An unlikely tragic hero

“Nutella, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Nu-te-lla: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Nu. Te. La.,” read a post on a friend's Facebook page.

She ingeniously swapped “Lo.Lee.Ta.” with “Nu.Te.La” in the opening lines of Lolita, a classic novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Protagonist Humbert Humbert's carnal desires took a culinary form for the friend.

My classmates were beset with a serendipitous predicament. Our professor chose Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran as the primary reading. However, the primary reading was rendered secondary as we realised that the book is very closely knit with the tale of Lolita. This became our Catch-22 situation.

But not everyone was intimidated. Some were “curious” about the “erotic” content of the book. As they later felt, with setting aside of morality as a precondition, Lolita could be viewed as “erotic”.

Full report here Hindu