2019
Purushottam Agrawal’s edited book on Nehru, provocatively titled Who is Bharat Mata?—among many other admirable qualities—has the grace of opportune timing. It comes at a precarious moment of our history when the memory of Nehru is dimming, almost irrevocably one.
Quichotte (pronounced key-shot), as the first page helpfully tells the reader, is a novel written by someone who very obviously watches a lot of TV, or so it seems. At its best the novel reflects an emergent way of thinking where there is very little differentiation.
‘I write to … express that part of women’s lives which is often buried and endured in silence.’ This line from Paramita Satpathy’s conversation with her translator says it all. Each of the fourteen stories in this collection showcases a different problem—each a common issue, rarely discussed.
This novel—and I’m using this classification as a temporary placeholder for an increasingly unstable yet resilient genre—is about a chanced upon manuscript dated 1724 which carries the confessions of Jack Sheppard, ‘an English folk hero and jail breaker.
When in doubt of your mettle, Rimli Gupta’s book, Karno’s Daughter makes for a good litmus test. If you feel exhausted on reading it, you are a wimp, but if the trials and tribulations of Buttermilk the protagonist buoy you, there is hope for you.
2019
In 1958, a young boy from a small town in Madhya Pradesh failed in Hindi in the school final examination, because of which he had to enrol in an agricultural college where there was no Hindi. He completed the course and taught in an agricultural college for many years after.
2019
Memento Mori is Latin for ‘remember you must die’. The recognition of mortality and the reiteration that life is lived in the midst of death is part of an old tradition iterated in cultures across the world through music, art, poetry, philosophy and writing.
Iqbal, aka Sufi and Aabid, the author, grew up in different households in Dongri, went to the same school and faced nearly similar circumstances at home. Their lives never intersected, and they did not witness each other’s trials and tribulations. Iqbal’s father.
There are not many fictional characters that acquire lives of their own. Sherlock Holmes comes to mind, as do Rumpole of the Old Bailey, Don Quixote, Cyrano de Bergerac and the inimitable Jeeves. The most recent entrant to this exalted and much-loved hall.
The title and subject of the book stirred up a deep sense of nostalgia in me. My siblings and I grew up in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra in our formative years. The names of dishes in this book—Kaande pohe, thali peeth, varanbhath, etc.