Jay Sitapara | Essays on Books, Culture, Life

Every true love and friendship is a story of an unexpected transformation. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough. It was a late afternoon rendezvous over coffee of summer of 2019 when I spotted this book at Hiteshree’s place, a dear friend and fellow literature…

Olivia Laing, in her extraordinary and compelling more-than-memoir, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, explores how hard it is to make an honest and genuine connection with another human being.  The author portrays an intimate and personal portrait of loneliness by delving into the New York art culture. However, don’t misjudge…

Haruki Murakami: the Japanese author who has become the darling of the discontented millennials in the English-speaking world, thanks to Instagram quote pages. Murakami masters the surrealist genre. With his writing, which spans over decades, mostly celebrates the lonely protagonists, mysteriously silent women who dress in a navy blue cardigan, as well as a small…

If you had met me almost three years ago, I would have been a totally different person. I never believed in myself, and that was a central part of my underconfident life. Or rather, underconfidence in every facet of my life. I didn’t think that I could excel in my college studies, and hence never…

How frequent is it that you take time out for yourself? To just sit in a serene place doing nothing but reflecting and relishing the silence. I am sure there might be a few of us who can afford to indulge in this luxury regularly. But most of us don’t! We are somehow just not…