I had never been much of a fan of Jug Suraiya’s column in the Sunday Times of India (STOI). It seemed dull, self indul-gent, trite and even pointless at times. His sense of humour escaped me and the satire was lost on me at the time when I did read his column…
This is a tough one: there are several collections of Munshi Premchand’s translations in the market, and to at-tempt a new ‘best of’ is a daunting challenge to take on. But Rakhshanda Jalil takes on this tricky task ably: her translations of seventeen short stories…
This collection of stories (originally written in Tamil and translated into English by the author herself) brings to the reader slices of life tinged with courage, pathos, humour, in short, situations and expe-riences that we can identify with in a myriad ways…
Going by this illuminating statement, let us look at the poems themselves. The very first poem gives the reader a foretaste of what is to come. ‘Egomobile: An Ad’ is like a mock-advertisement of an automobile. Almost all human preoccupations and passions are squee-zed into this tight structure…
To me, poetry is the recording of the emotional world structured by the intellectual reinforcements of indivi-dual subjectivity, through images, metaphors and sculpted words and phrases of specific aesthetic relevance. Even Wordsworth’s well-known descriptions of poetry…
It is rarely that one comes across a full fiction based on music. In Indian Bhasha literature, one immediately remembers S.L. Bhyrappa’s Saraswati Samman winning Kannada novel Mandra and Bani Basu’s Bengali novel Gandharvi…