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Amish Tripathi for FirstPost

Amish Tripathi: In our culture, we’ve always believed that even the Gods cannot judge (Published in FirstPost on October 15, 2016, Written by Prayag Arora – Desai and Sohini Guha)     Since his unprecedented success as an author with his Shiva series, Amish Tripathi has been a regular at literature fests across India. He’s set to […]

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Paws for Thought – Gauri Sinh

Paws for thought Could feeling for one stray cat foster a community in our oft-hard hearted city? By Gauri Sinh   Come to think of it, I cannot even recall his colouring. He came into my life by chance, suddenly and without warning, as things of significance often do, and his coming marked a paradigm […]

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Something of Nothing – Soumya Bhattacharya

Something of Nothing (Written for London Library magazine) Rakesh winced as the car lurched into a pothole. A tremor of annoyance radiated through the hand that he rested on the steering wheel. He had taken his eyes off the road again. Again, he had been looking at the mannequin in the Benetton shop window. It reminded […]

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Tata Litlive! MyStory Contest : First Set of Winners

In the 2016 edition of the Tata Literature Live MyStory Contest, we had over 1850 entries and 30,000 votes. Below are the five winners picked by our jury from the 25 entries with the maximum number of votes. They are not in order of positions. Samparna Tripathy Votes – 438 My dear Teacher, I am […]

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The Journey is the Destination – Ashwin Sanghi

The Journey is the Destination © Ashwin Sanghi (Written for the Times of India – Speaking Tree)   What is spirituality? Numerous sages, philosophers and thinkers down the ages have attempted to answer that question. Many of them saw spirituality as a quest to connect with a greater power—the divine. I see it a little differently. […]

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Coffee and the Writer – Sam Cutler

Coffee and the Writer   Can it be Tuesday ??  The years days and seconds roll into one as I sit in a small hotel room in Delaware and my non conforming memories try to follow the dissolving calendar … without a morning coffee I am like a shepherd without sheep wondering what the strange crook in my hand […]

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Patna Roughcuts – Amitava Kumar

Patna Roughcuts (Written for Granta on March 31, 2015)   1 When I was a boy in Patna in the seventies, the Boring Road crossroad boasted two businesses that were popular among the locals. One was Quality Corner, where you could buy the best samosas, and the other was the provisions store, Cheap and Best. Both businesses […]

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The Many Faces of Lord Ganesha – Shashi Tharoor

The Many Faces of Lord Ganesha(Written for The Taj Magazine  in the First Quarter, 2002)     The remover of all obstacles and bestower of wishes, he is worshipped in myriad expressions of form and material -wood, terracotta, bronze, clay, silver and stone. He is easily recognized by his elephant-head and curving trunk resting over his […]

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Secular Confessions – Mahesh Rao

Secular Confessions (Written for Mint  on July 8, 2016)   I push open the door of dark, weathered wood. There are always a few seconds of suspense before you enter an unfamiliar church. What exactly is on the other side? A magnificently ornate façade can often belie the interior: a simple vaulted ceiling and a sedate […]

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All that matters – Siddharth Shanghvi

All that Matters (Written for Times of India  on July 31, 2016) For Swachh Bharat, we must teach our kids to pack light, flush right   Dear Mr Modi, I admire the Swachh Bharat campaign. I’m trying to see if we can have a conversation about it — about how we define sanitation, for instance, or […]

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The ‘I’ in Eve – Arundhati Subramaniam

The ‘I’ in Eve (Written for The Hindu  on April 30, 2016) Why should women artistes be apologetic about the use of the first person singular in prose and poetry? At a recent literature fest, a young woman poet prefaced her reading with the breathless apology: “I still use the pronoun, ‘I’. But as I mature, […]

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