Sharath Komarraju's Blog, page 68
July 28, 2014
Stories from Mythology: Feeling bad for the bad guy
When I was contemplating the topic of today’s mythology post, a strange thought occurred to me: I sympathize with the ‘bad’ people in many of our myths. I remember that when I was a kid, when my mother first told me the story of Ramayana, I used to feel bad for Ravana, and in the […]
Meetup 142: The Fears that Rule Us
Last Saturday, I hosted a session at Write Club based on fear. I’d been thinking a lot about fear lately, about how much our daily actions and thoughts are governed by this emotion. In our session we drew a line between instinctive fear – the immediate fear of death and pain – and social fear, the […]
July 27, 2014
Feminism Counterpoint 3: The Illusion of Equality
I wrote a couple of posts in the last few weeks on the feminism wave in India. More specifically, I linked to a Buzzfeed article which showed pictures of people who held placards which began with the words: ‘India needs feminism because…’ I was critical of the whole exercise, and also some of the responses […]
July 26, 2014
Why Writing Good Books for Children is Important
If you could ask the writers of the greatest children stories in the history of literature, they would tell you that they have never thought of their readers – the children – as any less intelligent than adults. Which is why, if an adult were to pick up any well written children’s book, he or […]
Photo Post: Kanwar Yatra
In his previous post, Vivek Banerjee wrote about shooting a Royal Bengal Tiger. Here he takes us to Kanwar Yatra. The month of July witnesses Kanwar Yatra - a unique socio-religious phenomenon where people travel long distances, mostly on foot, to fetch Ganga jal from Haridwar/ Rishikesh, and carry it home in containers kept in specially designed […]
July 25, 2014
Contest 1: Which Mythological Character Would You Be?
Hi, guys. Two months have passed since I began to blog in earnest, the numbers (of readers, posts, of everything) have risen steadily, and the time has come, I think, for me to say thank you. And what better way to say thank you than to hold a contest and give away a nice fat prize? […]
6 Logical Fallacies Prevalent in Social Media Debates
Whether we like it or not, we communicate more through the written word today than in person. Social media has become all-seeing and ever-present, which means there are more worldwide debates happening on different issues today than at any time in the past. All you have to do is enter your pet burning issue into […]
July 24, 2014
Flash Fiction: Earth Waits
Back in 2008, Livejournal conducted a flash fiction contest where 500-word-stories had to be written on the theme: journal. They gave us a sop saying that all selected stories ‘might’ go into a published book, and we were allowed to send in more than one entry. I sent in five. I’m serializing them on this blog. This is the […]
Why Are We Taught To Finish Our Food?
A few weeks back, my mother invited my dad’s maternal uncle over to our place for lunch. This was the first meal he’d had in our house for almost twenty years. After he had his fill, he sat in his favourite chair in our living room, raised his hand and said, Annadaata Sukhibhava (‘blessed is the […]
Essay: The Dangers of Narrative Cinema
Blogging is today a list-maker’s delight. All blogging advice implores us to write for the scanner, for the people with short attention spans, for those who scroll rather than read. But there are some things that a list or a summary won’t achieve that an essay can. In this piece, Ritam Bhaumik speaks of this […]
