Anusua Mukherjee

1 week ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy

Dear Reader, Jostling for attention on my desk is a great variety of books on the north-eastern region of India—from Verrier Elwin’s Myths of The North-East Frontier, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India, Zubaan’s north-east India series to Legends of the Lepchas: Folk Tales from Sikkim by Yishey Doma, Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Myth, Memory & Folktale of the Wancho Tribe of Arunachal Pradeshby Tara Douglas and Jatwang Wangsa, as well as the...

1 month ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Gowhar Geelani |Vaishna Roy

Dear Reader,For the past few nights, my bedfellow has been the British-Mexican Surrealist painter and author, Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Her book, The Hearing Trumpet (1974), featuring a plucky, deaf, bearded, 92-year-old woman called Marian Leatherby, who nurtures a lifelong dream of “going to Lapland to be drawn in a vehicle by dogs, woolly dogs,” is so wacky that it upends all expectations of fiction. I am identifying so much with Marian that I feel quite exposed.

1 month ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Gowhar Geelani |Vaishna Roy

Dear Reader,It has been quite some time since I was completely befuddled by a book, but in a good way. I picked up Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe inspired by J.M. Coetzee’s recommendation of it—“A strange and haunting novel, an eccentric classic”—and boy, oh boy, isn’t he right!Reading the book, one realises why Coetzee endorses it—The Tartar Steppe has the Coetzian quality of being uncompromising.

2 months ago | frontline.thehindu.com | Anusua Mukherjee |Ilangovan Rajasekaran |Vaishna Roy

These days, when we come to art through memes, most of us will be familiar with the rage-contorted face of Medusa screaming out from T-shirts and coffee mugs. This is the Renaissance painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) for Gen Z, scaled down brutally, but still potent and disconcerting (Caravaggio painted Medusa twice, in 1596 and 1597).

2 months 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.