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I was not ready for Dorothy.

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I was not ready for Dorothy . I cried, continued to cry as I watched the film. Not that kind of crying that comes with a sentimental scene, where you wipe away your tear and move on. I simply couldn’t. I felt very uncomfortable, anxious and eventually content. I am trying to comprehend all of it. I have encountered this sort of violence before- in literature and cinema that stubbornly refuses to let us look away. When I first read The Begetter by Imayam, I was a college student. It was a part of my syllabus and I had to present it to the class. I read the night before, I couldn’t sleep. A lump in my throat refused to move.   The honour-killing episode and the violence inflicted consciously by the society broke something open in me. It wasn’t the violence that affected me but the terrible familiarity of it. The way such violence can be made inevitable, sanctioned and even ordinary within the structures that produce and sustain gender inequality.   The next day while ...
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Three Letters, Eight Years

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Three Letters, Eight Years An eight year PhD journey! Dr. Alamelu Janaki. These initials are very deceptive and alluring.   There is something almost femme fatale about them. Three letters that make eight years of reading, writing, waiting, doubting, stopping, starting and starting all over again look almost effortless. This journey derailed and challenged me in more ways than I had anticipated. It demanded relentless consistency and dedication—two things I was, frankly, spectacularly bad at. Looking back, I don't see one continuous version of myself moving steadily towards a doctorate. I see several versions of me: evolving, struggling, stopping, restarting and, somehow, continuing. So, I thought I would tell the story through those versions of myself.   1.        The Young Adult Who Began When I was doing my UG, my professor Shanmuga Priya ma’am planted that seed of pursuing a doctorate. But I certainly did not begin with the...
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Beyond Labels: knowing Anne Frank, the Teenager

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In my school days, we had an excerpt from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. It was a yet another lesson for me then. Given the age and exposure, I had not known enough to process the entirety of the injustice that has happened to her and to the millions of Jews during the Holocaust. Reading the book several years later was completely a different experience. I realised there is more to Anne as an individual teenager than being revered as a historical symbol of Holocaust. Before becoming a most recognizable victim of history, she was simply an ambitious teenager- curious, inquisitive, argumentative, affectionate, urge to comprehend complex things, longing to be loved and understood. Her relentless optimistic nature reminded me of my favourite 1997 Italian film Life is Beautiful.   In the film, a father conceives an elaborate game to conceal the real horror of the concentration camp from his four-year-old son.   While Anne is fully aware of the perils that surround ...
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Who Owns a Story Once It Has Been Told?

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       There was a time when I attended Hindu literary Festival at Chennai that was when Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi was out. So, people associated the significance of the black goat with multiple meanings- an allegory of state surveillance, metaphor for caste hierarchy, gendered oppression, poverty and the vulnerability of marginal lives. When the crowd questioned about the actuality of its representation, Perumal Murugan refused to offer a definitive answer. He said it is the reader’s discretion to associate, confront and relate to the text in their own convincing ways.      Similarly, in the preface of the English translated version of Pethavan as The Begetter , Imayam argues that once the story is written, it is no longer in his authority to offer interpretations and meanings.      This idea resonates in the long-standing debate in literary theory.   In the essay Death of The Author , Roland Barthes argues that on the death...
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What Makes a Woman Happy? Reading Hooked by Asako Yuzuki

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  Over years, my exposure to feminist literature and theories taught me to associate confinement as a major source of women’s unhappiness. I have likely believed that the pressing need of the society -to marry and to raise a family- as a major obstacle for a woman’s fulfilment. The domestic labour, absence of finances, familial restrictions are some of the prominent hindrances. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , there is a popular fable that answers the most sought question- “ what makes a women happy?”, the answer was the freedom to choose , the freedom of making a choice and executing it in free will. However, the clear solutions of education, financial independence and greater freedom of choice did not make the dissatisfaction in women disappear (or I think so).   The modern predicament has merely changed shape.   Reading Hooked by Asako Yuzuki , I was bothered by a different question- Why do so many of us continue to imagine that happiness exists somewhere else, in...
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“Women Need Spaces Where They Are Not Needed- Finding My Morisaki Bookshop”

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  While reading More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop , I realised that perhaps we all are in search of Morisaki shop kind of space in all our lives- a place that asks for nothing except our presence. For Takako in the novel, it was a secondhand bookstore tucked inside Jimbocho. For me, it was a reading room in our community, where time softened, responsibilities loosened, and I slowly returned to myself. ikr, there is too much of me in the picture. However, i believe my friend managed to click a good one. 😜       Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own wanted every woman to have a room of her own and some financial support for them to write fiction. The demand for a private space is indeed an ask for autonomy – that marked freedom and economic independence. However, in the current scenario, for contemporary mothers the Woolfian space can be interpreted in a different way-women might want a space away from home – which lets them be by themselves, having no demand...
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A WARM HUG THAT ALL OF US NEEDED!

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  Days at the Morisaki Bookshop – Satoshi Yasgisawa A warm, fast paced single sitting type of read, an absolute game for beginners! And Yes, the book gives you a bear hug- familiar and comforting!       Takako, a young girl who is often at odds in explaining herself suffers a heart break and later rediscovers her purpose by staying at her uncle Satoru’s rundown Morisaki bookshop. To stay among thousands of books is indeed a delight, as Takako explores the place and the bookshop her passion for life is rekindled.      The cozy novel is divided into two parts. The first part is about Takako’s self-discovery at the bookshop and the second part deals with her aunt Momoko’s return and how her presence and perspective of life alter Takako’s presumptions. Yet another fascinating thread is that of Wada – a customer at the shop who later becomes the love interest of Takako.        This book was lighter and warmer since my last ...
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