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6 days ago | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Keshava Guha |Tabish Khair |C.S. Venkiteswaran |Vaishna Roy
It is difficult to resist a novel that Amitav Ghosh, in one of the three heavyweight endorsements paratexting it, attributes to “an astute and insightful observer of contemporary India”. This comment mostly holds true, although I would have preferred to say “Delhi” instead of “India”. Keshava Guha’s The Tiger’s Share is a consciously “Delhi” novel, and for me that is a point in its favour. Another thing in its favour is the novel’s engagement with family property.
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Feb 23, 2025 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Tabish Khair |Vaishna Roy |Varsha Tiwary
The book’s title, Literature Against Fundamentalism, together with the glossy, abstract cover had made me expect a dense monograph packed with academese. What I found instead was a manifesto for literature and a guide to deep reading. Tabish Khair begins with the example of Anton Chekhov’s beautiful short story “The Requiem”, which revolves around an argument over the word “harlot”.
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Tabish Khair |Vaishna Roy
As the genocidal violence unleashed on Palestinians by Israeli forces, and conflicts in places such as Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, and Myanmar, have all been going on for many years and will continue into this year, it is not excessive to predict that the event of 2025 will be the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of the US at 18:00 on January 20.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Hanif Kureishi |Tabish Khair |Vaishna Roy
Shattered is essentially a collection of online dispatches that Hanif Kureishi dictated randomly to his wife, Isabella, and his three sons after a fall in Rome on Boxing Day 2022 left him almost totally paralysed. The first essay describes the horror of the accident: “I woke up a few minutes later in a pool of blood…. I then experienced what can only be described as a scooped, semicircular object with talons scuttling towards me.
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Tabish Khair
Sooner or later, every professional writer gets hit on the head with this question: Whom (or what) do you write for? If other writers wince, and I am sure some of them do, they manage to hide it better than me, and they give elaborate answers.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Tabish Khair
The general idea that human beings are “storytelling” animals is now widely pervasive, particularly following the popularity of books by Yuval Noah Harari. I made a similar connection when I noted that religion and literature began as twins: whatever may be the nature or existence of divinity, rituals etc. in different religions (and these vary widely), there is no doubt that all of them are accessed by us (and the devout) through stories.
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Nov 12, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Ta-Nehisi Coates |Tabish Khair |Talmiz Ahmad |Vaishna Roy
As demonstrated by Between the World and Me, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015 and is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the US today, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an extraordinary ability to use a personal narrative to make vital and complex political points. This enables him to get across to readers in a country—and an Americanised world—where the political has mostly been reduced to the private and the personal.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Muddassir Quamar |Tabish Khair |Jayati Ghosh |Saba Naqvi
Since the outbreak of the war in the Gaza Strip after the Hamas-led attack on Israel of October 7, 2023, the responses of regional actors have evoked curiosity and scrutiny. While Israel’s massive retaliation and the resultant humanitarian crisis in the Strip have drawn nearly universal criticism, the responses of Arab countries, especially those of regional powers such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Qatar, have been perceived as muted.
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Oct 28, 2024 | 
frontline.thehindu.com | Tabish Khair |Jayati Ghosh |Muddassir Quamar |Saba Naqvi
New York; Chicago; Washington, DC; Iowa City; small towns in Virginia, Illinois, and Iowa; everywhere in the US that I have visited over the past few weeks, I looked for signs of the approaching presidential election, when the country will choose Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, a choice that will also have a far-reaching impact across the world.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
scroll.in | Tabish Khair
The weight of the world is in the word. All writers know this, though not necessarily in the same way. However, often critics and commentators forget it, and end up discussing whether poetry can be political or not, and how realistic – or magic realist – fiction can be. It is as if the ‘world’ is something to be added on to the writing. But that is not true. The world is already contained in the word. And the world contains the word; worlds contain the word. No word exists on its own.
