Aditya is a left-handed architect who writes better than he can draw, and talks better than he can write. He expended his youth pursuing doctorates in Sanskrit Philology and Cultural Anthropology. Inspired by a vintage clothing store in NoHo that no longer exists, he started the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS) as an extended performance art piece. However, CKS was soon hijacked by corporate interests to advance their own capitalist agendas. Having wandered the world for a number of years, he has recently returned to New Delhi, the city of his childhood, where he is currently shacked-up with his girlfriend. Aditya's futile efforts to intellectually comprehend the unyielding abundance of the world provide the pathos and humor characteristic of his writings and reflections on everyday life. Email: [email protected]
by Aditya Dev Sood I know the grip, more or less, but nothing else about how to swing a club. I hold the club away from me, shuffle into a likely stance, and settle its head down, behind the ball, already resting on the tee. Hold your right foot steady as you swing back, Abhinav…
By Aditya Dev Sood She begins with the soles of my feet, tracing out nodes and ridges into which all my wanderings in the world are graven. She is a rehabilitating prisoner at the Chiang Mai Women’s Correctional Facility, halfway out of the system, learning massage as a trade that may keep her out of…
By Aditya Dev Sood The sun has been hanging low for a while now, so different from the high summer. I find myself imagining the extreme angle of its likely incidence, the cause of its fleeting presence nowadays. The garden gets next to no sun, and cold is setting into the house for the short…
By Aditya Dev Sood As we walk off the tarmac, the moon shines full and bright, lending the dark clouds of night a blue-black shimmer, a haunting presence. I hope this is an auspicious welcome to Bihar, the heart of that other India, which is not shining with the glow of liberalization and globalization of…
By Aditya Dev Sood I have been directed to a line that says C.P.L.P. for some reason. Most of the passengers around me are holding Brazilian passports, though a series of flags, mostly unrecognizable to me, are flashing on the LED display. The Comunidades dos Países de Língua Portuguesa, I later learn, is a radically…
By Aditya Dev Sood In the summer of 1991, I visited the Rudas Baths for the first time. The guidebooks had indicated that it was one of the major attractions of Budapest and one of the few architectural remnants of Turkish domination over the region in the 1500s. Kurt, David, Russell and I, four college…
By Aditya Dev Sood Akbar Shah had come to meet us. I can still see him, his untucked shirt fluttering in the wind, long arms strung at his sides, careful words, he needed this job. My main work is the rough-cut stone, he said, like you have all over the facade. But I can also…
by Aditya Dev Sood This is Delhi in its glory. Hotter, even, than when I knew it as a child, the temperatures these days scratching past the 45 degrees Celsius that were their absolute threshold then. Every day the earth baking, every night the atmosphere billowing in response, plumes of invisible heat unsettling the skies,…
By Aditya Dev Sood I am sitting inside a white cube, watching things familiar but different. I know this music, but there are no lyrics, nothing to anchor the sound flowing round and through me. These soldiers, their rhythms, they seem to be preparing for an event I was once at. Perhaps India's Republic Day,…
By Aditya Dev Sood The body has its ways, and jetlag is one of them. I want to sleep and it wants to drum its fingers on the bed springs to – what is this rhythm? – a kind of bhangda-fandango. I want to go dancing but it has already clocked off, tuned out, leaving…
By Aditya Dev Sood The other evening, Behenji Bua invited us over for dinner, especially to try her new karela dish. It was sublime, setting off taste sensations all round the apperceptive palate. The slightest sweetness, a balanced coping of salt and sour, fullness and complexity, all built around the fundamental bitterness of bitter-gourd, as…
by Aditya Dev Sood From my window, I can see the illuminated window of a shop named Dankotuwa, which promises ‘world-class tableware.’ It seems a dated claim, one that we’ve stopped making in India. I’m in Colombo on work, but this seems a fateful time to be in Sri Lanka. My ride in from the…
by Aditya Dev Sood As long as I have lived and thought about it, Delhi has been metastasizing, growing like a cancer outwards, drawing more and more people inwards, cutting its trees, widening its avenues, adding more and more floors per plot and cars per family. It may boast an imperial legacy stretching back a…
The year in terror has been building and rising, but few expected it to rise to this dramatic crescendo. Boats, control rooms in key buildings, AK-47s, grenades, hostages. As I begin to write, my television continues to bleat the worn platitudes of so many blind men and women of Hindoostan panning reality with their telephoto…