Loony Tunes

Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line is a story about three children ¬ Jai, Pari and Faiz – a story that’s deeply cracking under the ills of hate, pollution and society, and even when it reads like a fantasy, mystery absorbing prose, woven with vivid images, a hugely disturbing India looms for us to reckon with.  Papa says we are going on a patrol as soon as the smog let's a bit of morning light into our basti. But outside our house the world's changing... In her fiction, Deepa Anappapra gives the voice of the book to the voice of children, who live in a world of confusion. This confusion is not about seeing cities change or the emergence of alternate intelligence, it is a confusion in the world of masks and smog, it is a confusion of seeing friends move, of feeling a future missing, of seeing abuses hurled at each other; it is the confusion about ‘presence of precarity’.  When Jai’s bastimates go missing, he along with his two friends – Pari and Faiz – chalk out plans,

When we are children, we wait for our mind to grow, for experiences to accumulate and choices to solidify, taking shape into likeness of a person. Tara Westover, did exactly that. In fact, these above lines are paraphrased from her memoir Educated's last chapter, Educated. Educated is a story of Westover's relationship with her family and how she got educated. This memoir is about the relationship that became tumultuous. It is also about stories that families create for their own. Who they call 'own'? Very basic instincts of people and a nation. It is also about an education people enable for other people. The scenes in the story have been vividly written even when she uses other people's memory to write them. I like that she addresses the scenes with gaps — When Shawn falls, when the confrontation happens, when they are in accident. Sometimes the way to address a gap staring at your own story is not to include only your own version of it. It's also

  A Missing Climate - Summer Issue 2020 - Writing in Education, National Association for Writers in Education An essay discussing making space for creative writing in the Indian Education System. Special thanks to Cambridge School for their valuable support and space while I reflected on my experience. Grateful to Sparsh, Aakriti, Sarah for lending their reading skills and sheltering me in their friendship!