Authors Electric

 I’m not brilliant at New Year’s resolutions, that is to say, I’m good at coming up with them but incapable of keeping them. I have been promising myself I’d get fit since I was forty.  Last year I downloaded the NHS/BBC coaching app: ‘couch to 5k’ to my phone: obviously I did not open it. I bought fancy trainers (with insoles!) some ridiculous device for strapping a phone to your arm (now lost) and wireless ear buds so that I could follow instruction: I still did not open the app. I even talked to my physio about running (he was disappointingly enthusiastic) No. Still no running happened.    Credit where credit is due, I am unsurpassed at the coach part. I have natural ability in the sloth department. As with running so with writing: yes there too I am excellent at the coach part.    ‘I’m working’ I tell my long-suffering husband as I gaze at the TV with my laptop open on my knee.  ‘I’m actually working’ I say as I stare out of the window sipping coff...

  I am entering an age where the memoirs of old men and women are filled with characters, events and attitudes that I recognise as being part of my own past. I am currently reading “Based on a True Story” by Anthony Holden, a journalist a few years older than me, who distinguished himself on the Sunday Times in a period when it was possibly the greatest newspaper in the world, and went on to work for several others. Fleet Street tales from the pre-internet age, when newspapers actually did have their offices in or around that famous street, seem as ancient and redolent of smoke-filled pubs and shabby privilege as they did when satirised by the likes of Evelyn Waugh less than half a century before. Now that anyone and everyone can write and find an audience somewhere, the days when an expert in ancient Greek poetry, such as Holden, can drift to the top in popular journalism, might seem finally over, making this a nostalgic read about a time which one might have thought, for go...

It's been 2 years now that GARIAHAT JUNCTION got published! This is an appreciation post. Also, one of stock taking. I would like to thank the same wonderful set of people whom I did 2 years ago (who were part of the publication process): Zafar Anjum & Kitaab International for publishing it; Arindam Dasgupta for the beautiful cover art & design; Kunal Basu, Saikat Majumdar & Sumana Roy for the generous blurbs. The book’s birth was greeted with enthusiasm: special thanks are due to Arunava Sinha for publishing an extract in Scroll; to Malavika R. Banerjee for making it part of a Panel at KLM-2020; to Koral Dasgupta for including it in a ‘Writers-in-Conversation’ online-series at TMYS (with Damyanti Biswas ), during the first lockdown in 2020; to Tanuj Solanki for the very first, honest feedback on Goodreads; & three other gifted writers for their sensitive and nuanced reviews -- Anurima Chanda (in The Punch Magazine), Dipika Mukherjee (in Jaggery) & Bhas...

Wikimedia: a down feather  Duvets. Last month, I wrote about the art of Jack Frost and how he used to paint the windows in the freezing winters of my childhood. That started me thinking more about the way things were back then... Our bedrooms were freezing in winter. The cold was painful. My mother used to heap blankets on top of us until we were laminated to the mattress. When I say we could barely move for the weight, I am not exaggerating. Thick woollen blankets are heavy. We were pinned. And yet we were still cold. I remember lying awake for hours, unable to sleep because I was too cold. Cold feet, cold knees, cold bum, cold ears, cold nose. After an age, your own body heat would create an egg-shell thin border of warmth around you... But if you moved even slightly, if a toe or finger strayed over that thin border of warmth, then you leaped with shock at the thrilling, cold-ribbed regions of ice-sheet beyond. And your shocked movement shifted the crushing layer of blanket eve...

  'Colette' In the strange nothingness between Christmas and New Year, I watched a lot of films. One of those was Colette (2018). It tells the story of Sidonie -Gabrielle Colette , the prolific French novelist of the early 20 th century. I admit I found some of the film made me both blush and cringe, and if you are of a delicate constitution when it comes to hedonism being played out on the screen in explicit detail, you have been warned. But it was worth watching for the way it unpacked Colette’s relationship with her first husband, Henri Gautier- Villars . How he ‘forced’ her to write her semi-autobiographical stories and how he ‘stole’ the credit for the four Claudine novels published between 1900 and 1903, with his own pen name ‘Willy’ as the author. Many years later, when she had successfully proved the books were her own work, she was quoted as saying that she would never have become a writer without Willy. He in turn claimed that the books would not have been nearly ...

               The Problem of wishing ‘Happy’                                                        Frozen pond, foggy day In the weeks before Christmas just past, when I was writing greetings cards to the many friends we haven't seen or communicated with regularly or recently,   it felt more appropriate to wish them hope than happiness …. Indeed is it ever right to   assume happiness is uppermost in the minds of far-flung friends? After such a year, who knows what might have happened in their lives? Floods, fires, and hurricanes are commoner, Covid and its consequences lurks throughout the world. Hope was a better fit. Even though, or possibly because, I found myself dragged down by the dark damp weather, and the short days, into a feeling of hopelessness. I’ve  ...

A rather awkward question came up over Christmas lunch this year, which nobody in our family could answer: "What happens to all the face masks and test kits after use?" I expect you know the ones I'm talking about, since no doubt you've had similar conversations over the festive break. In our family, Dad alone uses four lateral flow kits every week since he's required to take one every time he visits Mum in her nursing home. I was surprised he took so many, as I always thought you had to pay for them and Dad is of the 'make do and mend' generation, but apparently these amazingly elaborate and well-packaged kits are totally free, and you just go and ask for one at a chemist if you need it... so who actually is paying for them all, I wonder? Brother uses fewer kits, but says he takes a voluntary test before visiting people or going to a party, since apparently that's the socially acceptable thing to do these days... always assuming you have any social li...