Annie Zaidi's Blog, page 6

A review of Rohzin

Myth, muse, mirage, a romance and a lament -- the metropolisis a protean beast haunting the dreams of its writers. In Rahman Abbas’ Rohzin,Mumbai serves many of these functions, now a watery canvas floating the boat offirst love and now a cesspool of emotional traumas.The story begins in Mabadmorpho, a coastal village where Asrarhas just finished high school, and decided to go to Mumbai to

On coverings of face or head, and the cultural value of uniformity

A good school or college teaches students to see people for the good or harm they do rather than focus on their skin, surnames, hair or tiffin-boxes. No society can hope to emerge from the dark pit of ignorance if it refuses to allow experiments with appearance, habits, even cultural values. What is ignorance, after all, but not knowing? Knowledge comes from seeing, listening, recognising,

From an interview with Mint about my new novel, City of ...

 From an interview with Mint about my new novel, City of Incident:With City Of ... I had started with just little flashes of incidents (in Mumbai) that I remembered, little scraps of detail that I saw/read somewhere, sights that haven’t quite left me, things I have been carrying around for years and have never forgotten. And I was unable to make sense of them, vis-a-vis my own relationship with

From an interview with Mint about cities and my new nove...

 From an interview with Mint about cities and my new novel, City of Incident:With City Of ... I had started with just little flashes of incidents (in Mumbai) that I remembered, little scraps of detail that I saw/read somewhere, sights that haven’t quite left me, things I have been carrying around for years and have never forgotten. And I was unable to make sense of them, vis-a-vis my own

An interview about the latest book, about cities and loneliness and some thoughts on literary ethical

I was interviewed by Chintan Girish Modi this week about my new book. One question in particular led me to think deeper around a topic that I had been debating internally for a while, so I put down my thoughts at some length. Q. What are some of the ethical questions that you grapple with while writing about people whose lives are available to you through observation but far removed from your

Happy Basant

 I was looking for a bright yellow photo to post on social media for Basant Panchami. Among my saved photos, I found this one. I am in a hotel room, on a research trip to Sirohi in 2019, for my book 'Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation'. In most small hotels in central and western India and many parts of the north too, especially in district headquarter towns, small-ish

Meta gaslighting

I've written recently about my struggles with Facebook, its 'security' viz logins, and it restricting me from commenting on posts. Over the last week, I have been carefully trying out the identity-confirmation-via-comments option. It is confusing, disorienting and as one of my friends here pointed out, rather creepy. Even so, the option does not work and the gaslighting has reached 'meta'

City of Incident: More reviews

"Haruki Murakami once asked, “Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves.” Zaidi posits a painful answer to this question, unflinchingly marking the social divisions that proliferate her web.Some of these social markers inevitably crisscross – like gender

The heart of the republic

Freedom is not simply a matter of being fed. The technical lack of a cage also does not define freedom. She may be trained to perform on stage through a judicious mix of fear, pain and food, but a lioness balancing on a chair and being ridden by a clown cannot be called free.Hunting and killing also do not necessarily translate to freedom. A lioness must also be free to not hunt and not kill when

A first review for City of Incident

"Short sketches are meant to be packed with detail, not a word out of place, and this is exactly the vividness that characterises this collection. And yet there is a sense of universality about the sketches as the reader will instantly recognise such characters in their lives too. The empathy with which she writes is at the heart and soul of every story. The stories linger with the reader after