Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 30

Gulab hooks reviewers

"There is a whirlwind of conversations, heated exchanges, physical fights and helpless sobs as the tempo builds and the mystery deepens. It’s nothing sort of a roller coaster ride, smooth one minute, scary the other and in between pregnant with foreboding."- The Millenium Post

"Gulab ends on a different note than its beginning. It begins with a darkly comic, almost absurd response to the idea

That other space

 

Gulab tests the limits that our mind
sets upon a ghost’s powers. If you see her as a woman clinging to life, there
is not much to fear. Yet: what if she wants to return to your life? 

And what
makes you think you can make her leave?



Annie Zaidi brings
her characteristically clear-eyed exploration of love to this beguiling, 

hair-raising ghost story.


Order it online. Or walk into the

An Impractical Education

This is the latest graphic story I wrote for the Mint.





I have been thinking for a while now about the inadequacy of our secondary and senior secondary school syllabi. As far as I can see, the syllabus informs teenagers about fairly complex natural, physical and chemical phenomena, formulae for equations and trignometric calculations that most of them will never use in their daily lives. But

Still smouldering

The best thing about being able to look at
a banned book in hindsight is that it also offers a kind of foresight.



The short stories – and a one-act play –
that made up Angaaray are mundane stories in the literal sense. The book
focussed on the everyday brutality suffered by millions of Indian Muslims in
the early twentieth century. Economic despair, domestic enslavement, sexual
oppression,

A bookish adventure

I stack books in double rows on each shelf so that an invisible row sits behind the visible row. Some shelves are three thick. I’ve also begun to stack books in horizontal piles on top of a row. Last year, I donated a boxful to a children’s library. But a donation cull is one thing; sentencing a book to death by drowning is another thing. To leave a book vulnerable is to say that the ideas it

More about love

I was invited to read and talk about love at the Godrej India Culture Lab book club event in February 2013.


I had upheld love as the only truly significant thing that happens in our lives, apart from the necessity of making money in order to stay alive. But for what should one stay alive if not to love, and enable love? I do believe that all human life and endeavour is about finding and

An excavation of our pre-partitioned self

Peoples’ political and cultural choices are directly impacted by history, or whatever little scrap of history is allowed into our narratives about who we are, and it is a shame that most of us in India and Pakistan are either ignorant of the forces that led us to where we are, or have been actively misinformed. A God in Every Stone sets out to peel back some layers, revealing a part of our

Because so much rupaiyya makes us blind

As citizens and voters, we are often stumped by the glaring lack of options. There doesn't seem to be anyone 'good' around. All candidates appear to be either directly corrupt - having been implicated in scams, or their family members named as beneficiaries of their time in office - or else, their politics is inherently corrupt. Their policies benefit a certain small group of people, heaping

Sharing, caring etc

Further musings on toilets and our shared existence as citizens, families, lovers etc. I do firmly believe that the day we all start leaving a public toilet cleaner than we found it, we will have understood the true meaning of patriotism.

I'd also like to say that there is nothing so unromantic as an unclean toilet, and that a nice, airy, really sparkling clean bathroom-toilet is a strong

because lioness hearts are not the same as lion hearts

"cubs are slow, fathers fast and lion mothers know that truthis the thing that prevails... "

I have a new-ish poem in Kindle magazine. This one was inspired by a National Geographic program about the lives of lionesses and lions in the savannah grasslands in Africa. Read the full poem here.