or what it is like
“Get your sweets from the candy man/ get your truth from the shelf/don’t buy into the fairytale/ just be good to yourself” No Small Thing/ TEARS FOR FEARS (2022) Maali Almeida. Photographer. Gambler. Slut. Perhaps also the most interesting, confusing, and bemusing literary character I have encountered since, as a 16-year-old, I first discovered Mohun Biswas […]
In Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator recollects his childhood experiences in aristocratic France, reflecting on the loss of Time and the lack of meaning in the world. Other than the narrator’s story, Proust explores the nature of human consciousness and our capacity to connect with other human beings. How an […]
Like the proverbial Man of humankind, Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart was a man of many personal achievements but one always challenged by his arrogance. As a young man, he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat and worked hard to earn his place as a clansman, warrior, farmer and family […]
In a year when everything about everything seemed to be incendiary, all news confusing, all social media angrily polarised, it was certainly more comforting to recluse in the parallel universe of fiction and cinema and reflect on the complexities of human relationships. The world has become a George Orwell novel. Fascism, xenophobia and hate pass […]
Every artist is a cannibal/ every poet is a thief/ all kill their inspiration/ and sing about their grief/ over love It’s been the best of times, it’s been the best of times. I’m writing this like a film editor clipping off the badly acted bits that couldn’t be recast. Or the actor who improvises […]
Music Although our cult of fast distractions and great disruptions is hell-bent on crushing the album beneath its caterpillar tracks, the long play musical form will always remain a pillar of art. Admittedly making an album seems to be a difficult feat for the insta-everything generation, but it is still an ideal to aspire to. […]
There is apparently a scientific reason why, as we grow older, we tend not to resonate with newer trends in music. The songs we fall in love with when we’re younger will typically guide our subsequent listening habits and they are also the songs that we carry with us as we age. Our music tastes […]
“Why Colombia?” was a question I was often asked by friends when I first mentioned that I would be going there. A few of them raised their eyebrows and gave me a supposedly ‘knowing wink’. (This confused me, since I couldn’t figure out the suggestion in the wink, or what it was I was supposed […]
Music It could be my advancing years or the death of my brain cells, but I am increasingly unable to decipher one musical style from another, unless the piece of music was recorded in the twentieth century, or does not have the ‘pop’ tag attached to it. We live in eclectic times, or rather we […]
NOORMOHAMED 