 By Samir Shukla
Start the New Year off right. I'm not here to suggest resolutions that will be quickly forgotten. I'm here to give you a bit of your privacy back, if you choose to take action. It is simple. You're likely not going to do it, but I'll give a shout out anyway. What am I talking about? Search engines. It's a plural word, but let's face it, there's one beast that has overtaken and dominates online searching and data gathering. Let's call that beast G***le. You know what I'm talking about. Here I'll also refer to it simply as G.  By Samir Shukla
Director Mira Nair's adaptation of Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy is a visual as well as literary feast. The novel, nearly 1400 pages, needs a longer treatment then a two-hour movie, so the six-part, six-hour series helps Nair flesh out the story in a manner that it deserves. Nothing is hurried as the characters are introduced and given time to show depth and flesh out emotions. Seth’s novel, one of the longest ever published in English, brings together several families in a post-partition India still struggling with fresh memories of violence and uprooting that followed partition in 1947. Nair deftly recreates the feel of early 1950’s India, during which time the story takes place.  By Samir Shukla
I was recently thinking of the three monkeys of wisdom, you know - speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil. Not sure why those came into my mind, maybe it's because this unhinged and disorienting year is slowly but mercifully coming to an end and I'm hopeful for a sunnier other side. The pandemic, protests, political pandering, posturing and pillaging all converged this year and now we crawl into the final month of the final year of this social media-warped decade.  By Samir Shukla
Life and Culture in Northeast India Authors: Dipti Bhalla Verma and Shiv Kunal Verma (Abbeville Press - Hardcover 260 pages) India's northeast region comprises of the famous “seven sisters" states - Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Meghalaya. The authors also include the state of Sikkim in the book Life and Culture in Northeast India, giving historical information about each state along with the region's myriad religions, tribal, and geographical significance. The region is a small sliver of land, compared to the otherwise vastness of India, and is snuggled between the Himalayas, Bangladesh and Myanmar.  By Samir Shukla
It's a Monday night. I'm fumbling through a desk drawer looking for a pen and a sheet of paper. I just want to put some thoughts down on paper. Sure, I can open the notepad on my phone and start speaking and presto, it's there, typed, misunderstood word typos and all. But I want to use my fingers and feel the pen do its magic on paper. There's a sense of clarity when you see your own thoughts on paper in your own handwriting. You own that thought, no one else. |
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