The Rebelle blog

Aging. Being in pain. Finishing. Rotting.              —Emmanuel Fournier Came across this on Poets-a-day on poets.org. I hadn't been on to this website for months until suddenly I started receiving the poems on my email. And, then I read another literary magazine in the morning, which celebrated the works of Vishnu Khare who recently passed away. I lamented abandoning my leisure days when I took refuge in poetry, esp, Hindi. It was about four years ago that on a December night I picked up some hindi literary magazines and was hooked on to their content from then on. I also wrote my first hindi poetry after a month of devouring poems by Chandrakant Devtale, Dhumil, Viren Dangwal, Anamika, Agyeya, Nida Nawaz and others. I distinctly remember being overwhelmed with the written word. I fervently copied their poetry in my little diary of quotations and from then on, I kept an art journal for all poems and literary verses that I read a...

I frequently lose myself over book reviews and introductions to old classics. These past few months, I have been holding cherished conversations with an avid reader who's a passionate linguist as well. When reading becomes a source of much greater joy than other things deemed important in this material world, we know we have struck treasure. Three different articles today gave me immense joy. They reminded me the reasons why I read and choose to spend on building a book collection over everything else. First, about a Dutch town of Bredevoort, where books present better photo-op moments than windmills and is a book town with 20 permanent bookshops in a population of 1500. The town's only English bookshop is run by an Englishman named Leonard Webb settled for the past 30 years in the Netherlands. He runs a handsome one person, exclusively English, independent enterprise. Their oldest book is a religious text published in Latin in 1773. I recall texting a friend in the morning a...

SO TODAY has been a very mixed productive work day. I believe I have absolutely tired my eyes out staring at the computer screen so much in 9 hours. More than that actually. Do we ever stop working by the clock? I envisaged two lines of a story throughout the day just to keep up with my energies for some creative output for the day.  I was very happy in the morning after my dance class and decided to paint something today. The morning breeze and slight drizzle on the way back home put me in high spirits. I felt charged and every atom within me bounced with endless energy. Something about witnessing the bright day and chaos on the streets had me unexpectantly cheery for my usual self. There is a madness in routine and habits. Anthony Trollope is said to have written meticulously every day. He wrote every day for three hours, 250 words in 15 minutes and 66 pages per week was his decided course for a book draft. This kind of routine is sure to produce good writing habits. I have...

Should we be apologetic for what we read? Could it be embarrassing to admit that some of us do read YA fiction because some of it offers great advice on life! It was with such thoughts when I read this article  on why reading fiction has become more important than ever. On Kindle, I have had access to some great fiction books that I would have otherwise not read as paperbacks. One among them is Love in the Present Tense by Catherine Ryan Hyde whose another book, Pay it Forward was made into a movie. The reasons for explaining our literature choices are more important these days is because all of us get labelled and categorized by our literary tastes in a book club. On Goodreads, when I see a healthy mix of fiction, non-fiction, history and sociology books it makes me realise this variation in our reading is essential for our thinking caps to grow and expand so as to behave sensibly in public. The moral code for behaviour is set pretty hard for people who read a multitude of su...

I have always given book recommendations to friends and cousins, even strangers I've met at bookstores or during train journeys who have approached me after seeing books in my hands. So, it's still always amazing when I hear my newly-acquainted-with-reading-and-loving-it friend to thank me and share her book buys via text messages. It gives me immense pleasure to go back into my memories and relive the happiness of our shared book reads.  Having spoken to a number of readers, mostly women, I have come to a conclusion that women tend to read more classics and go by reading lists recommended by book sharing websites than men do. It is slightly oddball that there is a category called Women's Fiction but none that is called Men's Fiction. I wonder why? Also, the fact that women tend to keep a track of other books mentioned in novels or generally note down a list of books in fiction and memoirs gives a perspective on the reading patterns of men and women. A few years a...