Mybookshelves

The hitman as philosopher: The strange and compelling narrative of Agni Sreedhar’s The Gangster’s Gita

Sacred Games’s depiction of the stoicism and banality of underworld lives (Ganesh Gaitonde casually mentions hacking an informer to pieces, returning home, eating “a little sabudane ki khichdi” and going to bed), came back to me while reading Agni Sreedhar’s The Gangster’s Gita | Jai Arjun Singh writes

Far from ideas of imposed 'purity', many Indian books make a case for the country's variedness

Trying to understand what Indianness might be necessarily means learning new things all the time; you’re a student for life, constantly re-evaluating your assumptions. And there are a number of books that make you thrill to the possibilities of being impure or unfixed | Jai Arjun Singh writes in 'My Bookshelves'

Of Devapriya Roy’s Friends from College, bridges to the past, and second-hand nostalgia

The writing of Devapriya Roy's Friends From College is reminiscent in some ways to a particularly observant series of journal entries, the sort that the more “writerly” of us might have maintained in our college days, creating narratives about ourselves and our friends

Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay illumines mind of Mahabharata's Karna, at the point of his moral faltering

It was only on reading Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay that I felt an author had got into the mindscape of Karna, a hugely complex character

Reading Gerald Durrell: How a boy on an idyllic Greek island inspired generations of nature-lovers, readers

As is the case with much comfort reading, revisiting these books also brings a tinge of melancholia, as one reflects on the small ways in which one’s own life paralleled (or might have paralleled) the author’s — and the very big ways in which it diverged.

Lessons from reading Richie Rich comics in a plush penthouse (as a resident of a soft-socialist country)

I wonder sometimes about the appeal — escapist or forbidden — that these Richie Rich comics must have had in a country with a soft-socialist history. They weren’t so much an unabashed celebration of capitalism as a goggle-eyed ode to a sort of demented-capitalism-on-drugs where one had so much wealth — in so many forms — that one couldn’t realistically do anything but arrange it in many pretty ways | Jai Arjun Singh writes in his monthly column #MyBookshelves

Child-appropriate literature: Should young readers be shielded from certain kinds of writing, or characters?

Much as I would today like to reply “Children should read whatever they bloody well want”, it would be silly to pretend there can be a one-size-fits-all answer

How to read anthologies, and learn about the adult world through Guy de Maupassant’s short stories

Much of Guy de Maupassant's writing was adult in ways that had little to do with sexually explicit content. It opened a window of insight into the mysteries of adult behaviour, and examined ideas and conflicts I had no firsthand experience of, at the time

Amar Chitra Katha's dark side: Recalling the morbid story of a jackal who ate an elephant

Author Jai Arjun Singh writes about the first book that he read, Amar Chitra Katha's Panchatantra – How the Jackal Ate the Elephant, examining the morbid stories and illustrations in a book meant for children