ARPANA CAUR 1/3 – Born in New Delhi, Arpana Caur spent her college years studying literature. As an contemporary Indian artist, she is largely self-taught, but observing her work you can feel that she continue the line begun by Amrita Sher-Gil. She started looking at the architecture in Pahari miniatures that led to her creating strange, linear tensions vis-à-vis the …

Jaipur House, India Gate, New Delhi. Welcome at the NGMA where you find the distinct character of modern and contemporary Indian art. Uniquely positioned, it is a powerful synthesis of western aesthetic values, and conceptual elements of Indian art, of different mediums and sensibilities, of a long and vibrant history steeped in art, philosophy and culture. Visiting European Traveller Artists, …

BURNT POEMS – I am a half-burnt poem. Yes, you guessed right, a girl’s love poem. Girls’ love poems have seldom escaped fire: father’s fire, brother’s fire, even mother’s, an heirloom. Only some girls half-escape: those half-charred ones, we call Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova or Kamala Das. Some girls, to escape fire, hide their desire under the veil of piety: …

Strange is that this novel – with short chapters and an external point of view – tells the daily life of a married couple, but the main theme is not what you might have imagined. Everything revolves around the Indian cuisine, along with its ingredients. Lena and a “him”, have been married for fifteen years, even though she is not …

A semi-realistic figurative painter, Patnaik has enjoyed much critical acclaim and popular appreciation over the past few years. Best known painter for his “Relations” series, that revolves around a semi-clad male and female figure captured in a series of complex, multiple and open ended postures. Always, human psyche and interpersonal relationships of people in society, is the underlying theme that …

HER SAFE HOUSE – Mother walking up a corridor with a stick, as frail as tissue paper, bunched on a stick. Moving up a corridor inch by inch, a hairball being pushed by a breeze, into her safe house, her sonless kitchen. BOMB SITE SEEN FROM A RAILWAY BRIDGE – As if the broken stumps were a girl’s starved shoulders: …

Samit Basu is the author of The Simoqin Prophecies, The Manticore’s Secret and The Unwaba Revelations, the three parts of The GameWorld Trilogy. Born 14 December 1979 in a Bengali Hindu family, Basu grew up in Calcutta. In 2007, Basu was declared one of India’s most promising ‘Emerging Indians’. Basu is a columnist, screenwriter, documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist writing …

Music has always occupied a central place in the imagination of Indians. The range of musical phenomenon in India, and indeed the rest of South Asia, extends from simple melodies, commonly encountered among hill tribes, to what is one of the most well- developed “systems” of classical music in the world. Music in India began as an integral part of …