I always find it slightly odd that those among us who read and write for newspapers, or for blogs, for that matter, there is such a great identity of lifestyles.

Most of us not only lead similar lives but also live in similar conditions and do similar sort of jobs. I had written some weeks ago about the diversity a hospital waiting room can present. I had found that diversity is so striking in part because of the sameness I encounter when I go to a party in Delhi or Bombay. It is not merely a question of my profession, as a semi-journalist and stage performer that I am likely to meet similar people everywhere.

But even if I go to a place where lawyers predominate or where there are lots of bankers, our interests and pastimes would not be vastly different. We would have read the same books, seen the same films, would holiday in the same places and have more or less the same aspirations.

I have wondered whether my discontent has to do with the confinements of a bourgeois life. Continue reading Spectre of sameness →

Other than trains, hospitals are the most secular spaces in contemporary India. This applies as much to upper-end luxury hospi-resorts such as — Apollo and Escorts — as it does to the lowliest nursing home in any corner of the country. However, even as I assert this, a caveat comes to mind — the aftermath of the Gujarat riots, which had hospitals and even doctors sharply divided along communal lines.

In itself, it may or may not be a picture post card communal harmony moment, but if you keep the Gujarat experience in mind, then this little incident certainly substantiates my assertion. Continue reading Patient India →

By Gaurav Dikshit

The incantatory quality of Urdu writer Naiyer Masud’s ‘fictional universe’–as translator Muhammad Umar Memon puts it–would seem witchcraftish to isolated and uncertain readers. Brittle and fluid, the painstakingly imagined worlds of these short stories have no resemblance in world literature. As silent and palpable as a dream, they rustle the senses until one realizes they are quite unprecedented in form and as ambitious in their idea of fiction and of tragedy.

Masud has said his stories are based on his dreams, some recurring over months which he keeps recording on waking up. He has also confessed to be a ghar-ghusna (stayer-at-home), a phrase quintessentially of Lucknow, the city where he has lived all his life in the house his father built. Writing his first story at the age of 12, he retained its plot when he began publishing at 35. He has survived by teaching Persian at the Lucknow University, though he says “My true occupation, at any rate, is reading and, occasionally, writing.” Continue reading Absent of the absent: The elusive stories of Naiyer Masud →