Aryaman Kakkar's Archive

  It’s always lovelier to walk around at night.   She is slightly different from her more cacophonic, harsh twin. Everything is asleep, in their beds of  cotton clouds and moonlit dew, but   everyone is awake.  Jackals roam the bushes and the open, winter fields, breathing in those white flowers blooming under the  eclipsing darkness, holding passers-by in their sweet-smelling dream. You go up the sloping road, with  oak and eucalyptus looming high above, ancient giants who have something to say when all mimic the  dead, and you have the peace to listen to the numbing, ice winds.   Listen.   Walk to the heart of the dying grass and lie underneath the stars. Look at Orion and Sagittarius, the Big  Dipper and Scorpio, they have stories to play out. The same stars we, of the same dust as our ancestors  and the greats, have the pleasure of witnessing.   Listen to the silence.   Everything sle...

We will always watch them from behind a glass wall of air conditioning and reclined chairs. They reach their hands up from the dirt dusted roads and palms caked in falling webs of skin to our windows, imprints of desperation, a daily calamity. Running, wandering, weaving their wares of popcorn, coconut, sunshades, and books in between our boxed chariots. We are the divine who have pity on them, the ones who shift their gazes suddenly; they were peering through the wall. You wonder why the idols in our homes don't answer anymore; statues of ivory and gilded gold with their thrones and their prayer-room sanctums. They sell idols of our gods to their divinities that traverse the earthly bounds. Your horse less chariot keeps moving, undeterred, fearless in the stifling stampede and they stand aside, their gazes but an imitation of the newly laid concrete. Their new home, they stare from the underbellies of the skyward carriages with what I never know. Envy? Anger? Pity? From another ti...

The jewel of the court. For the last eight decades, we have been at the crest of the coming wave, the epitome of innovation in education. The School has always excelled at doing things differently, but for the last few years, in the name of unique, we have constructed the façade of a jewel around ourselves. We make those beyond Chandbagh believe what we want them to, but inside this lush, green campus it’s another story. We perpetrate acts of hypocrisy every day, and we don’t even know it.  Education is not only our academia. It does not only comprise textbooks or tested knowledge but of what we learn in totality. It is what we mean when we hear the phrase ‘a well-rounded education’. However, it has also become the epicenter of the fractures in our jewel. An integral quality we look for in our new inductees is their love for reading. Yet, beyond the interview it holds no importance. On entering the Doon stream of life, we are submerged in layers of sport, co-curriculars, academia. ...

  Dear gods,   You cannot ask me to carve sigils and sacrifices of my body and not dream of murder. A mess of bone.  Of something. Of sinew.  You cannot ask for offerings and tomes of prayer and not make me remember the burning cities bearing  your name.   Dear God,  You cannot ask me for my Saviors of all, my children and not make me bleed every time a nail is  hammered down. Down into splintering skin, crackling wood.   You cannot lead me to believe that your legions of divinities and immortals follow you willingly. Not  when their harvested ichor gave way to the worlds you slapped your name upon. The realm of Creation  that was the spoils of the War of Seven Days. You cannot change the reality of your being; a common  coward hiding behind the guise of an ordinary emperor.   Dear gods,   When the others tried to help us, did you see yourselves in them? Did you see them; naïve and innocent,...

It is any bibliophile’s dream to meet their authors, the people who gave them entire worlds to dream of, histories to watch unfold, words to see flit off the page. So went a delegation of six boys and a teacher to Jaipur to attend the 14 th year of the Jaipur Literature Festival. A congregation of literary geniuses unlike anywhere else on Earth, the Festival took place over five days from the 24 th to the 28 th January, 2019.  Departing the campus on 23 rd , we faced an entire day of hectic travel followed by an exceptionally turbulent night, a time of many words, phrases, and laughter. The next day, we arrived at the shores of Hotel Diggi Palace the next day at 10am in time for the inaugural ceremony. The festival was declared open by the Sanjay K Roy and Namita Gokhale, two of the three founding members of the Festival. The third, William Dalrymple was unable to attend due to a recent death in the family. With the opening ceremony graced by the sensational poet Ruth Padel read...