Meeting Benches World art in all forms

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 …

Indian Cooking has two different traditions. The first (widespread in the North), which makes use of meat and the second (widespread in the South), essentially vegetarian. South Indian cuisine, is one that is characterized by the great use of spices used to flavor dishes and accompanying vegetables. In Indian cuisine, extensive use is made of eggs, milk and dairy products. …

About Dravidian woman, he has breathed life into the faces and lives of uncaptured people, the common crowd in everday moments of life. Exquisite innocent expresions with delicate play of light and fine details will captivate you with its like realism. He has revived a writing from of traditional painting style in today’s times and has quickly acquired a strong …

During the Eighty Years’ War, he loses contact with his parents, and a painter – Pieter Pietersz – has become his first teacher. In those years, he could not know that he would become a famous painter of the Mannerist school of Haarlem, painting large canvases in biblical or mythological subject, often with stylized characters, and even in grotesque poses. …

He is the artist who had created an artistic workshop in Wittenberg, introducing important changes in the pictorial landscape of his time, and with the colors also representing the nude and eroticism, with an extreme attention to detail. His desire to change, become pictorial reality, where everything that is not traditional, sensuality, charm and the pleasure of life, hovering lightly, …

Lucas Cranach the Elder, was friends with all of the big hitters of his Renaissance Germany: painter Albrecht Durer, reformist Martin Luther, and the various Electors and Emperors for whom he painted. Apart from being a very successful painter, he was a estimable businessman. The Three Graces (small tempera on panel, which measures 37×24 cm), was painted by him around …

Cornelis van Haarlem, Dutch Golden Age painter and draughtsman, was one of the leading Northern Mannerist artists in The Netherlands, and an important forerunner of Frans Hals as a portraitist. There was the year 1594, and he painted an oil on convas (height 77.5 cm, width: 64 cm), writing on the left, monogram and date: CCH 1594. It was born …