Written by Pooja Pande is the lead reportage editor at Papercuts. Growing up between Sharjah and New Delhi, Pooja has always searched for that which withstands time. The word on the page, the music in the sky, mental mathematics. A post-graduate in English Literature from Lady Shri Ram, Delhi University, Pooja spent 13 years building the critically acclaimed arts and culture magazine, First City; first as a writer and then as an editor. Pooja is currently pursuing her writing and editing career as a freelancer, working with publishing houses and authors, helping shape manuscripts such that they achieve their best potential. Her first book, Red Lipstick: The Men in my Life, a literary-styled memoir chronicling the personal life story of transgender rights activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi, was published by Penguin-Randomhouse in August 2016. Pooja lives with her husband and six-year-old daughter in New Delhi, India. She’s still seeking a few answers on Time, Eternity and the likes, but she’s getting there. Read more by this writer |
The Accidental Pilgrim: An Interview With Aatish TaseerAatish Taseer’s latest novel, ‘The Way Things Were’, was released in India in December 2014 and will be available internationally in July. Read his thoughts on writing, learning Sanskrit and being Indian in the upcoming print edition of Papercuts Volume 14. Pre-order your print copy now! Here are some excerpts from the interview: “What I’m actively in search of, both in my reading and in my travelling, is context. My aim is to try to strip the present of its exceptionalism. There is a tendency — and this, in my view, is more pronounced in India as a consequence of our disregard for history — to feel that whatever is happening in the present moment is divorced from deeper cultural problems. My aim, as a writer, is to try to understand what part of India is as it has always been, and what part is truly new.”  Aatish Taseer. © 2014 Photo by Manoj Kumar Jain “What drew me to Sanskrit was the very simple desire to want to hear a voice from classical India. I felt it would give me some very basic intimation of the past, of its texture. (…) I had no idea what was in store for me. I had no sense of how wonderfully self-aware a literary culture this was, how realized the idea of the writer was, how strangely ‘meta’ the plays and epics were. In my mind, the body of Sanskrit literature was an undifferentiated mass of what I thought was largely liturgical or philosophical works. I didn’t know how hard ancient India had thought about the act of literary creation, the idea of authorship, the power of the written word.”  Book cover of Aatish Taseer’s novel The Way Things Were |
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