Life – Paradise Prose Blog

Paradise Lost (?)

By: Shreya February 7, 2023

Life, Writingbiblical, creative, creative writing, eden, fall, Featured, love, Milton, nature, paradise, poem, poetry, rereading, WritingLeave a Comment

I wrote back to the infamous image of ‘paradise lost’ that has been doing the rounds since Milton. Enjoy!

Echoes

By: Shreya December 26, 2022

Life, Writingcreative writing, divine, idol, krishna, love, murthi, nature, poem, poetry, spiritualityLeave a Comment

A poem that explores alignment, through response to a sculpture of Krishna.

Realising The Truth Can be Difficult (Part One)

By: Shreya July 4, 2020March 21, 2021

Life, Writing in the Real Worldequality, human, injustice, intrinsic, material, race, reality, reflection, spiritual, truthLeave a Comment

It seems so simple: all the human population has to do to end injustice of any sort is realise that all life was made intrinsically equal. I don’t mean people are all equal in terms of biology, wealth, socioeconomic status, physical beauty according to current standards or any of that transactional stuff. I’m talking about…

Shlaime (Noun): A Poem by Shreya Manna

By: Shreya June 21, 2020June 21, 2020

Life, Writing, Writing in the Real World1 Comment

I had conflicting feelings about sharing this poem. The seeming atmosphere of outrage around us doesn’t seem to encourage self-reflection. Almost everyone will have seen memes about the ways in which 2020 has been a catastrophic year – a deadly disease transforming work, if not stopping it all together, the Black Lives matter movement catching…

Prose in the Time of a Pandemic (An Essay)

A post about the role that blogging, writing and the study of Literature plays during a pandemic like coronavirus.

Self-Song – A Poem

By: Shreya April 14, 2020April 14, 2020

Life, Writing, Writing in the Real Worldbengali, Life, new, poetry, pohela baisakh, reflection, self, Writing, yearLeave a Comment

Today is the Bengali New Year (Shubho Noboborsho or Poila Boishak). Since people from West Bengal mark this festivity as a time of auspicious beginnings, I thought that I should write a poem to mark a sacred beginning of my own creation.

Water-Forms Poetry Project – Part 1

Hello again, I’m back with (more) attempts at writing poetry and an update about starting Hilary Term (i.e. Term 2) at Oxford. Since I’ve been gone, I’ve been writing away for our weekly essays about everything including the lives of saints in Old English up until the modernist experiments of T.S. Eliot. I’ve taken up…

On Being Neither the Outsider Nor The Insider at the University of Oxford

By: Shreya December 8, 2019July 27, 2020

Life, Start Here, Writing in the Real Worldoxford, Study Help, university of oxfordLeave a Comment

It’s the age-old controversy: bring up the hallowed halls of the University of Oxford or Cambridge in a conversation, and you are bound to find yourself dredging up countless accusations of the institution being steeped in elitism and a lack of diversity. Having heard a good few of these myself before applying to Oxford, I…

Back with the Books: Learning Old English at the University of Oxford

By: Shreya October 31, 2019July 24, 2020

Life, Reading, Start Herecourse, english, old, oxford, study, university of oxford, VideoLeave a Comment

I’m back! I missed writing on this blog, but over these first few weeks of university I’ve gotten up to plenty of (essay) writing for my course tutors which will make my writing here much more worth reading. So, you might know that one of the things that makes the English course at Oxford stand…

Thinking in Zebra Mode – and Literature

By: Shreya August 3, 2019December 3, 2022

Life, Reading, Writing in the Real Worldcriticism, essay, interpretation, psychology, Reading, WritingLeave a Comment

Reading Literature is more than just a question of books; it’s a question of our worldview, our endless mental assumptions. This post is an attempt at becoming conscious of my own Achilles heel – black and white thinking.