Mehr Tarar’s book Do We Not Bleed? Reflections of a 21st-Century Pakistani in several ways breaks the pattern and monotony prevalent in the post- 9/11 discourse on Pakistan. The book is a digression as this narrative is not solely tangled in the hard-core security paradigm on which most of the recent published works on Pakistan are modelled.
The ten member-states of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) is, at times, an inspiration and, at other times, a house divided. That is how most outsiders would invariably react to the organization. Criticisms fly high when the grouping seems ineffective in handling regional issues such as human rights atrocities perpetrated by regimes from within the regional bloc.
This is a documentary study—compilation of 2523 documents spread over five volumes—introduced and edited by Avtar Singh Bhasin, formerly of the Historical Division of the Ministry of External Affairs. The 60-page introduction recapitulates the relationship covered by the documentation.
This book is about three riots—two in eastern UP, one each in Mau (2005) and Gorakhpur (2007) districts, and the third one in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli (2013) districts in western UP. It largely draws upon secondary sources, interviews, discussions and field work, and attempts to address changes in political economy and communal mobilization in eastern and western UP, the former in the urban and the latter in rural settings.
Matthew Mutter’s book examines four literary writers—Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, WB Yeats and WH Auden—for the intricacies of modernist relations to secularism in this erudite and well-researched work. He argues, following Charles Taylor’s ‘subtraction theory’, that these writers constructed ‘new imaginaries’ to modify, redistribute, and privatize religious ideas in a ‘new, secular cosmology’
(p. 8).
At a time when trolls act as gate-keepers to power and a motley group of hecklers, vigilantes, and vandals define what is permissible to speak, eat, dress, and consociate, definitions and redefinitions of democracy, even if qualified as Indian democracy, are required.
Armed conflicts have a devastating impact on children, and despite records and documentation of the use and abuse of children in conflicts, the international community has been unable to create measures for safety, security or adequate rehabilitation for such children.
Those who partake of Sahitya Akademi’s frequent hospitality at the India International Centre in Delhi may not as frequently find use for the Akademi Library. And those who do use the Library may not know of the various bibliographic aids prepared or published from time to time by the Akademi.
Thumri’s relationship with dance is evi¬dent even in its name which many musicians consider to derive from the word ‘thumak’—roughly translatable as the gait of the dancer, at once graceful, coquettish, sensuous. And almost all thumri singers will also say that thumri is (gale se bhav batana, gale se nirat karnd), showing bhav, dancing with the voice. So at the very deepest, inmost level, in its essence, thumri is dance.
An enormous metallic container of an unknown alloy, and a perfect cube at that, is uncovered during excavations for a deep underground gravity experiment. A scientific curio to be left to scientists to examine? But the container has strange carvings and symbols on its surface and is self evidently a relic of the past which only the archeologists should be able to decipher. Given this start a straightfor¬ward sci-fi tale would have a joint task force start work without much ado.
There is something strangely appropriate about Anjolie Ela Menon’s painting which is featured on the cover of Mrs. Baig’s book. A female, oddly nun-like, with a portrait on her lap, and another on a locket, stands framed in a window, seeing through shut eyes. Mrs. Baig is, of course, far less detached in her observa¬tions on the people she has known but she is at a secluded distance when she writes.
Premchand had gained national and inter¬national recognition as a great short story writer long before he died in 1936. The translations of his works, apart from being published in almost all the regional languages of India had also come out in Russian and Japanese. That Penguin has included a collection of Premchand’s short stories in its first batch of books to be published in India is a fitting tribute to a literary genius whose works revolutionized fiction-writing both in Hindi and Urdu.