 
											Roy is a poet and author

March 29, 2025 07:13 IST
At some point of time in our history – I think it might be the 1980s – the word “kavi” began to lose its halo. By the end of the 1950s, the ruins of that halo had already become visible – in Pyaasa, Guru Dutt names his poet “Vijay” with a mix of melancholy and irony
Sat, Mar 29, 2025
March 27, 2025 18:40 IST
Substitution of the poet by the storyteller isn’t a coincidence. It is now our history
Fri, Mar 28, 2025
March 19, 2025 07:08 IST
Though the film is called 'Nayak', it is the women I notice.
Wed, Mar 19, 2025
February 13, 2025 17:02 IST
That romantic love is an integer of the serve-and-volley between the elements and emotions seems as obvious as the curtain responding to the wind teasing it.
Sat, Feb 15, 2025
January 14, 2025 07:04 IST
To put a “TW” before a literary text is to prepare the reader for what they are to expect. But a woman like Draupadi wouldn’t have access to a world with beep alerts that warn her of the violence of men in a world that is a relentless test of one’s unpreparedness and resilience
Tue, Jan 14, 2025
January 02, 2025 07:25 IST
Framing only certain moments as worthy of attention is exhausting, unrewarding and hierarchical. Distraction could be essential to creativity
Thu, Jan 02, 2025
November 19, 2024 04:10 IST
Will governments allow rivers and the air and nights a life, their older lives, so that 'a new Upanishad', a new Riversong, can be composed within our own hearts?
Tue, Nov 19, 2024
September 10, 2024 07:37 IST
We ask students to be Socratic and implore them to argue, debate, question, dissent, but our courses are structured like the Bhagavad Gita, where, after a conversation between two tributaries of thought, one must be integrated with the other,
Tue, Sep 10, 2024
August 13, 2024 15:36 IST
In films such as ‘Pyaasa’, the actor-director challenges our habit of thought while showing us how commerce dominates and displaces both art and the artist
Wed, Aug 14, 2024
June 20, 2024 08:00 IST
It is water we seek and need, water from the sky, water nearby, on our bodies of course, as prophylactic to the curse of heat, but also to our ears.
Thu, Jun 20, 2024
May 17, 2024 13:06 IST
I wanted to believe that my generation had managed to dodge the lathi charge of the slogan ‘aaram haram hai’ that damaged my father’s generation. But we live on a treadmill, to burn until burnout, from which neither philosophy nor scientific discovery nor joy can ever be produced
Fri, May 17, 2024
May 06, 2024 08:00 IST
In the film, handbook feminism defeats patriarchy with a cinematic ease that would be hard to imagine in rural India.
Wed, May 08, 2024
March 09, 2024 17:53 IST
From 'sunte ho' to 'bakbak', the long history of shushing women
Mon, Mar 11, 2024
December 16, 2023 18:02 IST
With their infinite repetitions of Narendra Modi, these selfie points were, quite visibly, meant to be an optic of ‘propaganda’ — to make classrooms and Vande Bharat trains all look alike
Mon, Dec 18, 2023
November 27, 2023 07:00 IST
Silly as it might sound, I sometimes wonder whether it was the invention of a sport such as hang gliding, which brought the freedom and liveliness of air into human lives, that has given this new youthfulness to the life of ‘hang’ in our times. Like ‘miss’, it has resisted translation
Mon, Nov 27, 2023
September 05, 2023 18:29 IST
A jaded generation, their exhaustion deriving from the pessimism that has been their sad inheritance, they have been raised by a culture of dishonesty. The language that surrounds them perpetrates the timidity and obedience forced on them by the behaviour of market forces
Wed, Sep 06, 2023
August 21, 2023 15:40 IST
The purposive forgetfulness, a characteristic shared by Sonipat and other small towns where history seems to be a useless burden, where everything must be turned new, is oppressive. It messes up our sense of time and history and leads us to think of the world as a supermarket
Mon, Aug 21, 2023
May 10, 2023 06:50 IST
The history of plant life, records of its settlement on land as well as its death and evacuation from these spaces, a census of plants and trees — all these constitute our national history, not only the life of kings, queens and the famous
Wed, May 10, 2023
May 08, 2022 10:13 IST
A woman of agency, a lover of music and a feminist in spirit, she cared neither for saccharine femininity nor for conventions but she could draw people close to her -- like a tree
Sun, May 08, 2022
January 14, 2022 04:00 IST
🔴 Sumana Roy writes: Once upon a time, one could be just a noun: ‘Professor’. That isn’t enough anymore and the adjectives must be worn like the medals on an army man
Fri, Jan 14, 2022
December 19, 2020 03:52 IST
The career of the “literary” has not been very different from the Brahmin’s protectionism of the mantra, an inheritance kept out of the reach of the non-Brahmin. One of the ways in which this has been done in the last hundred years is through anthologies that create — and reiterate — the idea and the habitat of the literary.
Sat, Dec 19, 2020
April 29, 2020 10:30 IST
As the COVID-19 pandemic makes work-from-home the new normal, a look at the workspaces of people who have always functioned in isolation -- writers. For Sumana Roy, the bed is her home and studio.
Wed, Apr 29, 2020
April 19, 2020 11:30 IST
Lockdown verse, as the name suggests, is a series consisting of poems introspecting, examining and reflecting on the times we are living in. This week we have one poem each from Sumana Roy and Aditi Angiras.
Sun, Apr 19, 2020
August 11, 2019 06:10 IST
'I want to be free of climate, of weather...'
Tue, Aug 13, 2019
August 03, 2019 00:40 IST
Vinod Kumar Shukla’s literary universe is lit up by a culture of slowness and shyness
Sat, Aug 03, 2019





