Tag: Birthday

The Ibis and its Whereabouts – Amitav Ghosh and Jhumpa Lahiri

On this day, two extraordinary authors share a birthday.

Ghosh in 2017Amitav Ghosh’s education spans from Dehradun to Oxford. For a short time he worked at The Indian Express and it was while he was studying at Oxford that he wrote his first book The Circle of Reason. From then, his writing career blossomed and his books have been translated into over twenty languages. Almost every book he has penned has won an award. He is probably the first cli-fi writer India has produced- his fascination for the sea,  human history and migration make his novels complex, educational and must-reads. Ghosh’s writing veers on the non-fictional even when he writes fiction.  A book that many readers I have spoken to love is The Hungry Tide, The Ibis Trilogy, The Glass Palace, Shadow Lines and Calcutta Chromosome.

Jhumpa Lahiri in 2015

Jhumpa Lahiri, an American author born in London,  is loved most for her debut collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies. Her book The Namesake was adapted into a popular movie and she has a string of awards under her belt. Her stories have captured the Indian immigrant experience but she hasn’t stopped there- she has moved on to finding the true language of her soul by delving into a completely foreign language – Italian. This is an experiment in the fictional realm, one that many writers and translators can learn from.

Read this interview with Lahiri to understand this prestigious author’s love affair with the Italian language.

Which books do you love by these authors? Tell us in the comments.

Nine Times Kafka Was Splendid and Wildly Relatable

 

On this day, 138 years ago, notable novelist Franz Kafka was born. His writing has since become well-known for their “senseless, disorienting and menacing complexity”, with kafkaesque entering our cultural lexicon to describe situations similar to those found in his books.

Despite the reputation his books have garnered of being difficult to read and comprehend, a closer look reveals that Kafka would have fit right in with the rest of us as we navigate a pandemic, adjust to work-from-home, and juggle our emotions, needs, and physical and mental health.

Along with tempestuous and difficult personal relationships, Franz Kafka also struggled greatly with his mental health throughout his life. As a result, his writing literally represented a lifeline for this prolific author, and authors today continue to benefit greatly from his reflections on the life of a writer.

Kafka’s thoughts on depression, love, and anxiety give us a glimpse into the human condition, that has remained largely unchanged over the last one hundred years. And in the same way, one might be forgiven for thinking that he might not have been out of place in our meme-obsessed social media landscape with his bitingly sarcastic wit.

KAFKA WAS CLEARLY CENTURIES AHEAD OF HIS TIME WHEN IT CAME TO LIVE-TWEETING HIS DEPRESSION.

Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”

KAFKA ON SOCIAL ANXIETY, FROM LETTERS TO MILENA

NO PRIZES FOR GUESSING WHAT CAPTIONS HE’D HAVE ADDED TO HIS CAREFULLY CURATED FEED OF SOULFULLY ARTISTIC IMAGES ON INSTAGRAM. KAFKA WAS THE OG INSTAGRAM POET.

 

KAFKA, METAMORPHOSIS

Happy birthday, Franz Kafka. And finally thank you for these evergreen words of wisdom, that we are unlikely to forget as we struggle to work from our homes and manage our anxiety.