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2 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
Dear Reader,I stay away from poetry. It might be an effect of growing up in Kolkata, where one composes poetry on everything, from cloudy skies to yellow taxi to Gelusil. For the same reason perhaps, poetry stalks me, no matter how much I run away from it. It whispers, nay screams, inside my head at the most inopportune moments, leaving me red-faced. A few days back, some lines from the poetry of Larkin started haunting me.
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3 weeks ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Divya Gandhi |Vaishna Roy
Dear Reader,I stay away from poetry. It might be an effect of growing up in Kolkata, where one composes poetry on everything, from cloudy skies to yellow taxi to Gelusil. For the same reason perhaps, poetry stalks me, no matter how much I run away from it. It whispers, nay screams, inside my head at the most inopportune moments, leaving me red-faced. A few days back, some lines from the poetry of Larkin started haunting me.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Vaishna Roy
I am allergic to malls and supermarkets. The moment I enter one, my legs buckle, making me freeze on the spot. There are various reasons behind this repeated debacle—the result of encrusted past traumas. First, I am scared of getting on escalators because once I slipped on that moving, monstrous contraption with fangs of steel. I can never forget that dreadful moment when I had imagined that I would be pressed, shredded, and made into spaghetti, Tom & Jerry style.
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1 month ago | 
flipboard.com | Anusua Mukherjee
1 day agoPerplexity wants to buy TikTok and open-source its algorithmThe AI search startup laid out its bid for buying, and rebuilding, TikTok. The AI search startup Perplexity just proposed a bid for acquiring (and transforming) TikTok, per a company blog post published Friday.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Vaishna Roy
Dear Reader,“Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”This kept playing in my head in a loop last Friday, which was March 14 and, as online shopping and tourism portals kept reminding me, “World Sleep Day”. Since March 14 was also Holi, I was awakened rudely at 6 am by Amitabh Bachchan’s ghoulish voice singing, “Rang barse” on soundboxes as residents of the neighbouring apartment made merry by the poolside. “India does murder sleep,” I muttered fiercely under my breath as I slid out of bed.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Pico Iyer |Anusua Mukherjee |Vaishna Roy
Over the last three decades, Pico Iyer has been repeatedly going for retreats to New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. It belongs to the order of the Camaldolese Benedictines founded by the 11th century Christian monk St Romuald, who famously said, “Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it.” Iyer, Christian by birth but non-religious by conviction, has been doing precisely that at the hermitage.
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1 month ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Sharada Srinivasan |Vaishna Roy
Dear reader,It’s only March and Bengaluru is already blazing. The steadily rising day temperatures make one thirst for rain, but it isn’t in the offing anytime soon, as the weather report tells me. So I soak myself in literary rain, singing with Paul Verlaine, “It rains in my heart/ As it rains in the city”. The pathetic fallacy in the lines is very French—so sappy that it is droll. But the tendency to anthropomorphise nature is universal in literature, irrespective of language.
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1 month ago | 
flipboard.com | Anusua Mukherjee
Made of rain and fire | Reading with FrontlineDear reader, It’s only March and Bengaluru is already blazing. The steadily rising day temperatures make one thirst for rain, but it isn’t in the …
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2 months ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Vaishna Roy
Dear Reader,My survival mantra, “Nothing holds,” has unexpectedly received a hearty endorsement from my celluloid guru, Philomena Cunk, who has been savagely taking down all high-falutin ideas and their begetters in her stellar shows. The recently released Netflix “documentary”, Cunk on Life, finds her at the apex of her intellectual powers as she shatters all rosy beliefs about life and religion in her search for the meaning of existence. Cunk spells out the truth as only she can.
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2 months ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Soni Mishra |Vaishna Roy
Dear Reader,Let’s start with an excerpt from a novel I am reading, A Dark Tale From Cottonwood Grove, by Mahfud Ikhwan, translated by Annie Tucker. “He was well-acquainted with death. His mother had died giving birth to him. His grandfather, the person who loved him most in the world, had left him, vanished, assumed dead when he was only five years old.
