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Sumana Roy
Roy is a poet and author
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The Squelch and the Mulch of Rain: Author Sumana Roy on how the sounds of the world change when it rainsSubscriber Only
September 07, 2025 05:30 IST
The rains force us to become something more than ourselves, like it is the nature of water to spread and increase its occupation.
Sun, Sep 07, 2025
That we can repair ourselves makes us all teachersSubscriber Only
September 06, 2025 07:14 IST
We are our closest but most difficult students
Sat, Sep 06, 2025
Bottle gourd in ‘Panchayat’, plant metaphors in Hindi films hide a grief for dying forestsSubscriber Only
August 24, 2025 12:33 IST
Disappearing fruits; missing girls as missing flowers; politicians and everyday vegetables, lauki and kathal — If these are not an unconscious manifestation of the death of our forests, what is?
Tue, Aug 26, 2025
Pal do pal ka shayar: Where is the poet in cinema?Subscriber Only
March 29, 2025 07:13 IST
At some point of time in our history – I think it might be the 1980s – the word “kavi” began to lose its halo. By the end of the 1950s, the ruins of that halo had already become visible – in Pyaasa, Guru Dutt names his poet “Vijay” with a mix of melancholy and irony
Sat, Mar 29, 2025
The halo is gone: Missing poets of Hindi filmsSubscriber Only
March 27, 2025 18:40 IST
Substitution of the poet by the storyteller isn’t a coincidence. It is now our history
Fri, Mar 28, 2025
Satyajit Ray’s women constantly negotiated with modernitySubscriber Only
March 19, 2025 07:08 IST
Though the film is called 'Nayak', it is the women I notice.
Wed, Mar 19, 2025
Love in the time of climate changeSubscriber Only
February 13, 2025 17:02 IST
That romantic love is an integer of the serve-and-volley between the elements and emotions seems as obvious as the curtain responding to the wind teasing it.
Sat, Feb 15, 2025
What happens when people read to be ‘hurt’Subscriber Only
January 14, 2025 07:04 IST
To put a “TW” before a literary text is to prepare the reader for what they are to expect. But a woman like Draupadi wouldn’t have access to a world with beep alerts that warn her of the violence of men in a world that is a relentless test of one’s unpreparedness and resilience
Tue, Jan 14, 2025
The idea of attention need not be masculineSubscriber Only
January 02, 2025 07:25 IST
Framing only certain moments as worthy of attention is exhausting, unrewarding and hierarchical. Distraction could be essential to creativity
Thu, Jan 02, 2025
How do you care for a river if you never see it?Subscriber Only
November 19, 2024 04:10 IST
Will governments allow rivers and the air and nights a life, their older lives, so that 'a new Upanishad', a new Riversong, can be composed within our own hearts?
Tue, Nov 19, 2024
Why a noisy classroom must not be silencedSubscriber Only
September 10, 2024 07:37 IST
We ask students to be Socratic and implore them to argue, debate, question, dissent, but our courses are structured like the Bhagavad Gita, where, after a conversation between two tributaries of thought, one must be integrated with the other,
Tue, Sep 10, 2024
In his centenary year, making sense of Guru Dutt in the classroomSubscriber Only
August 13, 2024 15:36 IST
In films such as ‘Pyaasa’, the actor-director challenges our habit of thought while showing us how commerce dominates and displaces both art and the artist
Wed, Aug 14, 2024
From Kalidasa’s ‘Meghaduta’ to the monsoon ragas: Waiting for rainSubscriber Only
June 20, 2024 08:00 IST
It is water we seek and need, water from the sky, water nearby, on our bodies of course, as prophylactic to the curse of heat, but also to our ears.
