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Can AI replace children's book illustrators?

New Delhi, May 12 -- In the late 1990s, when Sudeshna Shome Ghosh was working with Puffin, the children's imprint of Penguin Books India (now Penguin Random House India), she had an opportunity to pub... Read More


Looking back at the intertwined legacies of Tagore and Ray

New Delhi, May 4 -- May is an auspicious month in the literary calendar of Bengal. Two of the greatest Bengalis who ever lived, both polymaths extraordinaire, were born this month. Rabindranath Tagore... Read More


In the company of Indian masters

New Delhi, April 27 -- In 2019, writer and historian William Dalrymple curated a magnificent exhibition titled, Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, at the Wallace Collection... Read More


Aamir Aziz, Anita Dube and the hypocrisy of political art

New Delhi, April 22 -- The problem with artist Anita Dube's use of lines from a poem by activist Aamir Aziz has been best articulated by the aggrieved poet himself in his posts on social media on 20 A... Read More


'The Tiger's Share': Taking the mask off the elite, entitled Indian male

New Delhi, April 20 -- Keshava Guha's new novel, The Tiger's Share, is a refreshing departure from his debut, Accidental Magic (2019), which was centred around the intense but somewhat rarefied world ... Read More


Book review: How the CIA smuggled banned literature behind the Iron Curtain

New Delhi, April 17 -- In 1904, Franz Kafka, then a passionate young man of 21, wrote in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak a sentence that has since passed into the collective conscience of the lite... Read More


'Deviants' book review: How generations of men navigated being queer in India

New Delhi, April 6 -- Towards the end of Santanu Bhattacharya's novel Deviants, Vivaan, who is one of the three protagonists, has a heart-to-heart with his beloved uncle, his "Mambro", a clever pun he... Read More


A morality tale for the age of AI

New Delhi, April 6 -- I read Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go for the first time when it came out in 2005. At the time, I was a student at university in England and counting my pennies carefully. A br... Read More


'Night in Delhi' book review: Sex, sleaze and some Shakespeare

New Delhi, April 5 -- Ranbir Sidhu's new novel is told by an unlikely narrator, an unnamed hustler and petty criminal living in Delhi, who spouts Dante and Shakespeare at opportune moments. In fact, t... Read More


A Bengali adaptation of 'Hamlet' takes the stage in Kolkata

New Delhi, March 29 -- Earlier this month, I had a chance to watch a stage adaptation of William Shakespeare's Hamlet in Bengali, a production by the theatre group Swapnasandhani in Kolkata. Led by re... Read More