Kureishi: writing courses are 'new mental hospitals'

Charlotte Higgins in Guardian

Link

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering Maninder Singh Kang

Image
(18.5.1963-4.2.2013) By Rajesh Sharma I visualize him watching his own burning corpse and laughing a philosopher’s laughter. “Oye pandatā , this Kang was a dog’s tail of a man. Look, he is poking even the flames to laugh. What a struggle the wind and the fire are waging over his body. And look at the rain, it refuses to stop. His death seems to have released an excess of the five bhoots , making nature go berserk.”                 Listening to him, I try to make sense of his bizarre inner geography.                 “He’ll be impossible to replace. It’s such a loss,” he adds in an altogether different mood.       Maninder had this ability to move effortlessly between gaiety and gravity. He probably had found the thread that connects the extremes.        ...
Read more

Remembering my teacher

By Rajesh Kumar Sharma A friend, who also is a teacher, recently sent an sms: satinder singh passed away this morning . Satinder Singh introduced me to the art of reading literature. He taught us to read patiently, to wait like birds even as reading hatched taking its own time. And he taught us to navigate literary works like wayfarers exploring the labyrinthine patterns of some Persian carpets. I remember the day -it must have been in 1980- I first went up to Satinder Singh. As always, he was there outside the classroom well before the class began. I had been reading a poem by Tennyson and had some questions. He heard me out and asked me to see him again the following day. 'Read this book over the weekend and come back to me,' he said, handing me The Complete Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson . I looked apprehensively at the forbidding tome but he reassured me, 'You'll read it through, I know.' And he smiled, patted my shoulder and walked into the class. ...
Read more

For a new political imagination

Image
By Rajesh Kumar Sharma   (Published in Daily Post 20 December 2011) The only political rally I went to as a child has not faded from my memory. Those were the days after the Emergency. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was coming to address the people in Kanak Mandi, the market square of Hoshiarpur. The whole town seemed to have poured out to hear him. I trailed my father to have a glimpse of the country's best known orator. I vaguely recall the big crowd, its sheer enthusiasm and the great distance between me and the stage. And I have not forgotten a studiedly casual remark Vajpayee made before an all-male audience, which elicited all round applause and laughter. "Look at poor me, Indiraji will say, a woman, hounded by all those men!" Time may have altered the syntax, but the content of the remark remains imprinted in my memory like an unforgettable photograph. I did not then know that it was a sexist remark. Nor did I know it had been made in bad taste.     ...
Read more