By Malsawmi Jacob
In these four stories particularly, we see the image of water as a means of life and death, physical and (according to some beliefs) spiritual cleansing, and of unification of ideas and identities.
By Riti Das Dhankar
Fifty Shades of Grey is a stereotypical love story with a supposedly “normal” girl being a complete nut-job and the “troubled” Mr Grey being the only consistent, non-weird thing in the movie.
By Achyut Dutt
There is this emptiness. The years are rolling by and soon you’ll be 60, an age when interesting things stop happening to you when you would like them to. The feeling that you have amounted to very little, that you have made no impact whatsoever on the community at large, has acquired a studio apartment at the back of your mind.
By Achyut Dutt
Oblivious that the traffic had now started moving once again and some very angry folk were blaring their horns behind him, Arjun kept his foot jammed on the brake pedal and stared back at the lovely face of Nandini Shyamrao. She had known he was in Pune but hadn’t told him she, too, had connections with Pune. Far as he knew, her folk were spread over Bangalore and Chennai.
By Achyut Dutt
This time, he waited till he saw a cyclist approaching the bike path that ran along the length of the bridge. He wanted his death to be witnessed. He did not want to make Shalik and Sparsh suffer the agony of not knowing, not having a closure that would help them move on.
By Achyut Dutt
He had then taken her by the hand, up the grassy slope, onto the narrow walkers’ path that ringed the lake. Exactly ten years from that day, they were married. He had a few conditions that she had respected. That she’d walk into his home with only one suitcase filled with just the things dear to her.
By Achyut Dutt
In the beginning, she’d been reserved, hesitant about talking of herself. He was just an unknown strange man who wrote outrageously funny notes that made her burst into laughter. As the days went by, though, the levee she’d hurriedly constructed seemed to look like it was made with cotton candy.
By Achyut Dutt
The meltdown came in what seemed like a flash. Two months into their friendship, she’d expressed that she wanted to talk. He called her up the following weekend. It was to be their one and only phone conversation. And a delightful conversation it had been.
By Achyut Dutt
The years have flown fairly quickly after that. After moving to the west, Rani and you had one more child, a son, Arnav. He is going to Stanford since last August. Tina lives with her husband Dieter in Schwedt. They have a cottage by the Elbe. And Rani. It’s now a year since the very light of your life, your Rani, passed away, consumed by the cancer which had galloped unchecked through her thyroids.
By Priyanka Banerjee
Sitting in two different continents with two different time zones, it was a challenge for us to make our love blossom depending entirely on technology. This long distance relationship sometimes appeared funny and sometimes unrealistic for the people around us. There was a big question mark on everyone’s face: how is it possible for two grown-up individuals to love each other in the virtual world?
By Indranil Dey
Then about a month later, while having dinner with friends, he got a call. It was about a broken laptop. She called him since her tech-guy was out of town and, somehow, the computer engineers are supposed to know how to repair a laptop, so she thought. It was also a critical time of final submission for her course and she had to prepare a presentation on the damn laptop.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 