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an hour ago
- General
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‘White Lillies': An intimate chronicle of a woman through terrains of loss, grief, and enduring pain
What happens when you lose the one through whom you learned love? And what if you lose not one, but two such anchors? What do you do when you are left with holes of their shape in your heart? How do you move forward when the only desire left in you is the longing to have loved them just a little harder, held them a little longer? White Lilies: An Essay on Grief by Vidya Krishnan is a tender yet aching meditation on these questions – an intimate chronicle of her journey through the terrain of loss, grief, and enduring pain. An unending loss In August, when the marigolds were in full bloom, Krishnan did not return to Delhi. Instead, she flew to Chennai to be with her dying grandmother – the woman who had raised her, fed her, and loved her with the quiet fierceness only grandmothers know. As she watched her haemorrhage before her eyes, Krishnan could do nothing but hold her wrinkled hand, the same hand that once comforted her in childhood. They cremated her on a Sunday afternoon. By Monday morning, Krishnan was back in Delhi. Grief-stricken and trying to move on, though barely. Her partner, Ali, had dinner plans that evening. He offered to cancel them, but she asked him to go, gently reminding him to bring soup on his way back. He never returned. A car hit him. And then another. In the span of a single weekend, Krishnan lost two of the greatest loves of her life – her grandmother to time, and her partner to a random, fatal accident. For years, she reeled from the double blow – mourning, disbelieving, grappling with the sheer absurdity and finality of death. A seasoned journalist long accustomed to reporting on illness, accidents, and loss, Krishnan found herself unarmed when death arrived at her doorstep. 'The thing about death,' she writes, 'is that the loss you feel the day a person dies is simply an inciting event. If you live long enough, you lose them repeatedly, for as long as you live and they do not.' In White Lilies, Krishnan brings forth a searing anatomy of grief, laying bare its raw, unyielding presence in the body. She writes about how grief is not simply an abstract emotion, but a physical invader; how it takes root in your memory and personal space, burrowing itself into the very fabric of your existence. It lives in you like a parasite, gnaws at your stomach, and refuses to be sated. The smallest reminders about those now gone only deepen that pit, transforming every corner of life into a shadow of loss. 'No one ever warns you about days like these,' Krishnan writes, 'when hell resides in the pit of your stomach, when you must breathe through a bottomless black hole.' Grief, in her telling, is as real as the teeth in your mouth, as tangible and inescapable as the air you breathe. It is not a metaphor, but a relentless force that takes hold of the body, creating a space where memory and suffering converge. Delhi, the city of Death She tries to make sense of it in every way she knows – in science, in religion, in recurring patterns, in the minutiae of daily life, in the mysteries of the afterlife – until she finds someone to blame: Delhi. Krishnan writes the city from the vantage point of the inevitable – Death. She lends material weight to the spectral cityscapes of Anisha Lalvani's Girls Who Stray and Ranbir Sidhu's Night in Delhi, both of which render Delhi as a city simmering with pain, silent suffering, insecurities, stark inequalities, and a brutal power imbalance – where the rich rule over the poor, and people can die arbitrarily, abruptly. She does all this while grieving. White Lilies offers a succinct and devastating commentary on the classist nature of Delhi, as seen through its roads, its traffic, and the reckless rhythms of driving. The traffic in Delhi, as Krishnan astutely observes, is not simply a logistical challenge. It is governed by the petty yet insidious dynamics of power. The streets unfold as an intricate 'dance of dominance,' where hierarchy hums in every revving engine and screeches through every abrupt brake. This relentless choreography of movement, filled with anger and disregard for life, reflects the unspoken 'class warfare' that defines the city. The powerful navigate the roads with impunity, their status allowing them to bypass the rules, while the powerless cling to fragile aspirations of breaking the rules, crossing lines, in a desperate attempt to taste power, even if just for a fleeting moment. It is in these small, everyday (mis)adventures that the stark inequalities of Delhi's social fabric are most acutely felt, where the struggle for power plays out on the most ordinary of stages – the road. Delhi, with its heartlessness, its endless history of death and renewal, stood as the perfect mirror to her mourning. But in this unforgiving metropolis, she also found a companion – a voice that could speak to her grief with a language both bitter and beautiful: Mirza Ghalib. In the midst of her own sorrow, Krishnan found solace in the city's echoes of Ghalib's ghazals, as if his poetic legacy held a secret truth she had been searching for. 'In his lifetime, grief did not diminish him. It expanded his capacity to hold infinite beauty.' Krishnan brings Delhi to life through the dead – those who have passed, but whose presence continues to haunt the city's streets. She traces a historical narrative of Delhi's own suffering, its cycles of destruction and rebirth. From the Mughals to the East India Company to the British colonial period, and then swiftly to the present, she paints a poetic yet painful account of how much the city, and more so its residents, have endured. Through these centuries of ruin and renewal, Krishnan evokes the city not just as a geographical space, but as a living entity – one that has absorbed and reflected the endless pains of its people, yet has always, relentlessly, risen again. White Lilies is a devastatingly honest meditation on the unyielding finality of death, written by someone who has spent years trying to make sense of its silences. Krishnan's exploration of grief is anything but abstract; it is raw, lived, and searing. She meets loss not from a distance, but up close – touching its jagged edges, tracing its contours through memory, regret, and the stubborn persistence of love. Grief, in her hands, is not a solid entity but a mosaic that is fragile, luminous, and alive. This is not merely a book about death, but about surviving its aftermath, about learning to live alongside absence, and about discovering what it means to live with life, with tenderness, with regard, for oneself and for others. It is an invocation of how to carry the dead within us as quiet companions on the road ahead. Powerful and quietly shattering, White Lilies does not offer closure – it offers companionship. And in doing so, it gently, insistently asks: how do we grieve, how do we remember, and how do we begin again?
