Rochelle Potkar

The landscape of Goa in Writing

The landscape of Goa in Writing

By Selma Carvalho

Poet and playwright Owen Sheers thinks landscape is what happens to nature when humans arrive. We create landscape, otherwise nature exists, forlorn, desultory and on its own. In every manner the newly released anthology The Brave New World of Goan Writing & Art 2025, edited by me and published by Cinnamon Teal, encapsulates this ethos of Goans interacting with the land of Goa. Identity is that most unknowable thing, constantly changing, a mere shadow on the edges of our consciousness, and yet if something were to exist as Goan identity than that something is our love of the land.

Coins in Rivers: Heta Pandit on Rochelle Potkar

Coins in Rivers: Heta Pandit on Rochelle Potkar

By Heta Pandit

Why do we call it a book release, Rochelle? In fact, isn’t it just the reverse of release? Holding, reading, and experiencing a book is an inhalation, a holding in of your breath, a waiting for a revelation. That is exactly how I felt when I began reading Coins in Rivers. I wonder why the perpetrators of all the atrocities described against women are men. You write as a feminist; you see and understand scars. Even the ones under the skin. And yet, I see a soft gentle touch, not the caustic, harsh, and scarred perspective of a hard-core man-hater.

Rochelle Potkar: Bombay Hangovers

Rochelle Potkar: Bombay Hangovers

In conversation with Rochelle Potkar

Issue no 19

As these stories organically came about, I gleaned that the common thread was Bombay, later Mumbai. As one consumes the ebb and flow, sea-breeze, buzz and bustle, march and spring, it puts you into the rhythm of its heartbeat and the city speaks to you. There is a hum that I have not felt in other cities of the world, rare like Bombay blood group. This hangover is one of memory, in and outside the city then. More so, of the joint march of its citizenry of all classes—industrious as bees and ants.