The pavements are hotter in winter, the rain never wets the asphalt and I never tell you to do anything else other than “be”. 

I became an ardent admirer of Amrita Pritam, the maverick Punjabi author, an outspoken critic of the Indian patriarchy and discriminating social practices, three decades back in New York when I was putting together an anthology of world feminist poems in Bangla translation.

Even if you are not a film enthusiast, chances are high that you have watched the 2022 Telegu blockbuster RRR. At the very least, you should have heard about it.

And along with our bodies, the rage keeps on, / we chafe and bleed and clot and steer; / we go mad and nude

And in spite of knowing this/ In spite of the absurdity of it all/ You let yourself fall

The lad appeared to be very humble and slowly took a seat. But I noticed that he did not take his eyes off my face even once. He kept on staring at me through his glasses.

Bibhuti Babu’s pen tenderly reveals the nudity of apparently disturbing feelings and emotions that we are so ashamed and afraid to accept and express.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that food is the undisputed sixth love language that Gary Chapman forgot to mention in his 1992 book. Or maybe it’s just the gastronome in me speaking.

In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.

Ask me not of Grief. For I have been burnt by its friendly fire with blood and bits of oozing mortal flesh spun flaky and ashen by its biting cold breath.

that single spot, shunyo, a hole that is filled to its circumference, I drive and the sun is bigger than I’ve ever seen and orange, look directly into it or, i had to write a poem to go along with the first

His face was growing warmer, it seemed as though the intangible entity that was stinging his closed eyes was growing stronger.

Love is the enormous mango tree growing directly from an ancient grave, so old that no headstone remains at all.

from my blood fangs, disarrayed cold / looting my sore body / that has done so much for me, while I ached

Melville's critics, inevitably, panned him for what he had characterised self-deprecatingly and in his frustration as his fictional "botches," although his works were rarely that.

I wonder where God sits in that tower. I wonder whose cries are louder.

The way we perceive the word “emotion” through the gendered lens contributes to systematic oppression because it dismisses those who fall under the umbrella of the emotional radar and it is easier to silence their voices as emotional beings because they are often, according to the patriarchal society, deemed as unstable, illogical, or disoriented.

‘It’s been two years today, a full two years, and it continues to amaze me that people run for their lives the moment they see me.

I proposed a panel at a North American Bangla literary conference. ‘Is translation itself a form of activism?’ I queried.

I sing the song of equality– Of a country where fresh joy blossoms in every heart