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When the World Hardens, Go Where Beauty Still Lives
At the VU Women@VU International Women’s Day gathering this year, I found myself thinking about absence. Not only who is present in the room, but who goes missing from our frameworks. Whose names fall away. Whose lives remain insufficiently held by the language, institutions, and categories meant to account for them. During the event, Ismintha…
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Exception, By Another Name: answering some frequently asked questions about my identity
Today the state writes my name with a borrowed pen. Not the pen kept in velvet for lost inheritance certificates, but a pen found in the bottom of a drawer: a little cracked, ink clotted around the nib, the kind you warm with your breath to make it move. They call it citizenship by an…
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Reclaiming the Body in Verse: Marginalized Poets, Hair, and the Politics of Presence
Poetry has long been a terrain where power structures are challenged, reimagined, and sometimes dismantled. Within this tradition, underrepresented and marginalized poets—particularly women, queer writers, and those of diasporic communities—have used the body, and often its most intimate and symbolic parts, as a site of resistance and reclamation. Among these embodied symbols, hair emerges as…
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The Graph of a Cry
My dissertation is available as a book for academics, libraries, and those who are interested to read more about the phenomenal journey of the American ghazal. This dissertation analyzes the journey of the ancient Arabic poetic form of the ghazal to America to provide insights into transnational poetry and cultural mobility. While the movement of…
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Intersectionality and Film at the Filmacademie
Almost every year I get to work with the vibrant students of the Filmacademie. An opportunity that I greatly look forward to as it always leads to powerful conversations in which I get to learn just as much as the students. The diversity and inclusion workshop involves the theory of Intersectionality and unpacking films and…
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Luscious Fragonard from St. Petersburg
She was leaning on him as if she would fall if he did not support her. Then I noticed his foot on the bottom folds of her carefully pleated white dress. He was persistent. He was a thief; the kiss was stolen, grabbed, plucked. Sahir Ludhianvi’s Abhi Na Jaao Chod Kar gently played in the…
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Dustbin Dreams: a short story
Maya was livid. It was that dustbin again. “It is there, on my mind, all the time,” she exclaimed. She had acquired a shrill pitch she gets every time she becomes anxious. One of perils of living in our particular government colony in New Delhi is that you cannot miss the indiscreetly placed dustbin. It…
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Musing about Success
This week I spoke to two individuals on the topic of success. The first, a mother of two in her late forties, for her the concept of success had much to do with her husband and her children, “ultimately, if our children are settled and are good human beings then my life has been successful.”…
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Planting the Seed of a Growth Mindset
The core of our beliefs rest in two types of mindsets: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. In this post I will be putting forth some of my learnings on how to nurture the growth mindset. When I say “growth mindset” I mean the conviction that my passions, skills, talents, can be developed further.…
