Latest news with #OnFailing
Mint
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
This new book asks what if there were no silver lining to failure?
On 23 February 1821, a young English doctor suffering from tuberculosis breathed his last on a tiny bed in a house near the Spanish Steps in Rome. In the last six years of his brief life, this 25-year-old man, who looked more like a wispy boy, had begun to write poetry. He had even published four volumes of his work, but none had sold much or got favourable reviews. His dying wish to his friends was to have the epitaph, 'Here lies One Whose Name was Writ in Water," engraved on his gravestone. It was duly honoured. Also read: Looking back at the intertwined legacies of Tagore and Ray To most of his contemporaries, John Keats was just another unknown poet, destined for obscurity. No one could have guessed the love and adulation he would be receiving more than 200 years after his death. Similar fates have befallen many creative spirits before and after Keats, the Bengali poet Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) being a classic example, who died, allegedly, in a road accident, mostly unsung and, worse, in penury. Some 70 years later, he is revered as one of the greatest Bengali poets since Rabindranath Tagore, while his works are translated widely into other languages. So were Keats and Das failures in their lifetimes? With the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to admit that they were but, from the perspective of the 21st-century free market, neither of them, indeed, didn't amount to much by the time they breathed their last. To borrow from writer Amit Chaudhuri's essay The Intimacy of Failing, included in the recent volume On Failing edited by him, 'In capitalism, only success has existence; there are no alternative, negative modes of existence." From our earliest years, we are primed to think of failure as a stepping stone to success. A gazillion corporate gurus and startup bros on social media will tell you why you must fail and fail fast to achieve the nirvana of success. But what if failure doesn't necessarily have any redeeming silver lining, at least not always? Why is it so hard for us to accept failure as an absolute reality, with no promise of recovery sweetening the deal? Some of these questions surface in the handful of essays that feature in On Failing. This slim volume reproduces a series of talks delivered by writers, critics, poets and philosophers at a conference held in the Literary Activism series at Ashoka University, Sonipat, in 2020. Some of the submissions are darkly confessional, where the academic distance between the idea of failure and its intensely human experience is breached with impunity. The opening piece by Clancy Martin, titled Suicide as a Sort of Failure, is a masterclass in writing personal essay. Grimly comic, self-lacerating, yet peculiarly shorn of any self-pity, it is an analysis of suicide as the ultimate act of failure. Martin's first-person account gets to the heart of the matter: the double burden of being a failed suicide, a failure to successfully fail at living. It is a bravado performance, where writers David Foster Wallace and Édouard Levé make virtuoso appearances, a class act that sets the tone for the volume. Also read: Book review: 'Heart Lamp' asks in whom women can really put their faith Bengali poet Ranajit Das's acerbic reflections on his own 'failure" meander through the life and times of Jibanananda Das (no relation of his), but the best piece in the collection, coming right after, is American writer Lydia Davis's Learning to Sing. The second person narrator of the story (or is it a piece of memoir?) is a middle-aged woman, who has decided to learn to sing formally in the autumn of her life. She is well conversant with the grammar of music, reads the score in front of her effortlessly, but her voice keeps betraying her, stopping short of hitting the right note or sounding croaky to her own ears. She isn't planning to be a star performer at this stage in her life, but she is driven by an inner resolve to achieve a certain level of excellence. It's a tense yet tender story of an individual's deeply private struggle to attain a certain benchmark that isn't set by society. Rather, she seeks validation from her inner critic, not even from the teacher who helps her blossom. Only a writer as masterful as Davis could unspool the public images of failure and success so subtly yet surely, nudging the reader to look within and question their own assumptions. The two other pieces that make as strong an impression on the reader are poet Tiffany Atkinson's reflections on her failed IVF treatment and filmmaker Anurag Kashyap's raw and candid dissection of his career. In the former, a slip of tongue by an acquaintance at a party—'One door closes, another door shuts"— seems to encapsulate Atkinson's difficulty with her disobedient body, failing to act according to medical protocol and make her pregnant. In the latter, the reader gets a ringside view of the series of failures—from No Smoking to Bombay Velvet—that Kashyap had to wade his way through to get to where he is today. The most fascinating part of his soliloquy—for it reads like one, with its dramatic interjections—is the unpredictability of his moves, a refusal to follow the script of success, even when it lies bare before him after films like Gangs of Wasseypur and The Lunchbox. For some of us, failure isn't necessarily always a tragedy. It is often a way of life. It's not a dirty word we shun, but a choice to avoid the ready and the easy way. We would much rather be misanthropes who dabble in failure, than be crowd-pleasers who only know how to cosy up to success. Also read: 'The Last Knot': A novel rooted in Kashmir's past, present and future
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
09-05-2025
- Business
- Business Standard
Best of BS Opinion: India's growth, tariff shocks, and global tensions
Some wounds don't pound with pain anymore, but when you just slightly press them, they remind you they're not quite healed. That stiff knee you injured years ago that aches on cold mornings. That friendship you outgrew but still think about when a song plays. Or that old family pressure that suddenly resurfaces over dinner. These aren't emergencies. They're echoes. And they whisper that even progress carries discomfort. Today's stories carry a feeling of slow mending, but interrupted by small jabs. Let's dive in. Take India's slow climb on the Human Development Index. It's now ranked 130, up three spots, with people living longer, studying more, and escaping poverty in record numbers. And yet, the gender and income inequalities remain sharp enough to drag the numbers down. It's as if the bandage has come off, but the skin underneath is still raw. As our first editorial highlights, without deeper public investment in health and education, the gains risk fading, progress haunted by the pain of what's still missing. Meanwhile, in the rice fields, India is nurturing a different kind of healing, through two new genome-edited varieties promising higher yields and climate resilience without the stigma of GM crops, notes our second editorial. They mature faster, use less water, and may rescue struggling farmlands. But like any leap, this too needs careful steps. Unless procurement systems and farmer training keep pace, even this scientific salve may dry up prematurely. Globally, Trump's tariff shock, boldly labelled 'Liberation Day,' landed like a slap across an old scar. Markets panicked, then calmed. Economists feared a repeat of 2008, but the world held steady. As T T Ram Mohan writes, we're wounded from past crises, but smarter now. Scarred yet sturdier. The fear didn't vanish, it just didn't win. In India's military setup, the scars of colonial-era command are giving way to more integrated, modern reforms. Ajay Kumar maps how deeper civilian-military synergy is needed to combat today's evolving threats. New laws and reorganisations are promising but the trust gap still itches, especially when stretched by real-world pressures. And finally, On Failing edited by Amit Chaudhuri, a book reviewed by Akankshya Abismruta, explores the ache of imperfection. Artists and thinkers dive into the creative potential of collapse, not as tragedy but as transformation. Their essays read like confessions from people who've learned that the most honest work comes after the fall.
&w=3840&q=100)
Business Standard
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Standard
On Failing: Where the quiet complexities of failure take centre stage
Through an eclectic collection of essays spanning subjects from suicide to physiology, On Failing creates space for failure to exist-without forcing life lessons down anyone's throat Premium Akankshya Abismruta Listen to This Article ON FAILING Editor: Amit Chaudhuri Publisher: Westland Pages: 124 Price: ₹399 Literary Activism is a project that began in 2014 with a series of annual symposia. The project aims to create a space for creative and critical discussions and intervention beyond commercial publishing, literary festivals and traditional academia. It brings together numerous national and international poets, novelists, translators, artists, journalists, scholars, filmmakers and publishers. On Failing, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, is a collection of eight essays and one short story presented at the fifth symposium in February 2020. On Failing, as is evident from its title, explores the concept of failure and the
