Mid-March in Bangalore circa 2009

The pretty morning light through my pink Cassia, early mangoes and that smell of wet mud that assures me it’s raining somewhere. Despite the traffic, there’s quite nothing like mid-March in Bangalore.


“Mid-winter spring is it’s own season.*”


So what shall we read when the weather is so alluring? Something clearly curl up-able, something edgy, something new? I’m an everywhere, anytime reader, so here’s what are currently in the loo, next to my computer, on my desktop, by my bed and on the yellow chair in the garden.

Loo – Tehelka

Desktop – The Guardian – Great Poets of the 20th century

Computer – The Shifting Point – Peter Brook

Kitchen – Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi

Chair – Buddha – Vol. 6 Ananda – Osamu Tezuka


Tehelka is a habit. My morning reading of The Guardian is a family joke, but seriously the Great Poets series is lovely, if only to revisit TS Elliot* and Ted Hughes and to read (for me, anyway) Siegfried Sassoon for the first time. Peter Brook is a theatre muse I often return to. But my something new and edgy are the last two.

I thought comics were for babies and that graphic novels were grown up’s name for comics. And am still ambivalent. But I love Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and have since been introduced to the Buddha series by my daughter. Deep, funny and haunting.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is about an academic, Azar Nafisi, defending the cause of literature in Iran during the Islamic revolution. It is interesting to read analogies between Nabakov’s Lolita, and the oppression of citizens in times of political strife. How the simple act of watching Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice in censored, un-subtitled form can so consume a people when their senses have been deprived.


How much we take for granted, no?