Sound of a Sentence

"Toby looked long at the audience, and, coming now to the end of his lecture, said, 'He regrets his curse, I feel, because he knows that his grief at the killings of the bird - grief, he feels interestingly, not for the dying bird, but for its mate, the hen, whose song turns to a piteous lament - has set free his inspiration. It is the dirty secret of his art. Known among poets as the adi-kavi - the first poet, a Sanskritic Caedmon, if you will - he is the first to recoganize, twenty centuries ago, that, however much poets wish not to cause pain, there is no poetry without pain, no poetry without pity. And from here on, in the Indian imagination, soka - sorrow or grief - comes to be fused , both conceptually and phonemically, with sloka, poetry! It is this, and nothing besodes, that we consider to be the birth of poetry."

Aatish Taseer,

The Way Things Were

'The day warmed, the palm winds were blowing. It was the hour of the teacher. Ravi smiled upon his twenty-two children, and they smiled back,the caliphs and queens, until smiles filled the seedling house. This was the hour of myth Ravi knew. 'Let's tell a story,' he said to the children. They were overjoyed.

Ravi asked, 'What kind of stories?'

The children began chirping all together, and a ten-year-old in the front row raised her hand to tell him something. Her silver anklets chimed when she moved her feet under the desk, and her wide gaze was hemmed by exuberant lashes darkened with surma.

'Yes?' Ravi said.

'Saar, Saar...' she said, they grew shy. 'A story without dying, Saar!'

Ravi laughed, 'What's your name child?'

'Kunhamina.'

Ravi listened to the ballad of Khasak in her, its heroic periods, its torrential winds and its banyan breezes. There was no death but only silver anklets and her eyes sparkling through surma. Ravi looked deep into those eyes; the story wold have no dying, only slow and mysterious transit. He began in the style of the ancient fabulist.

'Once upon a time...'

The Legends of Khasak,

O V Vijayan

I fell in love with Lily like a calf, which is the most romantic way to fall in love - it was also called heating up to a hundred degrees - and during that unforgettable summer, I fell three times.

The Bad Girl
Mario Vargas Llosa

No sooner had I made the remark than it seemed to crumble and change like one of those unstable compounds, returning to their baser elements with the slightest exposure. Defending something stupid can make the world feel beyond grasp.


The Temple-Goers
Aatish Taseer

Let us be honest: Gangaji was the kind of person it is more convenient to forget. The principles he stood for and the way in which he asserted them were easier to admire than to follow. While he was alive, he was impossible to ignore; once he had gone, he was impossible to imitate.                                                                                                          

The Great Indian Novel
Shashi Tharoor

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out tothe whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.

Famished Road
Ben Okri

The river looked swollen like a woman's face after she has cried too much in silence. The banks were strewn with boast lying upside down - some with careless holes poked into them, others sleeping with their heads buried in the sand, sails flailing in the breeze, forlorn masts standing defiant in an empty sky. Houses sat, their roofs missing. In a short span of a few hours, the world had changed beyond recognition.

The Dollmaker's Island
by Anuradha Sharma

What wouldn't we do 

to uncoil the coiled

and then coil it up again

Shreekumar Varma


Tho' much is taken, much abides;
and tho'
We are not that strength which
in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that
which we are, we are;
one equal tempo of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Ulysses
by Alfred Lord Tennyson