Paromita Chakrabarti

6 days ago | indianexpress.com | Paromita Chakrabarti

It is market day in Madikeri, Kodagu, and Deepa Bhasthi, back home from London after her International Booker Prize win for the translation of Kannada writer Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, is immersed in the routine of the everyday as the interview takes off. Pots and pans clink in the background, the sound of birdsong wafts in from time to time. Even though she is on the other side of a telephone line, the cadences are as familiar as if she’s sitting across from me.

6 days ago | indianexpress.com | Paromita Chakrabarti

A lawyer, activist and writer, through the course of her own life and career in Karnataka’s Hassan, Mushtaq has known what it means to be an outlier. Despite her middle-class upbringing and the freedoms that shaped her, she had sensed early on that choice was a privilege not afforded to many women of her religion and class. Since her school days she had wanted to write. “As a child, I would scribble on the walls and the floor and pretend that there was an audience waiting to read what I had to say.

2 weeks ago | indianexpress.com | Paromita Chakrabarti

Do men read women? Or, more precisely, do books written by women about the lives of ordinary women count as “literature”? In the century since the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, about the life of an upper-crust London woman going about her day, much has changed in how literature now mainstreams what was once niche, suggesting that the domestic, the ordinary, is anything but trivial.

1 month ago | indianexpress.com | Paromita Chakrabarti

As much a novelist of ideas as a storyteller of psychological and political nuance, Mario Vargas Llosa was a central figure of the Latin American Boom, alongside Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Carlos Fuentes. He distinguished himself early with a restless intellectual engagement with politics that was deeply rooted in Latin America yet universal in its philosophical topography.

2 months ago | indianexpress.com | Paromita Chakrabarti

Story continues below this adThe truth is, our generation doesn’t really know what we are up against. We have passed down the wisdom we have grown up with — don’t talk to strangers, look on either side before you cross the road, be careful with your words, be kind — but we don’t quite know how to navigate this vast, uncharted territory of the internet, on which one can be a million different people from one day to the next. Our finger on its pulse is indecisive, vacillating.