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2 hours ago
- General
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CUET UG Result 2025: Final answer key, scorecard soon at cuet.nta.nic.in, details here
The National Testing Agency (NTA) will soon announce the Common University Entrance Test Undergraduate (CUET UG) 2025 results and final answer key. Once declared, candidates can access their scorecards on the official website The examination was conducted in Computer-Based Test (CBT) mode from May 13 to June 4 for 13,54,699 registered candidates. The provisional answer key for CUET UG 2025 was released on June 17, and the objection window remained open until June 20. Steps to download CUET UG 2025 result
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3 hours ago
- Politics
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Assam plans to give district commissioners power to approve Aadhaar applications
The Assam government is planning a policy to issue Aadhaar cards to adults only through the district commissioners, said Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Friday. 'This will ensure that no illegal immigrant can get an Aadhaar made and we can track and push them back easily,' Sarma told reporters following a Cabinet meeting. The proposal is being discussed and a decision would be taken at a Cabinet meeting in the future, The Indian Express quoted him as saying. The chief minister said that Assam was 'pushing back' 15 to 30 persons to Bangladesh every day, but added that the police had not been able to detain all allegedly undocumented migrants. He stated that since Aadhaar had been in use in the state for many years, most adults already had one, and only children now needed to apply. Therefore, the proposal to have Aadhaar applications verified by the district commissioner would apply only to adults. This would ensure that 'fresh people coming from Bangladesh will not be able to take them', he said. Sarma said that earlier, the unique identification document was issued through Aadhaar centres or sub-divisional commissioner offices. If the proposed policy is implemented, no one will be able to obtain Aadhaar without the approval of the district commissioner. The chief minister also said that the process of registering births late would also be made stricter. 'Even to be included in voter lists this time, gradually, birth certificates will be required,' he was quoted as saying by The Indian Express. 'That's why we want to make the issuing of birth certificates also tighter… Even cases of availing backdated birth certificates will also go to DCs [district commissioners].' The Assam government has repeatedly raised concerns about 'suspected foreigners' acquiring Aadhaar cards. In September, Sarma claimed that the number of Aadhaar cards issued had exceeded the projected population in at least four districts: Barpeta (103.7%), Dhubri (103.4%), Morigaon (101.7%) and Nagaon (100.6%), The Telegraph reported. The Assam government has been forcing people over the border into Bangladesh since May. Many of those 'pushed' into the country claim they are Indian citizens. On June 9, Sarma said that more than 330 persons who were declared to be foreigners by the state's Foreigners Tribunals have been 'pushed' back into Bangladesh. An additional 20 persons were deported on Thursday night, the chief minister said. The Foreigners Tribunals in the state are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. They have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory. On May 20, Sarma said that the state was 'duty-bound to protect the interests' of Assam and ' expel all illegal immigrants from the state through any means and as per directions of [the] Supreme Court'. The chief minister was referring to the court's February 4 ruling that the state must deport persons who had been declared foreign nationals.
