Anusua Mukherjee

5 days 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 weeks 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).

1 month 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.

1 month 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.

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.