Nayan has discovered the newer version of the Ramayana, set in 3392 A.D. and has his opinions:
I wonder what Swami Valmiki thought while writing down this legend. I pray to God to give his soul peace, I am quite sure he would have not been happy to see Rama and Dashratha talking in fundax English, [...]
Archive for the 'Books' Category
Old Gangajal in a new bottle
Published by May 3rd, 2008 in Art, Books, Culture, Fiction, India and Religion. 0 CommentsLike a Picture? Steal it!
Published by April 4th, 2008 in Books, Business, Media and Photoblog. 0 CommentsJo takes a beautiful picture and finds it on the cover of a book. Only the credit is given to someone else … Of course he is livid. And plans to take action.
I don’t know why Prantha Books is not responding but I want them to know that I am not going [...]
‘Saala ek machhar aadmi ko hijra bana deta hai’
Published by March 23rd, 2008 in Art, Books, Democracy, Feminism, Government, Human Rights, Literature, Patriarchy, Personal, Politics, Religion, Secularism, South Asia and public space. 2 CommentsThat line from a Nana Patekar film, says, Aman Kumar, captures his ‘rage and frustration’ over the Taslima Nasreen episode:
So has mine! Sadly, I no longer consider India a secular country after watching and analyzing the political developments in last 15-20 years. Right from Shah Bano case to Babri demolition, and from Gujrat massacre to [...]
Its the first day of spring, thanks to google, greetings to all!
And Uma has a beautiful post on Father Anthony de Mello’s last meditations, on seeing beyond our valued illusions and images, and loving in contemplation.
Because most of the time, what you think you love, is nothing more than an image, a pretty picture you [...]
The Palace of Illusions
Published by February 27th, 2008 in Books, Culture, History, India and Literature. 0 Comments“It is quite admirable to see how the author managed to squeeze in almost all of the notable small tales that are linked to the main novel. She also does an admirable job in keeping true to the theme of biography. If an event occurred without Draupadi’s presence, she’d raconte it to us in retrospect [...]
“This isn’t something that guys should read”
Published by February 26th, 2008 in Books, Fiction, Humour and Personal. 0 CommentsSo Sudipta went ahead and did just that: read a Mills & Boon novel:
And all my enthusiasm about the book vanished within 20-30 pages of the book I had smuggled out. There was this caretaker guy of some god-forsaken house who went to cut wood in a nearby forest. And here was this daughter of [...]
Rajat Gupta pays his tribute to Sherlock Holmes:
That is the strength of observation and deduction. Holmes methodology as all the fans of the character will know were based on scientific analysis ,observation and deduction . Just by looking at the soil of the shoe of the person he could tell about the place from where [...]
Doubletake, Doublethink discusses the entry of romance novels into her life, particularly the figure of the Georgette Heyer man:
The Georgette Heyer Man (GHM for short) is a tall, loose-limbed, cynic with unruly hair and quite unremarkable features except for a smile that transforms his face. And yes, the eyes. Usually a queer light grey, very [...]
Follow the Chinese path?
Published by February 18th, 2008 in Books, Culture, Development, Economy, Government, India and Policy. 3 CommentsIn a well-argued post, Fellow Blogbhartian Bhupinder reviews Sagarika Ghose’s “Farming the Colonial Dream” and questions the premise of doing away with agriculture in India and walking the Chinese path.
She ignores what is practically an urban nightmare in China. Overwhelming migration from rural areas, a reversal of the 1960s forced migration, has led to increasing [...]
Zafar Anjum muses on reading & writing in the ‘twilight of the books’:
“The more I interact with editors etc here and see the kind of new authors getting published, it seems to me that publishing fiction is a totally commercial venture. A ‘product’ is packaged for marketing, depending on what the publisher thinks will sell. [...]
Silverlining reviews Khaled Hosseini’s “A Thousand Splendid Suns” and describes it as worth reading a thousand times.
One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,
Or the thousand splendid suns that side behind her walls.
When I finished reading the book, I thanked god for the freedom I am enjoying!
Swatie revisits her review of Abha Dawesar’s Babyji:
So, one way among many in which the text works:
In those few crucial moments of decision in the novel, Anamika (the 16 year old protagonist) attributes her attraction towards women to something genetic, something natural. This works because it dislodges what the socio-cultural order dictates: being compulsorily [...]
