On the evening of November 17,1962, between seven o’clock and eleven o’clock, three senior General Officers sat in the Operations Room of HQ IV Corps at Tezpur, arguing among themselves endlessly whether four Infantry Division should be ordered to withdraw from Sela without offering battle…
Orientalism is thriving in 2012, albeit in a more subtle and refined form. The proverbial ‘white man’s burden’ is no more about a civilizing mission, but instead to fulfill a ‘responsibility to protect’, from the terror of the irrational other.
In the foreword to his novel A Life Incomplete the legendary Punjabi author Nanak Singh narrates the story of the very conception of his novel and interestingly, he calls the foreword ‘More Fact than Foreword’. To me this story is actually a masterstroke of the story teller’s fictional strategy:
While documenting the creative and critical expressions of Malayali dalits from the beginnings of the 20th century to recent times, the volume under review remains sceptical of upper caste consciousness and historiography.
The birth of the Tamil Book, if it indeed can be narrated, it is here and comprehensively done at that, by Venkata-chalapathy. Backed by meticulous research, at times with finer details verging on the fastidious, the writer has done a yeoman service to the world of the Tamil word.
The Moslems are Coming: Encounters with a Desktop Terrorist published by Harper Collins India in 2012 is a revised and updated adaptation of Azad Essa’s first book—Zuma’s Bastard published two years ago in 2010.