Nirvan Shrivatsava steps into Shore Mount, a posh residential school, with the weight of his lineage on his young shoulders. Three generations of Shrivatsavas, including his parents and older brother, have been stars at the same school and Nirvan is uneasy with his legacy. Third Best is a coming of age novel that traces Nirvan’s life from Class VII to Class XII—from being a bullied junior to a respected senior…
The moment I read ‘Arun, Barun, Kironmala’, ‘Sukhu and Dukhu’ and ‘Saat Bhai Champa’ I had regressed to being a wide eyed seven year old listening breathlessly to my maternal grandmother, my Didima, weaving her magic around a Bengali rupkatha. She knew every story of Dakshinaranjan’s Thakurmar Jhuli…
The indefatigable Subhadra Sen Gupta! All children from eight to eighty (this phrase was made famous by Satyajit Ray) must be her fans. No one has done more to make history accessible and as much fun as her numerous books on the nationalist movement and leaders testify…
Published this year of the London Olympics INDIA at the Olympic Games is a timely and informative publication. It is also fun! It begins with a letter from Abhinav Bindra, India’s first individual Olympic gold medalist, where he says: ‘I believe every child should have the chance to play’.
We seldom realize, in thinking about human culture and history, how much we depend upon the written word for all we know about the past. Civilization is actually synonymous with writing and for all modern archaeological techniques, it is still writing alone that tells us how people in ancient times lives…
Harold Ross of New Yorker once asked James Thurber if he knew English. Thurber thought that Ross meant French or a foreign language. Ross repeated: ‘Do you know English?’ When Thurber said he did, Ross replied: ‘Goddamn it, nobody knows English.’…