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Among the Cities: Jan Morris’s Travels in Darjeeling
This essay explores how Jan Morris’s portrayal of Darjeeling in Hill Station: Darjeeling, 1970 earns the small Himalayan town a place within Among the Cities, revealing how its intimacy, diversity, and atmosphere quietly rival the grandeur of the world’s great capitals. Read more
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The Only City: Short Stories on Bombay’s Many Lives
A reflective reading of The Only City, this piece explores how Bombay—through its people, dreams, and contradictions—becomes both the backdrop and the beating heart of this modern collection of short stories. Read more
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On Truth That Fiction Tells Through Lies
Reflecting on Salman Rushdie’s defence of imaginative fiction, this short essay discusses his call to “find truth through lies” and argues that true storytelling begins where realism ends and dreaming begins. Read more
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Book Review: The Forever Green Lore and Legends of Kerala
Sreekumari Ramachandran’s latest book on Kerala is invaluable as a reference, but it falters as a pleasurable read due to its flat, over-edited prose and lack of narrative thread. Read more
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The Interplay of Soul and Body in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Let’s examine how Milan Kundera contrasts body and soul in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, with Tomas embodying the restless desires of the body and Tereza symbolising the wounded longing of the soul. Read more
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Lightness and Weight: Philosophical Explorations of The Unbearable Lightness of Being
This essay examines the opening section, Lightness and Weight, in Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, showing how Kundera reworks Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence into a meditation on whether life is meaningful as heavy burden or fleeting lightness. Read more
