Daily Archives: August 28, 2017

I had never been much of a fan of Jug Suraiya’s column in the Sunday Times of India (STOI). It seemed dull, self indul-gent, trite and even pointless at times. His sense of humour escaped me and the satire was lost on me at the time when I did read his column.

This is a tough one: there are several collections of Munshi Premchand’s translations in the market, and to at-tempt a new ‘best of’ is a daunting challenge to take on.

This collection of stories (originally written in Tamil and translated into English by the author herself) brings to the reader slices of life tinged with courage, pathos, humour, in short, situations and expe-riences that we can identify with in a myriad ways.

Reading Literature Today by Tabish Khair and Sebastien Doubinsky is precisely eponymous, it delves into the matter of reading and readers, as well as of writing and writers. The world is as much a text in this book as the word is, and the writers show how the makers of the world text are pushing the word text to a bestselling culture, and a culture of silent (and violent) complacency.

To me, poetry is the recording of the emotional world structured by the intellectual reinforcements of indivi-dual subjectivity, through images, metaphors and sculpted words and phrases of specific aesthetic relevance.

It is rarely that one comes across a full fiction based on music. In Indian Bhasha literature, one immediately remembers S.L. Bhyrappa’s Saraswati Samman winning Kannada novel Mandra and Bani Basu’s Bengali novel Gandharvi.

In the post-Mandal debates, one commonsensical understanding has emerged that the dalits (Scheduled Castes/Tribes) are more disadvantaged and deprived than the Other backward Castes/Classes (OBCs) and therefore their demands for reservations can be justified but not of the affluent OBCs.

Until sometime back caste was viewed as a kind of odd subject, something which primarily concerned scholars interested in the traditional social order of Indian society, social anthropologists and sociologists.

The book under review is a vital addition to the scholarly writings on Indian political economy, though sadly it engages with the familiar puzzle regarding why and how poverty persists among various social groups of India even after more than six decades of India’s freedom.