a brooding threnody to the disappearing joy of reading

shelf from my study

I never particularly wanted to transition to e-readers, but I made the decision deliberately. Books are prohibitively expensive outside India, and they occupy physical space in ways that become burdensome over time. I often imagine the practical reality of moving apartments alone, hauling boxes of books into a rented truck, a strangely humbling task that strength training does not quite prepare one for.

Over the years, I have also grown wary of accumulating too many possessions. More objects inevitably require more time to organize, maintain, and eventually transport. There is a certain relief in minimizing this material weight. At the same time, I have never been entirely opposed to downloading digital copies of books and films, since accessibility and cost are real considerations. Yet I find myself confronted with a paradox. Even when texts are readily available on my devices, I struggle to engage with them meaningfully on a screen.

What I miss most is the tactile and spatial memory that physical books offer. With a printed book, I can see and feel my progress, the shifting balance of pages, the visual placement of passages, and the subtle cues that help anchor ideas in the mind. Even the faint scent of an older book contributes to the sense of inhabiting a tangible object. On a screen, each page feels uniform and almost interchangeable, and that loss of spatial orientation leaves me feeling slightly unmoored. Simple actions such as moving back and forth between sections also feel less intuitive, requiring several taps rather than a quick physical gesture.

At the same time, I remain aware that continuing to purchase and store large numbers of physical books may not be practical. The logistical demands are real. Yet this self-imposed restraint has had an unexpected consequence, a subtle diminishment of identity and joy. I want to experience books as sources of pleasure and companionship, not merely as instruments for acquiring knowledge.

The quiet violence academia can sometimes do to us becomes evident here. Reading becomes instrumentalized. Pages become units of intellectual productivity instead of spaces to dwell in. Once that shift happens, the body remembers. Books stop feeling like shelter and start feeling like work. It is therefore unsurprising that attention resists, as though protecting itself from turning every encounter with literature into another performance metric.

The deeper issue may not be about format alone but about identity. Physical books were never only objects for me. They functioned as visible evidence of a life of the mind. Shelves gradually became a kind of autobiography, marking phases of thought, curiosity, and transformation. When I deliberately stopped acquiring them, I also removed that visible mirror of who I am. E-readers are efficient but invisible. They do not sit in a room and quietly testify that this is a person who lives among ideas.

There is an irony in all this. I own multiple e-readers and have nonetheless ordered several physical books that will arrive tomorrow. Perhaps this is less a contradiction and more a small, temporary lifting of the restriction I placed on myself, an experiment to see whether the simple joy of reading can be recovered. I will likely continue relying on e-readers for practicality, but I hope to rediscover a way of reading that feels grounded, attentive, and quietly sustaining.

where I’m at—cinema, books, et al.

In the last couple of days, I have been immersed in Akira Kurosawa’s autobiography titled, Something Like An Autobiography. I believe, it was written a few years after he directed Kagemusha, which was actually the very first Kurosawa film that I watched over a decade ago. Earlier this summer, I visited Varanasi with my family and went to Harmony The Bookshop at Assi Ghat and picked out two books that my father decided to gift to me. One of them is this, and the other one is Sartre’s War Diaries.

Reading this was a feeling of hiraeth because it transported me to my parents’ home where I was surrounded by the comfort of family and books. And while I was working my way through Kurosawa’s life in words, I ended up watching two more of his films, those being: Seven Samurai and Stray Dog.

The kind of personal perspective I was able to glean as I read the book and watched his films is an inimitable experience. It was almost as if I was able to “feel” the films as they were being made and Kurosawa’s vision itself.

To me, it has become unequivocal and undeniable that Kurosawa was unabashedly earnest, stoic, and a prolific screenwriter and film director who had great faith in his actors and never shied away from openly showing his gratitude to his mentors and the people who helped him realize his stories despite the repercussions of the World Wars and the American propaganda that the Japanese were so resistant towards.

It was only natural to me to download Kurosawa’s entire filmography and make plans to acquire a poster of Kagemusha (I am still saving up for this). By combining literature with visual art, a truly rewarding experience was yielded. Going forward, I will always make it a point to supplement films with literature written by the respective directors. Here is an incredibly moving speech by Kurosawa upon receiving an honorary award at the 1990 Oscars:

There was a great deal of World War consequences that made film-making difficult in Japan, especially with its strained economy and imminent loss in World War II with the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki which made me wonder about the state of affairs of the world during the 20th century. I was wary of documentaries and their propagandist tendencies—having taught a film course just last year to a class of 200 first-year students at university and so I didn’t quite know where to look for information.

However, this lack of direction was coincidentally and quickly resolved by my ever-resourceful supervisor who has been going through the first draft of my dissertation. He pointed out that I do need to know how nation-states were formed in Europe and North America and insert a page or two about it in one of my initial chapters.

Moreover, he kept mentioning this book titled Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder and waxed lyrical about how he felt like it was truly the voice of God and that was enough for me to download the audiobook. It was a huge file well over 500 MB and I began listening to it during my bus commutes and household chores but I gave up almost instantly. It was too dense for me to absorb simply by listening. There were too many dates, numbers, a lot of information, and masked ideologies for me to grasp it properly, and so, I ended up buying a physical copy of it. The reading so far has been slow and difficult as every page is fraught with millions of innocent peasants being killed and starved to death and I fully expect it to be challenging until the end. What I really admire about Snyder’s writing is that not only is it factual, but also extremely lucid, easy to grasp, and extremely well-researched and objective.

