Daily Archives: September 7, 2017

Not self-expression but expressiveness: The languageways of Heart’s Beast.

Apoet’s selected poems from multiple books and a lifetime’s work, implies an intense self-consciousness and a special focus on future readers. Selected poems are not really for one’s existing readership.

I reckon that blaming people fixes nothing. You’re the only person who is going to sort you out. No one else really can—or really cares, enough. That is what Nepalis know—better than anyone. That’s our western disease. Don’t take responsibility. Take on a lawyer!
—Jane Wilson- Howarth

Opening this book is like flying on a magic carpet across fabled lands and landscapes. It is a compilation of five legends drawn from the main regions of the Indus Valley, spanning the Himalayas to the desert sands of the Arabian Sea, in what is now Pakistan, encompassing Khyber, Pakhtunkwa, Punjab, Baluchistan, and Sindh, embracing a plural culture.

How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy is the story of Sumana, who, tired of the violence, greed, hatred, pace of life of the present day ‘human’ life looks for an alternative for which she turns to nature—the life of a tree—to find solace. She recounts her journey with all its doubts and fears, the impact of works of other writers, painters, scholars on her as she moved towards achieving her goal.

Imagine living in a country where the state decided everything about your life—the number of kids you have, how you get pregnant, how much food will be rationed to you, your profession, your language and religion.

The Partition of India was a cataclysmic event that rent the fabric of the nation, causing scars that persist into the present. The corrosive, debilitating effects of colonialism were temporary, but they ended in a brutal carnage, the real and metaphorical mutilations of which were almost impossible to erase from the collective unconscious.

In its broadest sense a masque is a pageant—a brilliant amalgamation of dazzling music, dance and colour. Zelaldinus (Jalaluddin Akbar) in his days as the Mughal emperor, is supposed to have held many masques in Fatehpur Sikri, the red stone capital he built in the Aravali range, beyond Agra. There, the women of his

With a narrative steeped in the annals of Kumaon history, Namita Gokhale’s Things to Leave Behind, may well be a historical novel; but then again, so deeply interlaced are the political fortunes of this land at the threshold of modernity with the history of the Pant family that pigeonholing appears, at best, an exercise in reductionism.

‘13” is an auspicious number for this collection of short stories by author Shane Joseph. The
number ‘13’ conjures up feelings of foreboding and unease, which is exactly what Joseph delivers in this assembly of stories. Throughout the telling of the ‘13’ tales Joseph introduces us to a myriad characters wrestling with their own personal demons; some mental, some physical and some the very environment they inhabit.