My first memories of watching the ‘Sultan of Swing’ Wasim Akram bowl to his opponents are from back in the day: Akram with his accurate and brutal left-arm swing pairing up with the toe-crushing yorkers coming out of the fast, pacy hands of his bowling partner Waqar Younis. Whether in Test whites or in Pakistani olive greens, the two gentlemen terrorized many a batsman in their heyday of glory.
Ve Nayab Auratein is remarkable in its expansive scope and commitment. As the title suggests, this memoir is an honest, frank and committed portrayal of ‘nayab’/inimitable women and men who have enriched Garg’s life and career as a writer. She often uses the word äfsana to describe this work, highlighting how literary imagination is deeply entwined with civic imagination. ‘I am a writer after all, and thus driven to enmeshing the real and the imaginary to create new worlds’ (Preface)
To finish reading a near 200-page novel in half a day is possible either because it’s been a gripping page-turner that the reader excitedly raced through, or else because it offered little for her to pause, think, to uncomplicate. Kunal Basu’s In an Ideal World is disappointingly the latter.
Sanskrit is an all-India language. All parts of this land have contributed to its ancient great literature, and none can claim a special place in this regard. Even so, the contribution from Kashmir over centuries is most remarkable—in quality and variety as well as value and volume. Once well known all over this country and beyond, it now deserves renewed notice, especially by Kashmiris themselves. Hence this brief note for Koshur Samachar.
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.