I never considered myself to be someone who would enjoy historical non-fiction but I am beginning to think that revisionist history could be my new source of excitement and joy—especially if it is written by Timothy Snyder. As I make my way through the book, I am slowly compiling a list of films based on the World Wars to supplement my understanding of the war and also understand the role of cinema when war was all that the world witnessed and remembered. Once I finish compiling the list, I will probably put it up here.

On a lighter note, my friend Niloofar and I recently watched Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami on my projector last weekend with a huge spread of various cheese, red wine, bureks, fruits, dips, pita, dark chocolate dipped pecans, and cookies. One can tell that she and I are too Asian to simply settle for popcorn and chips. Here’s a beautiful still of the film being cast on my wardrobe doors by my projector:

Actors William Shimell and Juliette Binoche in Certified Copy by Abbas Kiarostami.

a new cinephilic obsession

“I am not very good with money.” is an understatement and a euphemism. I discover plenty of innovative means of dissipating my modest source of income in a matter of minutes and I feel no guilt. I am excited because I truly believe that my expense is justified and absolutely worth it. And with that, I discovered a newfound love for collecting original posters and scene cards of films that I love. Naturally, my first acquisition had to be something from Stalker. While I couldn’t get the 1979 poster because my pockets are not deep enough to indulge my madness, I did get a French scene card from 1981 when it was shown in France. It took a while for it to arrive from New York but it came last morning and I braved a visit to the nearby post office in the rain to collect it.

The scene card looks so new that I had apprehensions about its original production. It looks nowhere near 40+ years but this worry was quickly dispelled by the accompanying authenticity certificate that came, watermarked, and signed by the owner of Posteritati. I’d have to make a trip to the nearest Dollar Store in the next couple of days to have this beauty framed. It has Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy and Anatoly Solonitsyn as Stalker and the Writer respectively in a scene from The Zone when they make their way to The Room.

Here’s a photograph of the scene card and the certificate of authenticity:

a cinephile’s latest acquisitions

When I wished to watch Nostalghia by Tarkovsky, I dawned upon a much-belated realization that my Criterion Channel subscription is not adequate for all the films that I want to watch. To begin with, Nostalghia was the only film by Tarkovsky that wasn’t available on Criterion. It was truly bewildering to me, especially because it is perhaps his most well-known film for the Western audience.

 Of course, I resorted to other ways of acquiring the film and finally got around to watching it. But it did make me realize that I should perhaps start storing my favourite films on my laptop for days when I decide to pause my subscription or head off to a remote place with a spotty internet connection for a weekend. My laptop, on the other hand, is in its death throes in terms of space and I know it will give up on me the moment I download more than 6 GB of data. The only solution that presented itself to me was procuring a Solid State Drive (SSD).

And so, I went online and looked for a reasonably priced SSD with 1 TB storage capacity and an SSD converter. I found a Chinese brand called Fanxiang that was selling it for 52 CAD which was a lot lower than a lot of other SSDs with the same storage capacity. My dream of creating a collection of my favourite films was finally on the verge of being realized. In my excitement, I threw in a copy of The Stanley Kubrick Archives by Taschen with the hopes that the purchase of this book would push me to finally start watching Kubrick’s films. Of course, my excitement did not end there. I decided that I must have a physical copy of Sculpting In Time despite having a PDF of the same. Why shouldn’t I buy physical copies of my favourite books when I’m doing something similar with my favourite films? With that rhetorical question, I placed my order and rested my case.

Today was the day when my newly purchased belongings arrived and I duly formatted my new SSD and copied three of my favourite films. I will begin watching Kubrick as soon as my schedule gets freer. I did watch Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai a couple of nights back and I will be reviewing it soon, but for now, enjoy this little flat lay of my most recent cinephile purchases.

Today’s spoils

a fall photowalk

My friend Niloofer messaged me a night before to tell me that there was a photowalk that the university photography club was organizing the next afternoon and asked if I’d like to be a part of it. Knowing that I needed to take photos on my Konica Auto S3, I took the offer immediately and turned up where all the other photography club members had gathered. Within ten minutes, we made our way to the Medway Valley Heritage Forest and lost ourselves in conversations about Tarkovsky’s cinema, vintage film posters, and Persian poetry amidst the beauty of Canadian fall colours.

Soon after, as I made my way into the tall grasses of the trail, I was photographed and immediately told of it by a fellow photographer. Very quickly, Jaytee and I became friends and I introduced her to Niloofer who turned out to be a fantastic subject for a photoshoot because of her Iranian features. We shared conversations about our university degrees, the work we do, our interests, and opinions about Canada as we munched on M&Ms that the exceptionally organized Jaytee had packed along with her camera gear. I am glad I came out of my home and actually touched grass, felt the sunlight on my face, and the wind in my hair, and made a new friend. It was a really good day. Perhaps the last day of warmth and sunlight of this year.

Here are 8 of the fantastic set of photos that Jaytee took of Niloofer and me. More of her work can be found here.