When Indu Jain published her first collection of poems, titled 64 Poems, I had reviewed it in Hindi and remember to have said that she is a new poetess with promise. Her second collection is now available. I am glad that the promise is fulfilled. She has matured in her expression.Lecturer in Hindi…
It is notoriously easy to dislike Delhi. It is a fast, arrogant, ugly urban sprawl lacking basic infrastructure. It is populated largely by immigrants who are too busy getting ahead to notice the city or to make room for anyone. It is a city that forces its association on you and overwhelms you with a shameless brio…
The city of Delhi has lived and died many times, it has reinvented itself many times over. In every age, it has had the good and the bad-the mushairas have thrived alongside prostitution rings. Those that have inherited this historical sense know that the good and the bad coexist. They take the darker side of Delhi in their stride…
Kipling’s caricature of the hill-station memsahib is the one that has endured—frivolous, vain, sometimes adulterous, ‘a heartless bitch with an ever tinkling laugh’.Pat Barr has attempted to correct this image by describing the lives of a few women who came to India before the 1857 ‘mutiny’ and who were equal to their men-folk in courage…
As the old song does not have it, old soldiers never die nor fade away, but write memoirs. But let us grant it to them, they usually make a much better job of it than old civil servants. At least General Chaudhuri does. The book is written in crisp and cultivated English, which I attribute less to Sandhurst and the lesser English school…
It is seldom that one finds genuine pleasure in reviewing a book, but involvement in its theme can make the exercise rewarding. Ram K. Vepa belongs to the Indian Administrative service. The blurb describes his book as one written by a ‘practising administrator for the benefit of other administrators’…