What would Kesari do? As Amitav Ghosh stood arguing with a taxi driver, a character from his book popped into his head. For Ghosh, who in 2015 brought his enormously ambitious Ibis Trilogy to completion with the release of Flood of Fire, this is what it means to live with the people he writes into … Continue reading
When Jeet Thayil was 13 years old, he bought a copy of Catch-22. His father, the noted journalist and editor TJS George, did not approve. When he found Heller’s book, he confiscated it. Thayil went out and bought another. Enraged, believing the book to be inappropriate for a young man, and certainly for one who … Continue reading
Though she was born in Kuala Lampur, and has since lived in England, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, Minoli Salgado will tell you her earliest memories are of her grandparent’s home in Sri Lanka. Revealingly, this is a country she feels compelled to return to again and again in her writing. A poet and the author … Continue reading
British novelist Sebastian Faulks is the latest member of the Fairways Galle Literary Festival team. His job description, as he puts it is to act as “a sort of go-between” for authors being invited to the festival and the organizers themselves. Formerly the first literary editor of The Independent and now the author of over … Continue reading
Naresh Fernandes arrives for his session at Cinnamon Colomboscope covered in sweat. It’s a hot day but Fernandes has been on a brisk walk around Slave Island. He is fascinated with the parallels he sees between this city and his own – the frenetic development, the deepening class divide,and the contradictions inherent in democracies that … Continue reading
I find Laki Senanayake perched among his sculptures in the Barefoot gallery, laughing as he talks with the staff. He’s bare-chested, dressed in a bright orange sarong, his modesty preserved by a shawl in bright pink, red and orange slung over his shoulders. He has a red lighter tucked into the fold of fabric at … Continue reading
As a soloist in the opera, Sean Panikkar has had to learn more than his fair share of foreign languages. Still, there’s never been one quite like High Valyrian. In the hugely popular Game of Thrones (GoT) series, Daenerys Targaryen’s handmaiden and trusted advisor describes it with reverence, saying “The gods could not devise a … Continue reading
Earlier this year, activists from the Cinema for Peace Foundation thought smuggling copies of ‘The Interview’ into North Korea via hydrogen balloon was a good idea. Adam Johnson doesn’t agree. The author is not against smuggling things in, in principle. He’d just rather the activists choose a different film. In the now widely criticised Hollywood … Continue reading
The walls of the gallery are bare, eschewed by the photographs for the office upstairs. I find them there, in the company of photographers Dominic Sansoni and Sebastian Posingis and writer Richard Simon. The trio are surrounded by the prints that sit patiently in tidy stacks, nevertheless succeeding in claiming a great deal of space … Continue reading
It’s interesting to note that the man who would take India to the Moon and later to Mars had never even travelled beyond his district in South India until he completed his Masters in 1982, aged 24. Mylswamy Annadurai would join the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) that same year. Now it takes six levels … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 