Writer, researcher & critic

Mallika Kanodia moves away from the loose, soft style usually associated with pastels. She handles the pigment with the strict precision of an architect, layering the fragile chalk so densely that observers often confuse her saturated surfaces with digital prints.

“I like making the material do something people don’t expect from it. Each horizontal band is hundreds of strokes, back and forth, layering pigment until the color builds a structural density. Soft pastel has this natural brightness, and when worked with concentrated force, it starts to glow.”

“If my art can hold space for a viewer to simply experience a moment of quiet reflection or a singular unburdened feeling, it fulfills its purpose entirely.”

Christopher Sullivan has spent a lifetime crafting complex, detailed independent animated films while teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — with fellowships from Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Creative Capital, and screenings at MoMA, the Whitney Biennial and Tribeca.

His advice to students runs against the usual counsel. Treat your heroes as allies rather than untouchable figures. Build on your strengths — change one variable at a time. Stop making “student” films: “you should be trying to make the best film you can make, period.”

“Your work will never pay you back for lost emotional space.”

Swetha Chandra is a Chicago-based artist balancing a career as a professional dancer and a clinical researcher, studying how movement and nutrition affect disease progression in patients with metastatic breast cancer at Loyola University Chicago.

“This past week I was on tour with an artist as a backup dancer. I flew in on Sunday, went back to my regular job Monday... Sometimes that’s what the balance looks like, and it doesn’t make me any less of a dancer or any less of a clinical researcher.”

“Every time I tried to just throw an arm up the way they did, it would default into a mudra — it was just second nature.”

Elgin Bokari T. Smith is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and social activist from St. Louis — founder and artistic director of the Stomping Grounds Literary Arts Initiative, a nonprofit providing creative education to incarcerated youth.

Elgin rejects the “starving artist” concept, emphasising instead that every artist has to be hungry. His classroom runs on three principles: “Just try,” “Make mistakes,” and “Consent is key.”

“Literacy as Liberation. Art as Resistance.”

Aneisha, a 24-year-old NIFT graduate, paved her own career path as an “imagemaker” — a role that lets her weave together photography, printmaking and design, rejecting the conventional corporate route as the only way to keep her inner artist thriving.

She cold-emailed her portfolio to design houses and landed her first few projects — but learned that Instagram is a passive platform: “You still have to have a conversation, you have to talk to people.”

“The work has to speak for itself; it has to be presented in a way people can connect to.”

When the Chief Justice of India called the country’s youth cockroaches, he handed a movement its name. What followed was, by any conventional political reading, an accident — a reactionary formation born of insult rather than articulated ideology. Yet CJP has shifted something in Indian political life that years of carefully constructed left politics could not.

I attended the June 6th protest at Jantar Mantar. The several thousand people who came did not come to endorse any single individual’s politics. They came in spite of the leadership’s failings, not because of them.

This generation’s dissent took the form of memes, a choice that deserves to be taken seriously. Memes act as compressed political communication — they travel faster than any party manifesto and work precisely because they translate complex grievances into something immediately recognizable. Romila Thapar reminds us that dissent and protest are present in all complex societies; June 6th belongs to that long record.

“Offering that flower to a police officer who might beat you is not a gesture of submission. It is a deliberate refusal to give the state the violent pretext it wants.”

India’s history suggests that peaceful protests often outlast and achieve more than violent ones. What made the farmers’ movement succeed was not confrontation for its own sake — it was solidarity, establishment and sustenance. What CJP and the left need to learn is not the false binary between liberals and the left, when both want the same thing.

“Thang God we’re rich.” I smiled as I read the line in the book. It referred to the royalties she got, which she never stopped giving away. It was the first smile after a few pages of intense tension. I knew if I ever wrote something on this book, it would start with this line.

For lack of a better metaphor, I choose the ocean waves to describe it: a terrifying, sublime presence, with each movement orchestrated by the cosmos. Mother Mary Comes to Me is nothing short of a movie transpiring before your eyes. Cut to the screen being lifted and there sat the protagonist in all her glory of rebellion and resistance.

Mrs. Roy arrives with all her grandeur in the book, a woman of steel, a formidable presence. Arundhati appears herself stripped of any undefeated image she might have had in public — vulnerable, and therefore she is Booker Prize winner, Arundhati Roy.

“If I were to ever explain the statement ‘personal is political’, I would read them excerpts from this book.”

When the Vogue article declaring that “having a boyfriend is embarrassing” first appeared, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon. It was the proverbial nail in the coffin for an idea years in the making, an academic validation of what many women have long felt — what can be called heterofatalism.

Social media transforms these attitudes into trends. Something goes viral, becomes overused, fades into digital waste, then reemerges in a new form. There is a striking dichotomy between what online culture labels “cringe” and what it calls “aesthetic” — essentially visually pleasing, aspirational content that sells.

“The fundamental difference between ‘cringe’ and ‘aesthetic’ often comes down to one thing: brand deals.”

Are you also the worst person in the world? A question that crosses my mind each time I look at the picture of Julie from The Worst Person in the World by Trier. Played by Renate Reinsve, Julie is naive, yet full of all the things she loves and cares about. She struggles to find the right words for herself — but here’s the thing, there are no words for it.

I find it pressurizing, putting things in words, replacing meanings with the simplicity of replies like “nothing.” There is a withdrawal in me when there’s intensity of anything I feel — all of it simultaneously happening while there’s “nothing” happening.

“She’s poetry, poetry with such few words that it is illegible.”

If there was a way to keep walking, beyond the many thresholds I have already crossed, I would keep walking. I would keep walking till my legs gave up, till I couldn’t take a single breath from my ripped skin — towards an uncertain, away from the certainty of my fate.

A third road where I am alone, alone in peace and happiness of being tired only from walking. Can anyone find me a path like that? A never-ending one, a trail towards sun and a path beyond it.

The blinds are opening to reality — I am staged again. Where is my prop? Yes, that — a hearty laugh. There is a dance I know, a dance of my gender. The dance is called feminarchy.

“Is there a road, Robert Frost? A road that never ends?”

Today is Karvachauth, an Indian festival where women fast the whole day without water for their husbands’ long lives. I do not mean to implicate any woman of wrongdoing — yet I want to ask, out of curiosity: how many “harmless” days constitute this institution of a very harmful system of Hindutva, caste-mediated patriarchy?

The idea of devotion is very simple: families dedicate themselves to the gods of their faith. Women, on the other hand, have two gods — the spiritual, supernatural ones in millions, and the other, the ‘husband’: pati-permashwar.

“How many ‘harmless’ days constitute this institution of a very harmful system?”