Everything the Light Touches is a quiet book. Very quiet. It has time-travelled from another world into the twenty-first century, where fiction often tries to match the breathless pace of action cinema in order to stay in the ring, as it were. Quiet is not the same as slow, though the narrative is not fast-paced. Quiet is restful, quiet is calm, and there is something deeply assured and assuring about the place of things that the light touches
While the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall moved some of the stereotypical goalposts and challengedbinarieswhich were intrinsic to the genre, the spy continued to be what has been called ‘one of our favourite mythical heroes’ in an increasingly complex and conflicted world.
Udayan Mukherjee’s successive works of fiction have a wider and wider canvas. His first novel, Dark Circles (2018) had a focus on a dysfunctional family: the mother goes away to live in an ashram, leaving behind her two sons, a twelve-year-old and a six-year-old. Mukherjee’s second novel, A Death in the Himalayas (2019), is a well-plotted murder mystery
Journalism is an ever-evolving chaos because its umbilical cord is attached to the socio-cultural-political movements of a society that needn’t necessarily have any design, formulae or pattern. It is an institution of discourses that are formed on shared beliefs, anomalies, conflicts, power dynamics and confluences. In India, the global and local practices of journalism merge to create a unique communication system that underlines her contemporary socio-cultural-political spectrum.
It is not every day that one comes across a revolutionary’s biography. Even though Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Joe Slovo, Ahmed Kathrada and Walter Sisulu, all have a memoir to their name, the majority of revolutionaries are, nevertheless, reticent when it comes to sharing their experiences and anecdotes of their adventurous life.
Devy covers an extensive expanse from genetics (David Reich’s Who We are and How We Got Here) to linguistics (David Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, Maheswar Neog’s Essays on Assamese Literatures) to literary theory. For him, Indo-Iranians entered the subcontinent with the horse-and-chariot and mingled with Out-of-Africa southerners producing the Mahabharata culture, shifting from pastoral to agrarian, urban and feudal society.