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Dec 4, 2024 | 
outlooktraveller.com | Amitava Kumar |Dharini Bhaskar |Kanan Gill |Kanan Gillharpercollins.co.in
The monastery will become his home for 10 years, its isolation and discipline the anchors of his life, following which he will be sent to a Benedictine ashram in faraway Bangladesh—a village in Khulna district, where monsoon clouds as black as night descend right down to river and earth.
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Mar 25, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Dharini Bhaskar
“I’m headed out. I can drop you.”“Okay.”“So, Tariq, hm?”“Mummy, it’s not what you think.”“If you say so.”“It isn’t.”“Well, for your sake, I hope you’re right.”“What does that mean?”“It means it isn’t wise to be reckless.”“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you.” Mummy glared. “So, Poppy, tell me . . . you’d like us to discuss recklessness?”She can be intimidating, I admit, my mother.
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Dec 25, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
I took my son for his first ‘class’ when he was around four years of age. We had travelled to a potter’s studio, set in an exquisite veranda dappled with light. I imagined my son falling in love with the space — and by extension with his mentor, a gentle woman who could tame clay. We had paid for an hour-long session. My son entered the studio, ran end to end. After he had sufficiently exhausted himself, he sat at the table.
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Nov 12, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
‘It must take courage,’ my book editor said, ‘to produce a child in today’s world.’‘Or a kind of foolishness,’ I laughed. But deep down, I wasn’t laughing. This was before the war in Israel and Gaza, but after Ukraine and Russia, after Kashmir, after China and Tibet, after so many catastrophes, disclosed and undisclosed, in this country and beyond. Even then, just weeks ago, enough was going wrong. Now, everything feels dire, more on the verge of a kind of shattering.
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Oct 14, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
Recently, my son and I attended a college festival in Bangalore. The plan was to take the guided insect walk that had been advertised. To my mind, this would be an experience my son would cherish, even remember, in the years to come.
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Sep 30, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
‘Do you like cars?’It’s the first question my son asks a grown-up or a child he is in the process of assessing. If they respond with sufficient enthusiasm, they are (on a good day) let into his car-ful inner world. If they shrug, snigger, or — god forbid — say no, they are summarily dismissed. My son’s adoration for cars used to leave me baffled. There was no logical explanation for it, I’d tell myself; for his love for objects that — in my humble view — were ugly, smoky, and decidedly dull.
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Sep 5, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
During a nature walk last week, my five-year-old decided he wished to climb a tree. Its bark was smooth, there was little to hold on to. He had to find a way of hoisting his body up to a low branch. He clambered and slid, slid and clambered—until a girl, six years older, said, ‘Can I help you?’‘Yes,’ my son replied. And she held his hand till he could negotiate bark and branch. Just minutes earlier, I had made a similar offer. I can help you, I had said. But this wasn’t what my son desired.
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Aug 13, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
My son does not enjoy the neighbourhood park. There’s something about it—the boisterousness, but no, more than even that, the high-decibel, high-stakes, dog-eat-dog play of unsupervised four- and five-year-olds—that leaves him terrified. He consciously avoids that corner of our world, choosing instead to cycle solo and converse with adult joggers. Not too long ago, someone had asked me, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that your son refuses to play with other kids in the park?
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Jul 17, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
My son — then four — and I were sharing an elevator with a stranger. Suddenly, the stranger spoke to my boy: “Shall I drop my watch into your cycle basket?” It was a teasing question, the kind grown-ups toss at children when they want to amuse themselves. Until that point, my son had been reticent, reluctant to engage with those he wasn’t acquainted with. I expected him to hide behind me, as he usually did in social situations, and stare shoe-ward.
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May 21, 2023 | 
freepressjournal.in | Dharini Bhaskar
I'm sometimes asked what my son does all day. After all, a child his age would typically have his hours neatly divided—school and home, weekend and weekday. My son, unschooled as he is, knows no such division. His time, when I consider it, is spent cycling on his balance bike, cooking, being read out to, dreaming, vehicle-watching, and visiting car showrooms or spaces housing rescued animals. If I had to sum up his life in a word, I would say it is a life of play.