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3 hours ago
- Entertainment
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In Bengaluru, an ancient play finds new voice in the world's oldest living dramatic tradition
A celebrated courtesan is being chased across the streets of Ujjayini by the king's boorish brother-in-law and his thugs. She takes shelter in the home of a noble, impoverished and much-married Brahmin she is smitten with. To ensure another rendezvous she leaves her jewellery behind in his son's toy cart. But her attendant's lover steals this bundle and the Brahmin is falsely implicated. Several hairy twists later, there is a happy ending for all the good people. Along the way, the inept king is overthrown in a coup by a herdsman, the courtesan is murdered but revealed to be alive, and her beloved is saved from the noose at the last moment. For good measure, there are stormy nights and elephant fights. For over 2,000 years, Shudraka's action-packed Sanskrit play Mrchhakatika (the little clay cart) – and its plot woven with love, intrigue, crime, satire, caste and class inequities, politics, and human follies – has enthralled readers and theatre lovers. Noted for combining the grand sweep of Shakespeare with the fine irony of Moliere, the play maintains a perennial appeal despite its vintage. This is not your usual Sanskrit classic dealing with gods, damsels, apsaras, myths and nobility – it is peopled by gamblers, rascals, philanderers, drunks, avaricious rulers, scheming lovers, bhikshus and priests. It is set not in a forest, palace or celestial realm but in a bustling Indian city in ancient times. And, in a realistic portrayal of the time, all but five elite characters – who speak Sanskrit – slip into the subaltern languages of the time, such as Prakrit. There are neither black nor white characters in Mrchhakatika. As Sanskrit scholar William Ryder points out in the introduction to his 1905 translation of the play, what you find in Shudraka's works are cosmopolitan characters who are 'citizens of the world'. Ever since the Orientalists discovered the play around 200 years ago, the saga of Vasantasena and Charudatta's trials and travails has travelled the world and been translated widely into Indian and global languages. A popular script, it was turned into desi and western operas, and presented several times on silver screen in multiple languages. Most famously, it became the lush Girish Karnad film Utsav. Next week, Mrchhakatika will be staged in the world's oldest living dramatic tradition that claims a vintage as old as the play itself – koodiyattam, the Sanskrit theatre form from Kerala. Directed by scholar and choreographer G Venu, Mrchhakatikam will come alive at Bengaluru's Ranga Shankara theatre, its 10 acts compressed into about two hours. 'It is a very strong play for its time and the writing is remarkable,' said Venu. 'Shudraka's concerns are very progressive – he talks of revolt and inequalities. And I would describe Vasantasena as a feminist, and an important figure in the city where the play is set.' Adapted for the first time for koodiyattam, the play marks a departure from the form's focus on mythological epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. For koodiyattam artiste Kapila Venu, who will be playing Vasantasena, this is what makes Mrchhakatikam an invigorating experience. 'I find it liberating playing her because she does not fit that subservient stereotype,' she said. 'Vasantasena is contradictory, she is wealthy, intelligent, beautiful and has agency. She does not succumb to the powerful and is drawn to Charudatta because he, like her, is kind and generous. When I play Sita or Shakuntala I am required to bring lajja (shyness) to the character. Here, I love that I get to keep my chin up at all times.' Sooraj Nambiar, the koodiyattam artiste who plays Charudatta, says Mrchhakatikam is at heart a very current and a very political play. In koodiyattam, where characters are costumed very differently to indicate their high levels of virtuousness or infamy, the characters in the play will be wearing almost similar costumes to mark their ordinariness. 'Charudatta, for example, is an even-tempered man – he is not very expressive and that calls for subtlety,' he said. 'And even more unusually, it is not he who approaches the nayika with declarations of love or expression of desire. It is she who embraces him first.' Fact and fiction There is an ongoing debate over who the playwright Shudraka was. Some like Sanskrit scholar MR Kale believe that he was a king-playwright of the southern Andhrabhrityas dynasty. Others have concluded that he belonged to the nomadic Abhira (herdsman) dynasty and lived and ruled somewhere in modern-day Maharashtra. There are others still who claim that he was a Brahmin king of Ujjain. As for the play's vintage, there is no agreement on that either – estimates place Shudraka between Kalidasa (4-5 CE) and Bhasa (3 CE). But Kale, in his 1926 work The Mrichchhakatika of Sudraka, dated him and his work even earlier – 2BC – arguing that the references to astrology, Buddhist institutions and figures and the Sanskrit itself should mark it as an older play. What is generally agreed upon is that the play combines historical facts with fiction and likely that Shudraka had a ring-side view of the factual events, presumably as a ruler. The revolt of the herdsman Aryaka against the cruel king Palaka, Kale points out, could hark back to a historical putsch after the death of Buddha. The play has stood the test of time well, having lent itself easily to translation. It was in 1826 that it was first