radhika

(she/her) • agent @JacarandaLit

[Lost In Film @LostInFilm]

Marjane Satrapi (1969 — 2026)

[Mariam Pirzadeh @mapirzadeh]

Marjane Satrapi est partie rejoindre l'amour de sa vie. Elle était bien plus que le chef d'œuvre de Persepolis, elle était l'une des voix des Iraniens qui sont tous en deuil aujourd'hui. Elle n'aura jamais revu l'Iran pour lequel elle se battait tant. "Je m'en vais, épuisée triste et affligée vers ma demeure désormais ruinée, j'emporterai loin de votre ville je le jure mon cœur fou et passionné". Forrough Farrokhzad. Rouhet Shad Marjani

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The research behind this is wild. If you played Pokémon as a kid, you have a tiny region in your brain that exists only because of Pokémon. Not a metaphor. Stanford put people in brain scanners and found it.

The study was published in Nature Human Behavior in 2019. They scanned 11 adults who grew up glued to their Game Boys and 11 who never played. When they showed both groups images of the original 151, the players' brains lit up in one specific spot every time. Same spot across all 11 people. The non-players showed zero response.

That spot is a little fold in the back of your brain that normally processes things like animal shapes and cartoon faces. In the Pokémon players, a chunk of it had been permanently reassigned. Their brains carved out a Pokémon department sometime around age 6 or 7 and just never took it down.

And the reason it ended up in the same place in everyone's brain comes down to the Game Boy itself. The screen was 2.6 inches. Every kid held it at roughly the same distance. So those 151 characters hit the exact same patch of each kid's retina, thousands of times, during the years when the brain is still soft enough to reorganize itself. Where an image hits your retina in childhood is what tells your brain where to build the wiring.

Reading works the same way. Humans invented writing about 5,000 years ago. There's zero evolutionary reason for a brain region dedicated to recognizing words. But every person who learns to read grows one, roughly the size of a dime, in the same part of the brain.

Brain-imaging research from 2018 actually watched it appear in children's heads as they learned their letters. It grew by quietly taking over nearby tissue that wasn't doing much yet. Stanford published a follow-up this year showing this region is way smaller or missing entirely in kids with dyslexia, and that 8 weeks of intense reading practice physically grew it back.

London taxi drivers show the same thing in a completely different part of the brain. Brain scans from a 2000 study found the region that stores mental maps had physically expanded, and the longer they'd been driving, the bigger it got. These drivers spend 3 to 4 years memorizing 25,000 streets before they get licensed. About half wash out.

The common thread is childhood. Harvard researchers trained young monkeys to recognize new shapes and they developed brand-new brain regions in predictable locations. Adult monkeys trained on the same shapes never got those structural changes. The young brain wires itself in a way the adult brain cannot replicate.

If you're wondering whether a Pokémon patch in your brain means you lost something else, no. The region sits alongside your normal visual processing areas, not on top of them. Your brain has hundreds of millions of neurons in that zone alone. The lead author noted that every participant in the study had gone on to earn a PhD.

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

Neeraja Srinivasan from @platformag interviewed me for my debut collection of poetry!
You can read the full piece here:
https://t.co/hy4XPl2Ri3

@WestlandBooks @JacarandaLit

[Westland Books @WestlandBooks]

#Dilli, we have a special evening planned for you!

@Saranyalol and @shrutisonal26 will be reading poems from Absent People, Absent Places.

Join us this Thursday at @Planterie_in!

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

Delhi launch! Thursday 6:30 pm onwards at Planterie.
Please come :)

[Neha @nehavermani]

To the endless maternal, material, and economic labour of women that sustains the world.

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

"An Inquiry into Tenderness" from my debut book - Absent People, Absent Places - in today's Hindustan Times.

Wrote this as a reminder to both my best friend and I. On the importance of softness and kindness.

[Kunal Purohit @kunalpurohit]

Mumbai University didn’t allow Naseeruddin Shah to speak.

So, Mumbaikars turned up in large numbers to hear him deliver the talk at an alternate venue, with Anand Patwardhan moderating it.

A full house for him, and a rebuke for those who tried to silence him.

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

book launch at Kitab Khana with @asanyfuleknow !
thanks to everyone who came :)
Absent People, Absent Places is available at all major bookstores in India - and online!
@WestlandBooks @RadhikaShah97 @JacarandaLit

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

"Elegy for When Nothing Else Can Be Done" from my debut collection Absent People, Absent Places.
Published by @WestlandBooks

[Snacky Boy 🍟 @snackyboy]

I love Pokemon, as a world. I love seeing mundane every day life, not everything has to be an epic adventure. I think this short by HMCH Anime Studio has been the best portrayal of the Pokemon world ever made and I’d give anything to see more of the world like this 😭

[Anurag Minus Verma @confusedvichar]

✍️NEW: Are Indians not reading for pleasure? What we get wrong about the idea of Indian reading culture. Read here with pleasure. https://t.co/zf3PnSdjDP

[Kavitha Rao @kavitharao]

1/ mid all the talk of litfests in India- which I won't get into- can we talk about the lack of modern, accessible libraries? Seems to me we need to address that if we want to encourage reading culture. Shutdown of the British Council in Blore, Chennai and Mumbai went unmourned.

[Anantha Padmanabhan @jilpanz]

https://t.co/QdgRfj5LIJ

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

this book was such a pleasure to put together. :)

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

Mustansir Dalvi generously blurbed my debut book of poems. Now available everywhere!

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

Acknowledgements to all the people without whom my first book would not have come together the way that it did.

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

held my first book for the first time at @JaipurLitFest 💙💙💙
if you’re at the fest, please pick it up😊
@WestlandBooks @JacarandaLit @RadhikaShah97

[Saranya Subramanian @Saranyalol]

My debut collection of poems - Absent People, Absent Places - will be out on 23 January.
Preorder link here:
https://t.co/JBKPfNynhS
Published by @WestlandBooks represented by @RadhikaShah97 at @JacarandaLit
Cover image photographed by @yashsheth3
Cover design by Saurabh Garge