Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

If I am what I eat, and I keep feeding myself lies about what I am,  what the fuck do I become? I am what I eat.  I feed myself lies about Me. What is my name? I am what I eat. Falsehoods are  permanent delicacies. What is my name?

The relationship between the material and the literary has always been one of thick corded rope anchoring fantasies and worlds spun out of thin air. So many of the great works we know today are personal replicas and interpretations of other personal interpretations and carefully chosen words. Intent of the writer is what gives life to literature, regardless of whether that intent changes halfway through or results in the silent tears streaming down as you finish the first and final draft. An intent driven by the world of the author and the poet and the playwright, the storytellers and the epic narrators, we are all living testimonies to the stories we have heard and read and glimpsed dancing across stages and street corners. A living intent: how the world of the storyteller crafts the intent, whether capitalistic or personal or rebellious, and how that story changes with each new hand it touches. There exist three hundred versions of the Ramayana today, each version unique and crazy in...

  The many narratives that comprise Human Acts are written with the hindsight of an author who did due diligence to the memories of those individuals who give her work meaning. As each segment progresses the protagonists draw from their memories: choosing to relive or repress, regret or be at peace, those choose to pass their story on to those who would hear it or hide their scars and pasts from those who ask, from those who didn’t ask. The beauty of reading a work that has the opportunity to give thoughts and lives to individuals who otherwise remain statistics or singular names in dusty newspapers and government records is that it succeeds in attributing a terrifying humanity to everything. Honouring the oppressed, Human Acts lies up to its name with its very human act of remembering the afflictions and aftermaths of the Gwangju Uprising. The element of memory, not limited to the stories the author explores or the characters carry with them, is an element in Human Acts that ne...