rendered in English by Horace Wilson, an employee of the British East India Company. This was followed by French and German translations. The play bill for an 1895 French stage adaptation, Le Chariot de Terre Cuite, was designed by painter-illustrator Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. There are records of its performance in other parts of Europe in the late 19th century and in England, where it has seen countless productions. In India itself, the play has seen adaptations in several languages, especially Marathi, Telugu, Bengali and Hindi. Activist and reformer Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay played Vasantasena in a silent Kannada film by the same name in 1931. But one of the most inventive and contemporary adaptations of Mrchhakatika was Habib Tanvir's 1958 play Mitti ki Gadi, in which he first drew on the folk traditions of Chhattisgarh. 'It was at a 2002 show of his play that Tanvir and I spoke of the play's possibilities for koodiyattam,' said Venu. 'By that time we had done the first act of Shakuntala and he had been very appreciative of it. But starting any new production from scratch in koodiyattam is a very tough task.' Koodiyattam is an art of extreme rigour. A ritual art that historians argue became the exclusive preserve of Brahminical groups around 9-12 CE, koodiyattam is a highly codified, arcane and stylised form where actors' manuals (attaprakaram) outline characters. The enactment, recalling past histories (nirvahanam) sometimes to the beginning of time, and painstakingly detailed character minutiae, lasts not over hours but days and weeks. Scholar David Shulman, in a lyrical essay for The New York Review of Books in 2012, wrote of the experience of watching a 29-night performance of a single act from the Ramayana. Of the form's refusal to fast forward even in an attention-starved world, he said: 'I think I live my life in this constant rush toward death, almost never allowing a single movement of the body, or a single passing thought of any power or novelty, or even a single deep breath or tender gesture, to complete itself without being cut off too soon. I suppose that in this I am hardly alone. Kudiyattam is profoundly, perhaps uniquely, therapeutic in this respect.' With the passage of time, many things have changed in the art: it is no longer exclusive to one community, it has stepped out of temple grounds, and increasingly the needs of the modern audience are kept in mind when the length of the exposition is decided. Sudha Gopalakrishnan, the koodiyattam scholar who was among the experts to argue for the form's inclusion in UNESCO's intangible heritage list, says the change is both welcome and unsettling. 'The plot itself is secondary in koodiyattam, which is what marks it apart from realistic theatre,' she said. 'Its crux is about how you arrest a small moment and use multiple sources and contexts to elaborate it. The trend of adapting it for contemporary context – editing for time and content – started in the 1940s and 1950s with Painkulam Rama Chakyar. But I think this will likely become even more prominent in the coming years.'
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4 hours ago
- Entertainment
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Zara Chowdhary wins the Shakti Bhatt Prize in its final year for her memoir ‘The Lucky Ones'
Zara Chowdhary was awarded the 2025 Shakti Bhatt Prize for her debut work, The Lucky Ones. Her memoir examines her family's trauma to document three months of sectarian violence in her hometown of Ahmedabad. Set during the 2002 riots, when Chowdhary was just 16, it is also the story of a trapped, severely dysfunctional family caught up in the tides of Indian history. Chowdhary will receive a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh. The Shakti Bhatt Prize will be discontinued after this year's award. Originally called The Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, in later years it became a prize that honoured a writer's body of work. However, this year the prize ended the way it began in 2008 – by awarding a debut author. For 17 years, the Shakti Bhatt Prize has recognised literature from the South Asian subcontinent, giving the award to writers from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India. Administered, judged, curated and funded by writers, the Prize was independent and did not involve any corporate sponsors. The Shakti Bhatt Foundation, which set up the prize, has received financial contributions from author and journalist TJS George, journalist Sheela Bhatt, and academic Thomas Kailath. The Shakti Bhatt Prize complete list of winners over the years: Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, 2008 Mridula Koshy, If It Is Sweet, 2009 Samanth Subramanian, Following Fish, 2010 Jamil Ahmad, The Wandering Falcon, 2011 Naresh Fernandes, Taj Mahal Foxtrot, 2012 Nilanjana Roy, The Wildings, 2013 Bilal Tanweer, The Scatter Here is Too Great, 2014 Rohini Mohan, The Seasons of Trouble, 2015 Akshaya Mukul, Gita Press and the Making of India, 2016 Anuk Arudpragasam, The Story of a Brief Marriage, 2017 Sujatha Gidla, Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, 2018 Tony Joseph, Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, 2019 Anand Teltumbde and Gautam Navlakha, Body of Work, 2020 The Shakti Bhatt Foundation did not award a literary prize in 2021, and instead made a donation towards Covid-19 relief work Manoranjan Byapari, Body of Work, 2022 CS Lakshmi (Ambai), Body of Work, 2023 Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, Body of Work, 2024 Zara Chowdhary, The Lucky Ones, 2025
