On this unseasonal rain-chilled June day, I went for a walk along the Seine. For the first time since the lockdown in Paris was lifted, the quays and streets were eerily quiet under cobalt-grey clouds.

Once I reached the Tuileries Garden, I relished the tranquility. Silence lay heavy over long gravelled paths lined by ancient trees, hopping pigeons, crows, ducks mingling on cordoned lawns, and a panoramic view of the Louvre.

When I say “Homeric Epics”, what comes to mind first?

School-day drudgery or elite-class snobbery;

cumbersome poetry, maybe dreary infantry?

The oldest surviving written texts in western literature allegedly tell intense stories of gruesome drawn-out war, weak-heeled heroes, conniving anthropomorphic gods and monstrous beasts. Nearly 3000 years later, The Iliad and The Odyssey continue to capture our imaginations. Some say, all of western culture draws from these two springs.

Growing up in India, I loved tales from Hindu mythology. I was familiar with certain ancient Greek (and Egyptian) traditions. At school, we were not formally exposed to literature from western…

Two months ago the French government announced the end of “normal life” in response to the pandemic. Today marks the beginning of the end for some confinement measures. These past eight weeks, I was holed up in a small Parisian studio with limited human connection.

I quickly figured avoiding strangers out on their 1-hour-a-day-only walks didn’t cut it out as meaningful interaction. Since I disavow most social media, the void can appear as deafening silence in times such as these (I did WhatsApp and the rare Zoom call with a couple of friends & family).

Long spells of listlessness meant…

Fiction:

• Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights)
• Sarah Winman (Tin Man)
• Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall trilogy, A Place of Greater Safety)
• Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
• Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
• Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss)
• Jhumpa Lahiri (The Interpreter of Maladies)
• Madeline Miller (The Song of Achilles)
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
• Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea)
• Daphne Du Maurier(Rebecca)
• Charlotte Bronte (Jane Eyre)
• Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye)
• Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend)
• JK Rowling (Harry Potter series)
• Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot series and other mystery novels)
• Enid Blyton (Famous Five, Secret Seven, Five Find-Outers, Noddy)

Non-fiction :

• Nan Shepherd…

Today like yesterday,

tomorrow like today,

And always the same!

A gray sky, an eternal horizon

and walking … walking.

Moving to the beat, like a stupid

machine, the heart:

the clumsy intelligence of the brain

asleep in a corner.

The soul, which longs for a paradise,

looking for it without faith;

fatigue, without aim, like a wave that rolls on

not knowing why.

A voice, incessantly, with the same tone,

sings the same song,

monotonous drop of water falling,

and falls without ceasing.

So the days are slipping

by in pursuit of each other,

today the same as

yesterday…

Nearly four months ago I decided to give up meat and seafood. Just to be clear: I’m still consuming eggs and dairy products (albeit as little as possible). Vegetarianism was only one of my 2020 resolutions.

I also decided to not log into Twitter or Instagram any longer. I haven’t used Facebook since 2013–14. Social media felt superfluous in the kind of life I wanted to create for myself. Disclaimer: I still use the Goodreads app to keep track of my books although I’d argue that the social evils of a reading app are extremely limited.

End of April will…

A version of this article was published at Tiny Buddha.

“Think of the world…you carry within yourself and set it above everything that you notice about you.

Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not lose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

I turned thirty years young last month. Being on the cusp of a new decade feels momentous. Over these last ten years, I have struggled with depression, anxiety and a crippling lack…

Ever wondered how a novel would read were it written, without restraint, with the freedom and ferocity of a poem? In her masterpiece, Virginia Woolf defies the norms of prose to paint the story of her childhood in an unprecedented style. Largely drawn from her own life experiences, To The Lighthouse is the story of the Ramsays, an English couple, holidaying on the Isle of Skye with their eight children at the beginning of the 20th century. Also present at their rented home is a cast of major and minor characters, the mercurial sea and the eponymous lighthouse featuring amongst…