As I wrote last month, Alberto Moravia was the literary discovery of 2025 for me. His wife Elsa Morante was also a celebrated writer best known for her novels ‘Arturo’s Island’ and ‘History’. Their marriage was a stormy affair (literary icons you see), and Moravia himself had at one point confessed: There were days when … Continue reading The Moravia–Morante Marriage
Phantom Thread: I thoroughly enjoyed this story of a conventional artist–muse relationship that slowly turns into a strange psychological duel. Daniel Day Lewis has such screen presence that his performance alone made the movie worth watching. The Sacrifice: My first encounter with Andrei Tarkovsky’s work was far from easy. The film demands absolute attention and … Continue reading What I Watched – December 2025
The Comedy of Errors is considered to be one of the first plays of Shakespeare and is also his shortest. Double roles and mistaken identities often serve as easy gateways for displaying a writer's ingenuity; Shakespeare, however, raises the stakes by introducing two sets of identical twins, allowing confusion itself to drive the comedy. The … Continue reading The Comedy of Errors
The Italian writer Alberto Moravia (1907-90) who wrote most of his famous works during the 50s was my discovery of the month. I'm onto his fourth book and have been floored by his excavation of the interior worlds of his characters and the existential angst that he confronts in his writings. In 'Contempt', a scriptwriter … Continue reading Moravia’s ‘Contempt’ and Ulysses’ Refusal to Return to Penelope
Hardly a week goes by without my reading at least one piece from The New Yorker. Its long-form journalism and the sheer breadth of its coverage—from global wars and haute couture to fiction and cinema—have always been a magnet for me, along with that unmistakable, one-of-a-kind font that makes every page instantly recognizable. Netflix has … Continue reading An Ode to The New Yorker
This November, although I was physically in Delhi, I spent most of the month mentally wandering the streets of Naples. I was immersed in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, and I’m still not sure how to fully describe the experience. The four books, spanning 1700 odd pages was one of the most powerful literary encounters I’ve … Continue reading Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet
Shame: Steve McQueen’s Shame - a deep dive into the psyche of a sex addict had Micheal Fassbender pull off a great effort. The inability to get aroused with romantic partners, the porn-addiction and his eventual spiral towards a violent climax was a gripping watch. Hunger: The 1981 Irish hunger strike was the culmination of … Continue reading What I Watched – November 2025
In his lecture on Othello, the critic Harold Bloom has this memorable line: “Shakespeare was the greatest theorist of sexual jealousy the world had ever seen before the advent of Freud and Proust”. While ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ had jealousy as one of its themes, it is in Othello that Shakespeare explores this in all … Continue reading Othello
Small Things Like These: The adaptation of Claire Keegan's Booker shortlisted novella was more or less true to the book. The plot revolves around a coal merchant's encounter with a girl at a Magdalene Laundry (the notorirous Catholic-run institution in Ireland, which triggers memories of his own mother's own precarious past as an unwed mother. … Continue reading What I Watched – October 2025
Errol Morris’ documentary on the life of John le Carre – The Pigeon Tunnel was a peek into the life of the probably the greatest spy novelist of all time. After watching it, I revisited my notes from his 2016 memoir of the same name, which I read three years back. The title refers to … Continue reading The Pigeon Tunnel