Thu, Jun 20, 2024
The work epidemic: Why Indians need to rediscover leisureSubscriber Only
May 17, 2024 13:06 IST
I wanted to believe that my generation had managed to dodge the lathi charge of the slogan ‘aaram haram hai’ that damaged my father’s generation. But we live on a treadmill, to burn until burnout, from which neither philosophy nor scientific discovery nor joy can ever be produced
Fri, May 17, 2024
Laapataa Ladies: A fantasy by those who have never lived in a villageSubscriber Only
May 06, 2024 08:00 IST
In the film, handbook feminism defeats patriarchy with a cinematic ease that would be hard to imagine in rural India.
Wed, May 08, 2024
Arre ji sunte ho: When attention is affectionSubscriber Only
March 09, 2024 17:53 IST
From 'sunte ho' to 'bakbak', the long history of shushing women
Mon, Mar 11, 2024
UGC’s selfie points with PM Modi: It’s the nature of leaders to clone themselves as their nationSubscriber Only
December 16, 2023 18:02 IST
With their infinite repetitions of Narendra Modi, these selfie points were, quite visibly, meant to be an optic of ‘propaganda’ — to make classrooms and Vande Bharat trains all look alike
Mon, Dec 18, 2023
How would you say ‘I miss you’ in an Indian language?Subscriber Only
November 27, 2023 07:00 IST
Silly as it might sound, I sometimes wonder whether it was the invention of a sport such as hang gliding, which brought the freedom and liveliness of air into human lives, that has given this new youthfulness to the life of ‘hang’ in our times. Like ‘miss’, it has resisted translation
Mon, Nov 27, 2023
This Teachers’ Day, I wish for my students to step out of the dishonesty of Instagram ‘likes’Subscriber Only
September 05, 2023 18:29 IST
A jaded generation, their exhaustion deriving from the pessimism that has been their sad inheritance, they have been raised by a culture of dishonesty. The language that surrounds them perpetrates the timidity and obedience forced on them by the behaviour of market forces
Wed, Sep 06, 2023
Sumana Roy writes: The Sonipat school of history – universities without contextSubscriber Only
August 21, 2023 15:40 IST
The purposive forgetfulness, a characteristic shared by Sonipat and other small towns where history seems to be a useless burden, where everything must be turned new, is oppressive. It messes up our sense of time and history and leads us to think of the world as a supermarket
Mon, Aug 21, 2023
India@75, Looking at 100: What will be the history of India without the history of its plant life?Subscriber Only
May 10, 2023 06:50 IST
The history of plant life, records of its settlement on land as well as its death and evacuation from these spaces, a census of plants and trees — all these constitute our national history, not only the life of kings, queens and the famous
Wed, May 10, 2023
Monica Ghosh, my mother-in-law: On Mother’s Day, writer-poet Sumana Roy on discovering the unorthodox womanSubscriber Only
May 08, 2022 10:13 IST
A woman of agency, a lover of music and a feminist in spirit, she cared neither for saccharine femininity nor for conventions but she could draw people close to her -- like a tree
Sun, May 08, 2022
Understanding our DIY fame cultureSubscriber Only
January 14, 2022 04:00 IST
🔴 Sumana Roy writes: Once upon a time, one could be just a noun: ‘Professor’. That isn’t enough anymore and the adjectives must be worn like the medals on an army man
Fri, Jan 14, 2022
For long, Indian English literary establishment has enforced a culture that can only be called BrahminicalSubscriber Only
December 19, 2020 03:52 IST
The career of the “literary” has not been very different from the Brahmin’s protectionism of the mantra, an inheritance kept out of the reach of the non-Brahmin. One of the ways in which this has been done in the last hundred years is through anthologies that create — and reiterate — the idea and the habitat of the literary.
Sat, Dec 19, 2020
Home is where the work is: Writers and their workstationsSubscriber Only
April 29, 2020 10:30 IST
As the COVID-19 pandemic makes work-from-home the new normal, a look at the workspaces of people who have always functioned in isolation -- writers. For Sumana Roy, the bed is her home and studio.
Wed, Apr 29, 2020Journalism of Courage
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