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.
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All articles filed in Writing
Water-Forms Poetry Project: Final Poem
A poem about water-forms.
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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…
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Falling in Love – A Poem
Trees spilling with boughs of white flowers Like bright eyes, shrouded in the waxy palms of leaves I watch some fall, stolen by the breeze, I watch them fall (in love). Petals unfurling, they embrace the dusk with open arms, sprinkling the earth. Hush. Listen to them land: tiny, soft blankets for unseen slumbering fairies.…
Read MoreThinking in Zebra Mode – and Literature
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.
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Home: A Poem
I wrote this poem in light of the events in the news recently that have made the word ‘home’ a politically charged one, and also as a memory of my personal experiences that put into question what home might be.
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Literary Theory: Why Should a Young Writer Care?
Why should I be spending my summer holidays reading Terry Eagleton’s ‘Introduction to Literary Theory’? The unglamorous reason, of course, is to acclimatise myself to the looming rigours of studying English at university. Another reason is anxiety: count yourself lucky if you can sit in one place without your mind running wild. Mine, meanwhile, needs…
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An English Literature Workshop with Myself, Age 14
Humbling, funny and cringeworthy – that was my experience of writing this scene imagining myself as a mentor to a teenage version of myself. For all the earnest young writers and English students out there!
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Breathe In Dawn, Breathe Out Starlight: A Poem
Breathe in Dawn, Breathe out Starlight – some poetic observations on the endless intelligence and regeneration of the natural world around us.
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The Dress: A Fairytale…Or Is It? – A Short Story by Shreya Manna
In childhood, it’s possible for us to see, even believe, in the magic of fairytales. But as we grow older, there’s no reason why we can’t take our grown-up problems and laugh at them, thanks to the superpower that being human gives us: the power to tell stories. This fairytale is really a story I wrote for myself, to capture the circus of our minds that only we can hear.
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