He was not…smiling…But it did not…look like he wasn’t…smiling either.” Sheba considered the funny sentence, relishing it for a few moments, as she did in her childhood when she wanted to break a sentence and make it up again in reverse.’ The book is a slow unravelling of a family living in Kashmir. The unravelling…
In Bells of Shangri-la: Scholars, Spies, Invaders in Tibet (originally published in 1919), the author, an academic in West Bengal Education Service who attends a course in the Institute of Advanced Studies in Simla, reminisces on a bookstore there. Books are not only a priceless resource for him, he says, but when he was a child, he imagined books creating new stories as they lay on the shelves.
The generation of young Tibetans, born and brought up in India amidst the cultural diversity of the land is putting out a rich harvest of creative writing, which speaks to readers across the world telling them of what it means to exist in a state of perpetual exile, the rootlessness and sense of homelessness it entails along with the never-ending threat of cultural dilution and extinction which they face. Under the Blue Skies, an anthology compiled by the poet and Sahitya Akademi awardee Bhuchung D Sonam is one such book, which highlights how exilic sensibility partakes of both—freedom and despair
Gopinath Mohanty wrote his fictional masterpieces during the years just prior to and after Indian Independence. He was the first Odia and Indian writer to receive the Sahitya Akademi award, and the first among Odia litterateurs to receive the Jnanpith award. No wonder he is the most translated among modern Odia writers. After the international publication of the English translation of his cult novel Paraja in 1987* a steady stream of translations of his other major novels has poured in.
The first book is a collection of eight prize-winning entries in the category Creative Non-Fiction for children in the 9 to 12-year bracket of the Competition for Writers of Children’s Books organized by the Children’s Book Trust (CBT). Seven of the profiles are of Indians, while one is of a Kenyan, Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. The seven Indians are of varied backgrounds: a soldier, Param Vir Chakra winner Albert Ekka; Everester Arunima Sinha; solo-forest planter Abdul Kareem; Hockey Olympian Dilip Tirkey; visually impaired Jawahar Kaul; ‘India’s James Herriot’, Vet Dr. Naveen Kumar Pandey and sand artist Sudarsan Pattnaik.
Difficult to translate my son’s response on reading the new English translation of Sukumar Ray’s Gonph Chor (Catch that Moustache Thief!). Perhaps ‘How funny!’, but that does not entirely convey the element of surprise, affection, and familiarity that he feels. In the short poem, boro babu, the boss in an office, is frantically looking for his stolen moustache.