A disconnect exists between expectation and reality in America. There is the promised state of being, of living “the dream” as beamed through television and, more recently, through the Internet. And there is the squalid and mundane reality of everyday existence and the analog world. That disconnect finds expression in various aspects of its society:…
Read more On Reality-Altering Events: Review of Don DeLillo’s White Noise
I started running quite late in life. I was 35 and living in Portland. After a series of work mishaps and visa issues, I became unemployed. My living quarters consisted of an ill-lit single room furnished with a writing desk, bed, and a closet. During the day, I sat in coffee shops and applied to…
On Christmas Eve in December 2014, roughly a month after moving to New York City, I became homeless. I’d been trying to find work while living at a friend’s place on the Upper West Side. There were gigs in the hospitality industry but they were sporadic and my salary was minimum wage. That evening, a…
Read more On Being Homeless and Lars Eighner’s Travels with Lizbeth
At the end of Anjan Sundaram’s book “Bad News: Last Journalists In a Dictatorship”, there is a list of 60 journalists “who faced difficulties” (or, in simple words, were punished) for criticizing the government in Rwanda. One was left in a coma after a knife attack. Another disappeared. And another was shot dead on the…
Read more Can Journalism Survive in a Dictatorship: A Review of Anjan Sundaram’s Bad News
Libra is a fictional reconstruction of events leading up to and after the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, the man alleged to have assassinated him. Both deaths were equal parts mysterious and sordid. In twenty seconds that stunned the country, Kennedy, a leader who captivated America during a tumultuous time in…
Read more The Slippery Reality of Kennedy’s Assassination. A Review of Don DeLillo’s Libra
Shoe Dog, Nike co-founder Phil Knight’s memoir about the company’s evolution into a sports powerhouse, is an excellent read. At a time when fly-by-night entrepreneurs dispense textbook wisdom about their experiences in distilled tweets and Facebook posts, the memoir is refreshing because it packs in a wide scope. Knight is an old-school entrepreneur, who worked…
I borrowed Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters from the public library because I wanted to indulge in nostalgia and emotion. There is a certain claustrophobic beauty to Mistry’s works. His novels have a large canvas and are typically set against turbulent times of political upheaval in India’s recent history. But the narration is tightly focused…
Read more The Complicated Dynamics of Family Love: Family Matters Review
On 9/11, President George W. Bush Jr. spent eight hours up in the air after the attacks. He was stopped from returning to Washington D.C. by his Chief of Staff and the Secret Service. He was isolated from his administration due to a breakdown in communications. But he didn’t need legal briefs or consultations.…
Read more 9/11, Iraq War, and the Financial Crisis: A Review of the Bush Presidency
(Click title above to buy book) “A Catcher in the Rye” was my first (and, for a long time, only) Salinger book. I read it during my undergraduate years in Mumbai. I was living alone, drinking large amounts of alcohol and, like most adolescents, unhappy with life and the world. It was a confusing time:…
Rakesh Sharma 