The intelligence had left the room
The lights were still on.
The graphs updated. The screen blinked politely. The servers hummed like obedient bees behind the wall. Everything was working. Everything...
When memory became a map
The boy did not speak.
He had no name, only numbers. He wore them stitched into the collar of his shirt.
Somewhere, a signal blinked green.
He...
Light that took its time
What we see in the night sky isn’t what's there.
It’s what was there—long ago, and sometimes, long gone.
Light takes its time.
Even the fastest thing...
Of Horlicks, Hope & Memories: A personal monsoon chronicle
Every year, when the monsoon hits Kerala, I take out Alexander Frater’s Chasing the Monsoon from my bookshelf and read a few pages. Frater’s...
What the sky recorded
Before we built machines to remember, we used the sky.
The ancients didn’t write with ink.
They marked seasons in shadows, moons in tides, warnings in...
Tradition tested in Shakthidharan’s latest play
A new play has arrived in Melbourne that refuses to romanticise the past or give easy answers about the future. The Wrong Gods, written...
The first eyes
Before we knew the heavens, we stared.
Before names, before stories, there were only patterns.
Points of light, fixed and flickering, watched by creatures unsure whether...
The signal that wanted to stay
A voice once left the body when breath ran out.
Now it stays.
Not in lungs, but in loops.
Not in echo, but in storage.
A voice can...
The mind clocked in, the spirit clocked out
The soul didn’t vanish.
It was crowded out.
It had no place in the factories, no use in the schedule, no line in the budget.
It lingered...
When thought remembered itself
The soul never returned from the plague. But something else emerged from the ash.
Not a god.
Not a ghost.
A thought.
The Enlightenment did not begin with...