English has an uneasy existence in India, for we in India are not at home with it in spite of the Times Literary Supplement’s consistent advocacy of the recognition of Indian English. In India it is nobody’s language unless you would like to consider it the language of Anglo-Indians (Eurasians), but their number is small…
A Tamil proverb says that a half-nosed person is the king among noseless persons, This proverb can be applied with precision in the modern Tamil literary sphere where anything vaguely resembling political writing and everything that is made to seem revolutionary is hailed. The mere mention of a worker, revolution…
History, notoriously, is not about the past.-Amitav Ghosh in The Man Behind the MosqueVishwajyoti’s Ghosh’s Delhi Calm reminds one of the daily calm that is being witnessed along with the daily alarm of scams, jams, inflation and general deflation of spirits. The phrase ‘India shining’ was the buzzword a few years back…
Trickster City is an extraordinary collection of stories, anecdotes, observations, biographical fragments about arrival, about belonging, about identity and about the fragility of existence. It is about a Delhi that is known and yet unfamiliar. Moving away from the easily recognizable, historically rich and elitist neighbourhoods…
‘Delhi is whatever you make of it’, muses New Yorker Dave Prager in Delirious Delhi, the Capital’s latest travelogue-cum-survival guide. ‘Every person defines Delhi for his or her self, and no two Delhi struggles are the same. At any given point, your experience will be the exact oppo-site of my experience, and we’ll both be right.’..
Kitsch and homogenization have been two important techniques used in the reduction of the person to the mass man by the mass society of today.Kitsch means that products of mass culture in which the aesthetic and intellectual work is done for the recipient, making him a passive recipient rather than an active discoverer…