By Pooja Pande
I scratched the first lines soon after the 1991 Gulf War, and the wars, of course, never stopped. After 9/11, the topic of a distant territory used by an imperial power to incarcerate and torture ‘terrorists’ became eerily close, with the parallels between Andaman and Guantanamo.
By Poornima Laxmeshwar
When I visit poems from my first book, I see that many of them are also about existential angst. About this clawing search for the real essence of life. The explorations are handled with slightly more finesse in TFM perhaps because I have more experience with the craft now.
By Santosh Bakaya
I grew up believing in the power of writing and of the word. Connected to this was my idea of the muse, of being inspired and the effect of Romantic poetry in writing what I feel when I feel intensely. The haunting nature, the lingering effect, and the sadness that readers come across, the melancholia if you will, in my works is clearly because of what I spoke of earlier.
By Lopa Banerjee
I started writing Lost Words when my mother was ill and almost every night turned a challenge. Being her only child, I stay with her and had to keep myself awake at night to attend to her. To keep myself going, I started writing and it finally took shape of Lost Words.
By Rashida Murphy
I first encountered the work of Nabanita Kanungo, when she sent me a book of her poems to read and review in my capacity as Books Editor for Café Dissensus. I started reading the poems and finished them in one sitting; easy enough for a slim volume, you might think. Then I read them again. For several days, I read the poems that still haunt me for their frank exploration of the violence embodied in landscape and the way language is used to convey both ‘resistance and retrieval’.
By Adil Bhat
Self-mastery gives way to deep and meaningful relationships with our selves, and this kindness of self then extends to a deep and meaningful relationship with others. There is also the domino effect because when we pass on our own ability to respect others (by way of self-respect), they do the same, and so on. I discuss this in the hopes of my ultimate goal: The Kindness Revolution….my next writing.
By Rashida Murphy
These poems burrow deep into the heart of landscape and memory. Some of the best ones are laments – as in “the sound of something cracking” and when the “dealers of grief” cannot contain the loss of a homeland.
By Bhaswati Ghosh
Thwarted Escape is a woman’s journey – not only through the alleys of memory – but also in the physical realm, from the East to the West. The narrative oscillates between the author’s life in Kolkata, India and cities in the US, where she moved post-marriage. Some of the book’s most tender parts are where the author is seen synthesizing her experiences of her home country with those of her adopted one. In doing so she realizes that despite her impulse to fly abroad, the escape from her old universe never actually happened on the emotional plane.
By Safia Begum
The work is an outcome of contemporary volatile political situation that compels the author to reflect on the gradual othering of Muslims in India. The work takes us back to a city and time, where the understanding of relations and culture was distinct and peaceful to a great extent.
By Scott Haas
Those Immigrants!: A Psychological Exploration of Achievement is my latest book, and comes about through a five year effort to understand better the challenges, resilience, and unique contributions of thirty prominent Indian-Americans from immigrant backgrounds. It is a limited sample of people, not an academic guide to what’s what, but rather it is meant as an anecdotal contribution to recognizing the skills, strengths, fallacies, and observations of a range of people across the U.S.
By Rashida Murphy
This anthology is a sustained call for an intellectual and emotional uprising. It situates the reader at the heart of violence against women without ever seeming shrill or censorious. Veils, Halos & Shackles was conceived as a response to the brutal gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey on a bus in Delhi in 2012.
By Aroup Chatterjee
It is known that Princess Diana desperately wanted to meet Mother Teresa in Calcutta; nine times her office tried to bring the two together in Calcutta but nine times it failed because the nun was rarely there.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 