Weaving of Arachne

  Palabar Poth Nei by Suchitra Bhattacharya is a romantic thriller novel in which Bhattacharya introduced her female sleuth, Pragyaparomita Mukherjee a.k.a Mitin Mashi. The plot revolves around a newly married woman who is blackmailed by an unknown caller for her allegedly ‘immoral’ past. The plot is riveting and the writing is vivid, which never for once loses its pace. The novel does not merely focus on solving the mystery and unveiling the identity of the mysterious blackmailer rather Bhattacharya in her signature style explores the intricate labyrinth of human nature and relationships. She also compels the reader to rethink the conventional concepts of morality and impurity. None of the characters could be divided into absolutely good and absolutely bad. There is no black and white dichotomy in the narrative rather each of the characters dwell in a grey zone which makes them complex and consequently real, flesh and blood human beings. I have never been disappointed by any work o

  Because survival is insufficient. There is an outbreak of a deadly virus in a certain part of the world. However, the interconnectedness of the modern world acts as a catalyst in spreading the virus throughout the world in no time, which results in a pandemic that brings the entire civilisation to a grinding halt. The preceding lines could deftly summarise the plots of numerous post-apocalyptic fictions and movies, as well as the lived realities of our present lives in the face of the on-going corona virus pandemic.             The premise of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel Station Eleven presciently and somewhat eerily reflects the chaos that was to descend on Earth in 2020 in the form of corona virus pandemic. However, in Station Eleven ninety nine percent of the world’s population succumbed to the deadly virus, which in this case was a deadly mutant form of swine flu that had been termed as Georgia flu. The novel focuses on the survival of the remaining one percent of the

  The Importance of Being Earnest is the first work of Oscar Wilde that I read and I am in absolute awe of his writing style. It is an almost two centuries old play yet I am amazed at its reliability as well as readability. Wilde has masterfully employed such chiselled sentences in the play that hardly any word seems redundant or archaic even in the 21 st century. The play is peppered with such witty dialogues that I was rolling with laughter.             The theme also remains as relevant as the witty repartees of the play. Wilde playfully mocks the superficial values of the aristocracy and the landed gentry without being too bitter in his satirising of their privileges. It’s an absolutely delightful play with endearingly silly characters.             I have many favourite lines however I will enumerate a couple of them before wrapping up my review. “Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct

  Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger is one of the strangest books I have read but I am absolutely enamoured by it. The novel has poignant visual characteristics and hence reading it felt akin to watching a televised film. The novel has no definite plot, per say yet each moment of it is so well defined that the one feels an irresistible urge to go on reading, that is to say that even without a comprehensive plot the novel never for once slackens or loses its vigour.             The novel is divided into two parts, Franny and Zooey. And the eponymous characters happen to be the youngest siblings of the Glass family. Both the siblings have to deal with their existential angst, the loss of losing their eldest brother and other anguishes of life in general. Both of them find it difficult to conform and fit into the ‘normal’ society, and therefore Zooey calls themselves ‘freaks’. However, the best thing about the novel is that though neither of the siblings is “qualified” to counsel the ot

  In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh erases the demarcating lines between the genres and presents unique blend of fiction, non-fiction, history, anthropology and travelogue. Ghosh presents two parallel narratives: one concerning himself and his time in Egypt, and the other about the twelfth century Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave Bomma. But the narratives are not isolated from each other, in fact the repercussions of the historically obscured lives of Ben Yiju and his acquaintances can still be detected subtly influencing the lives of 20 th century citizens of the third world countries, whose forefathers were once involved in the highly developed mercantile network of Indian Ocean trade.             In this work Ghosh painstakingly reconstructs the lives of those entities whose existences had been all but devoured by the incessant ravages of Time. History, itself is an insidious institution which can conveniently obliterate from its annals such existences and occur

Hello, I am Sreya Mukherjee, a curious and paradoxical woman with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. I have always wondered what my purpose on Earth might be because I firmly believe that I have been assigned a greater purpose that has to be fulfilled before I exhaust my limited time on earth. Then while writing a research paper for my post-grad course work, I had an epiphany which made me realize that I want to work on motherhood studies/maternal feminism (the paper that I was writing was on mother-daughter relationship in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale ). I am trying to get enrolled in a PhD program but even if my application doesn’t get selected by any of the universities I have decided that I will work as an independent researcher on maternal feminism, because this not only endows me with a sense of purpose but also, more importantly makes me feel happy and fulfilled.             Though feminism had always been especially close to my heart, yet I had never ventured in