Gatekeeping is hard these days. Music is too accessible, which is great, which means you no longer need to rely on your dad’s cassette collection (we used to own cassettes!) to shape your prepubescent taste in music. It also means that you no longer need to risk virus-ridden YouTube-to-MP3 websites, no longer need to seek…

More than a year has passed since I watched In the Mood for Love for the first time. I love that movie. I love its language of cramped spaces, narrow hallways, steep stone staircases, peeling paint hanging off the walls, light-bulbs that hang from the ceiling by its powering wires. Not Hong Kong. It reminds…

I moved cities this year. Kinda. Adulthood is supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to be the phase of your life that you compare constantly to your childhood’s, it’s supposed to be the thing that gives you seriousness and tragedy, and also euphoria and humility. It involves knowing how to iron your clothes, what the…

The long-awaited sequel is here! I’m back with a consolidated set of thoughts about the books I read this year. This one’s going to be different though – I now know how to use separators! But seriously, I don’t really have a purpose for doing this except that it might excite you enough to consider…

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —Success in Circuit lies What I’ve always been profoundly proud of about this blog is its refusal to stick to form. No post resembles all the others, I hope. And that is because the form, even the absence of form, that a blog must have, in my…

I think life is a series of restaurants more than anything else. Think about it. What else is as temporary as a restaurant? When people leave, you have their images, their essences, the songs they listened to, and the habits they gave you, lingering. A restaurant shuts down, and it is gone. Every now and…

This is a post about perception. About how I think about things. About what I write and how I perceive it. All of this because I am a closed-off person. Writing, to me, is an intimate act. Words once read cannot be erased. And writing is about support, about consolation. In all honesty, I don’t…

Very few people who regularly read Japanese literature are unfamiliar with Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The father of the Japanese short story lends his name to Japan’s highest literary honour: the Akutagawa Prize. His work is largely immortal, with his most famous works (Rashomon and In a Grove) lending their plots to Akira Kurosawa’s iconic 1950 drama…

Having finished Milan Kundera’s 20th-century behemoth, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I am once again filled with the disconnect between what I am and the body that bears it. The body has weight, the soul does not. Even in the Gita, the body is changeable, malleable and temporary. It is separate from the thinking, moral…