? I thought everyone wanted to have sex with their mother?
The lack of necessity
It is fascinating when the murder in a murder mystery happens two-thirds of the way into the novel, and then turns out not to have been a murder at all. Sorry if I have just given away the twist in The Tailor of Giripul, but suspense is not at all the point of this novel. Instead, the book revels in conjuring up the
Betwixt & Between
Part bildungsroman and part manifesto, The Truth About Me is, fittingly, a book that does not fit fully into either category. Revathi, born Doraisamy in a small village in Tamil Nadu, journeys through incredible violence in multiple cities to arrive at Sangama, a sexual minorities human rights organisation in Bengaluru. She has had a sex-change operation,
Blood, sweat, tears
These are angry poems. Not in their tone, nor even necessarily in their choice of words, but rather in their extended meditations on knowledge, migration, feminism, and violence. They induce and celebrate anger (the closing lines of Arrival read: “And though her aunt and father are dead,/I wish her strength to break the rhyme/ Of Reason divorced from all time,/ I wish her sight to see the danger,/I wish her will, I wish her anger!”), which marks a welcome return to one of the primary functions of literature —
