O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars Are in the poorest thing superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s . . . Thus exploded the raging King Lear in Shakespeare’s play when he realised that his two daughters were trying to deprive him of all that represented his identity. The king’s daughters were...
Read MoreRe-reading Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’
“Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world,” writes Albert Camus in his novel The Plague (La Peste). “Yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people by surprise.” Albert Camus never made the...
Read MoreConfinement, isolation and Marcel Proust
To ……….. In these days of government recommended social isolation, we have days, may be months, to meditate on the benefits of inaction. It is nothing new though for the ‘magnum opus’ of the French author (bearing the title of À la recherche du temps perdu) mentioned in the title of this piece has also been translated as ‘In Search of...
Read MorePostural reflections
Ours is a downcast generation. It appears that soon the entire humanity would curl up. By wedging the buttocks in an armchair facing a screen, the homo sapiens is shrivelled. Back problems are the evil of this century. From osteopathy to treadmills in workplaces, resistance is planned so human bodies may recover from bad postures. The Macintosh and the...
Read MoreAn Illustrator and a Writer
Rarely would you find the union of an author and an illustrator so steadfast, so artistically productive as that of Patrick Modiano, the Nobel laureate in literature and Pierre Le-Tan who passed away on 17 September. Le-Tan’s cover drawings have so informed the pocket editions of Patrick Modiano’s novels that for many readers even the themes of Modiano’s...
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- Benoite Groult-pencil sketch
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- Manohar Malgonkar
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- Ajit Dutta
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- Satinath Bhaduri
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