Business
Outlook
The Artifice of Reality
TO my mind, one of the most vital aspects of creativity is the ability to unravel the relationship between a character and their world: their language, politics, lineage and era. The writer's task is not one of mere placement; I do not “place” a character into a setting.
5 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
HOME... A CONVERSATION
Donskobar Junisha Khongwir is an educator and visual artist.
7 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
The Spaces of Fiction
One of the important lessons that I use in teaching the skill of reading is to ask the readers to focus on the how, rather than the what.
7 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Elsewhere
I often feigned illness on Monday mornings to avoid a needlework class in school. As soon as the school bus had trundled down the street, however, it was safe to be well again. I remember lying back in bed, looking out at a peepul tree, and dreaming my way into ancient Greece.
6 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Well-Kept Ruins
! remember, is this what you call remembering?
4 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
The Geography of Waiting
YEARS ago, while I was waiting on Platform Number Three at Dadar for a local train that might be a little less crowded, an elderly man approached me and asked, “What place is this?”
5 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Diary of a Homeless Child
Home, sweet home. Sweet. Home. Home. A gust of breath escapes me when I say home.
4 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Discovering Telenapota
DURING the conjunction of Saturn and Mars—yes, Mars, most likely—you, too, might discover Telenapota.
3 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Our Unseen Sanctuary
IT was pitch-black on the mountain road through Yemen, and the driver and I had just survived a swarm of teenage boys crowding round us while waving assault rifles.
6 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Márquez's Macondo and Gandhi, Still Undeciphered
MACONDO, in Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, begins, famously, as a town founded in the middle of nowhere, born out of flight.
9 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Sky Above, Earth Below
For every novel, the central idea, the story, often takes shape easily in the mind.
10+ min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Tracing the Memory of Migration
This photo-essay looks into the lost memory of migration connected to women indentured labourers from north India, who migrated to the Caribbean, Suriname and Mauritius in the nineteenth century.
5 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
A Breath Held Long
THE human instinct to act or perform in the world must be deeply connected to the idea of desire. A desire to be elsewhere.
2 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
The World and the Word
IN fact, we live in garrulous times.
6 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Navigating the Nation Factory
IN 1979, Andrei Tarkovsky, the great Russian filmmaker, completed Stalker, the last film he would make in his homeland.
7 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Imagine
from an imaginary notebook I am yet to imagine...
6 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
HOUSE OF CONTEMPLATIONS HOUSE OF CONVERSATIONS
TO the self and the others, this home is a shelter, a place of contemplation, a space for conversations. The guestbook, which Aradhana Seth calls the 'Elsewhere Book', is a drawing board, a container, a time machine where you can find yourself and others in an elsewhere time and place.
3 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega
I am concerned with the landscape of memory.
4 min |
January 21, 2026
Outlook
The Big Blind Spot
Caste boundaries still shape social relations in Tamil Nadu-a state long rooted in self-respect politics
8 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
Jat Yamla Pagla Deewana
Dharmendra's tenderness revealed itself without any threats to his masculinity. He adapted himself throughout his 65-year-long career as both a product and creature of the times he lived through
5 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
Fairytale of a Fallow Land
Hope Bihar can once again be that impossibly noisy village in Phanishwar Nath Renu's Parti Parikatha-divided, yes, but still capable of insisting that rights are not favours and development is more than a slogan shouted from a stage
10+ min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
The Lesser Daughters of the Goddess
The Dravidian movement waged an ideological war against the devadasi system. As former devadasis lead a new wave of resistance, the practice is quietly sustained by caste, poverty, superstition and inherited ritual
2 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
The Meaning of Mariadhai
After a hundred years, what has happened to the idea of self-respect in contemporary Tamil society?
5 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
When the State is the Killer
The war on drugs continues to be a war on the poor
5 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
We Are Intellectuals
A senior law officer argued in the Supreme Court that \"intellectuals\" could be more dangerous than \"ground-level terrorists\"
5 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
An Equal Stage
The Dravidian Movement used novels, plays, films and even politics to spread its ideology
10+ min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
The Dignity in Self-Respect
How Periyar and the Self-Respect Movement took shape in Tamil Nadu and why the state has done better than the rest of the country on many social, civil and public parameters
5 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
When Sukumaar Met Elakkiya
Self-respect marriage remains a force of socio-political change even a century later
7 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
The Flow of Thirukkural
Dravidianism developed as a challenge against the Aryan-supremacist and Hindu nationalist trends of India's early nationalist movement. It continues to challenge Hindutva's Vedic supremacist concepts
7 min |
December 11, 2025
Outlook
The Druid's Bitter Medicine
When Nehru wanted Periyar to be kept in a mental health facility for his vitriolic views on Brahmins
6 min |