Reviews & Musings

Floating Worlds is not interested in telling a story in straight lines. In her debut, Alpa Arora follows the rhythms of a mind that wanders, retreats, and returns, often without warning, making the reader inhabit that same uncertainty.  At its center is Ruby Khanna, a former scriptwriter, empty nester, and a woman suspended between selves. Ruby does not simply escape; she lives inside escape. Her movement between fantasy and reality is not always marked, conscious, and within her control. The novel refuses to rush into naming this as damage or disorder. Instead, it lingers in that uneasy space where the mind fractures out of a need to survive what cannot be neatly contained. Ruby’s inner life unfolds through a series of imagined scenarios, desires, and projections that slip quietly into her lived reality. These are the novel’s way of thinking.  At a time when so much fiction leans toward clarity and resolution, Arora stays with what is unclear, unresolved, and at times uncomf...

In early 2023, I made a quiet decision that did not feel significant at the time—I chose to stop reading casually, and to start reading with intent, turning towards artists I had long admired, not just to understand what they created, but to sit closer to the question of how and why they created at all.  They were not confined to a single world. They came from everywhere—writers, yes, but also singers, lyricists, filmmakers, actors—voices that had shaped something within me long before I knew how to articulate it. And what I sought in them was not inspiration in the shallow, fleeting sense, but something far more demanding: a deeper encounter with creativity itself, with the discipline it requires, the solitude it enforces, the identity it constantly unsettles, and the quiet, often invisible love that sustains it despite everything.  The process, I realised very quickly, could not be rushed. It refused to remain “reading” in the conventional sense. It became slower, heavier, a...