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2 weeks 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.
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4 weeks 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.
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1 month 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).
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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.
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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.
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2 months 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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2 months 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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Mar 8, 2025 | 
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.
