Category: books

  • Nine Lives and a Summer Requiem

    Nine Lives and a Summer Requiem

    Nine Lives by William Dalrymple In a land where gods and goddesses abound as do their stories, Dalrymple’s search for the sacred in Modern India still throws up interesting threads. From tantric rituals in cremation grounds, houses lined with skulls to the frenetic energy of Sufi dancers, the author underlines how faith in chosen gods…

    Read more: Nine Lives and a Summer Requiem
  • Books and Berries

    Books and Berries

    The sprawling villas on both sides don’t point to a village. I’m about to double-back when the signboard declares that I’m still a kilometre away. The signs are all over the place – a book and strawberry, over the red type declaring Bhilar as India’s first “books village”. Located between the popular hill towns of Panchgani…

    Read more: Books and Berries
  • Small joys

    Small joys

    It’s always about the simpler things in life with the boy from the hills. Of brushing off one’s shoes, encounters with snakes and centipedes, and jam, loads of it! Only this time not as Rusty, but as Ruskin himself as he recounts the years spent with his father in Delhi. It’s of course a long long…

    Read more: Small joys
  • Becoming a child at Kahani Tree

    Becoming a child at Kahani Tree

    “Aaaaaaaaccchhhooooooooooooooooooooooooo” Blork! Bluurf! I seem to have caught Gajapati Kulapati’s cold. Just wait till I catch hold of that elephant again! I feel a little biffsquiggled with this cold to be honest. But what I was saying was…when I walked in to Kahani Tree, an independent bookstore in Prabhadevi, I had but a few cats in…

    Read more: Becoming a child at Kahani Tree
  • A bibliophile’s guide to the city’s bookstores

    A bibliophile’s guide to the city’s bookstores

    The last time I visited a bookstore (which was just last week), I sat down to read Neil Gaiman’s The View from the Cheap Seats: incidentally, a chapter wherein he talks about his favourite bookstores. It ends like this: “Writing this, all those bookshops come back, the shelves, and the people…I wonder who I would have been,…

    Read more: A bibliophile’s guide to the city’s bookstores