Professor Carstairs is best known in India for his study of personality formation in a traditional Hindu society—The Twice Born. That study dealt with the social determinants of a ‘normal’ personality and relied mostly on an imaginative use of the clinical method.
‘Are you Woodward or Bernstein?’‘Neither, they are both in America’, replied John, thus killing, once and for all, an altogether inappropriate comparison between the Watergate reporters and the authors of Delhi Under Emergency. It was perhaps inevitable that this superb piece of investigative journalism, a rare specimen in India, by two young and relatively unknown journalists, would be compared to the Watergate story…
As a little child my mother told me the story of the founding of Panja Saheb: Guru Nanak once came into wilderness with his disciple. It was hot. The disciple thirsted for water. But water was nowhere except on top of a hill where a dervish lived.
The political appropriation of Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy has been going on for decades. Now the trend has spread to unlikely quarters. Gandhi peersat us from posters, sharing space with his ideological opponents. Even artifacts associated with him, like his spectacles, have been used as logo in government propaganda. Commercialization has been a parallel process, initially for marketing products purportedly of cottage industries, and then for a whole range ofother things. The powers that be appreciate the brand value of the
name Gandhi.
According to Elizabeth Cook, ‘myths are about gods, legends are about heroes, and fairy tales are about woodcutters and princesses.’
Here is a collection of sixteen short stories including one by Ka Naa Subramanyam himself. Not all are short stories—at least one is an epic in a terse form: Ramapada Choudhury’s Festal.