Lounge Loves: ‘The Doomies’, Zena Hitz on intellect and more

A Portal to Entertainment

There is no genre like animated horror-comedy. For a longest time, I watched and re-watched Gravity Falls for the adventures of twins Dipper and Mabel. The recently released The Doomies, hailed as the spiritual successor to Gravity Falls, is my new go-to show. Though it might follow a conventional template of being set in a small town abounding in supernatural phenomena, the show is wonderfully eccentric. Its young protagonists, Bobby and Romy, are best friends who live in Brittany. While seeking monsters to showcase on their social media page, they accidentally open a portal to evil. The characters are wonderfully etched—the timid Bobby, who lives with his aunt because his mother chooses to stay away, quick-witted Romy, and certain monsters who don’t follow the archetype. Watch it for the visual design as well.

—Avantika Bhuyan

Coffee With a View

A dilapidated building in ruins with an overgrowth of bougainvillea is my view from the large glass windows of Brevé café in Bandra West, Mumbai. Most old houses have been replaced by multistoried residential buildings in this suburb. Taking in this vestige of old Bandra while sipping coffee is a respite for concrete-weary eyes. In a suburb teeming with cafés with each competing for the same audience, Brevé with this view and thoughtfully done interiors is a rare find. If the seats by the window are occupied, their grey walls complemented by green chairs and large flower pots adding a touch of freshness provide a fitting background for a relaxing café experience.

—Jahnabee Borah

Life of the Mind

One of my favourite mindboosters on YouTube is the Big Think channel, which regularly features long interviews with scholars and thinkers from across the world. In a recent episode, Zena Hitz, a philosopher, gave insightful answers to questions regarding the “intellectual life”. Is intellect an outcome of the academic degrees one has? Or can it be cultivated by anyone? Author of the book, Lost In Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, Hitz took a hiatus from academia in her mid-30s to live in a monastery. Eventually she returned to her job, but with a renewed understanding of intellect and its relation to our everyday life and being. This interview will whet your appetite to pick up her book.

—Somak Ghoshal

Mid-century Memoirs

I rarely manage to finish memoirs, but I’ve been drawn into Urdu novelist Qurratulain Hyder’s memoir, A Tilt in Time: Partition & Pakistan, translated by Fatima Rizvi. Hyder, a prolific and acclaimed writer who supported herself as a journalist, grew up in Uttar Pradesh, migrated to Pakistan in the months after independence, worked in London for a while and returned to India, which she considered her home. It moves like a novel, an entirely original migration story about finding one’s feet as a migrant in a nation that is itself new to the idea of independence. As it moves from Karachi to Lahore to London in the 1950s, the observations are both witty and penetrating—and then there is her prodigious memory to be impressed by, remembering bends in every road, and bringing her own life alive for readers decades later.

—Shalini Umachandran