Every movement or protest has it’s online presence these days. Here is a blog that collecting updates of British Library closure in Trivandrum.
Men of letters
Published by December 25th, 2007 in Books, History, Literature and Spotlight Series. 2 Comments[This is Essay #7 in our Spotlight Series. Click here for archives.]
Men of Letters
—————
Samanth Subramanian
More than a decade ago, over the course of three essays written for the New York Review of Books, Julian Barnes pondered the correspondence of three Frenchmen: the poets Baudelaire and Mallarmé, and the painter Gustave Courbet. The essays, brought together [...]
A Devil’s Chaplain
Published by December 15th, 2007 in Books, Religion, Science & Technology and Theory. 1 CommentRemigius De Souza’s second attempt to read Richard Dawkins’ ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’ fails:
Typically, like the western, and later the westernized societies, the book, too, boasts, as if no science did exist in the bygone eras before the Industrial Revolution.
The image of the engraved bone plaque illustrated here is 30,000 yBP old, from Blanchard, France. [...]
Jai Arjun Singh reviews a collection of stories which falls in the ‘Diaspora fiction’ category but isn’t ’stereotypical’:
Reading Karma and Other Stories is a reminder that we live in a world where people travel more extensively than at any earlier point in human history, where an increasing number of people are moving out of their [...]
Fellow Blogbhartian Bhupinder on the Universal Digital Library Project completing the digitization of 1.5million books.
A scan through the list of some books (on India, for example), makes one feel as if one is walking down the dusty aisle of an Indian university library. Most of the books are evidently old, belonging to the late 19th [...]
Of pirated books
Published by November 20th, 2007 in Books, Capitalism, Culture and Theory. 0 CommentsRimi B. Chatterjee examines a pirated book she bought at an intersection in Delhi.
Look also at the maths. A cover price of Rs 295 (the same as City of Love) yields to the publisher only about Rs 180 since booksellers buy at heavily discounted prices. If we remove from this price the author’s royalty (since pirates [...]
Minority Thoughts
Published by November 12th, 2007 in Books, Personal, Society and Women. 0 CommentsAmrita on why you’re never really one of Them:
On the one hand, I suppose I am Ms. Hindu. But here’s the thing about growing up as Ms. Hindu in India: it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. I guess it’s better than being Ms. Muslim in certain aspects (the law definitely takes better [...]
Shout disagrees on a few crucial points with First City’s review of Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People and tells us why it does not need the Booker.
I’m not surprised that Animal hasn’t won the Booker. It is not ‘expansive’ enough in that it does not speak of generic things that are of interest or [...]
“In 1060 a monastic republic was set up as a self administered area of Greece. Some 1700 monks and hermits live in twenty monasteries and lots of abbeys, sketes, cells and huts. Women are not allowed in the state even as visitors - not even heads of State. The Queen of England, for example, could [...]
Scholars Without Borders has a short review of the English translation of Hindi writer Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography, Joothan.
Translated into English for the first time from the original Hindi, Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography talks of growing up in a village near Muzzafarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, in an untouchable caste, Chuhra, well before the defiant term ‘Dalit’ was [...]
Sargentroy reviews Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns:
Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is a sensitively told if slightly uneven story about the crushing of the strong-willed Mariam’s spirit and the opportunity she gets, decades later, to validate her life by helping another innocent – a young girl named Laila, Rasheed’s second wife.[..] P.S. Based [...]
‘What might India have looked like?’
Published by August 29th, 2007 in Books, History and India. 0 CommentsReihan Salam reviews India after Gandhi:
No, my friends, the Kerala Communists were preferable to Nehru’s record of unmitigated Fabian failure, believe it or not. The fact that “even” Bombay industrialists backed central planning proves an old Partha Chatterjee point: I mean, it’s not all that shocking that an interventionist state was aligned with the “Big [...]
Richard Charkin, Chief Executive Officer of Macmillan, the publishers, has an interesting August 15 post on Macmillan’s association with India:
I’ve been visiting India for twenty-five years, always (apart from the occasional day or two by the beach) on publishing business. My first visit was to the Delhi offices of Oxford University Press India in Ansari [...]
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