The story takes place in 1998, in the sleepy village of Sittanavasal in Tamil Nadu, where Sriveni has led a happy and sensitive childhood with her parents and brothers, aiding her midwife grandmother, and acquiring deep knowledge about plants and herbs.
Brevity is said to be the keynote of a short story, and length admittedly impacts the range of matter dealt with in a brief narrative as well as its treatment. Nevertheless, defining a short story merely in terms of its length does not take into account the flexibility of the genre or the often-profound impression made by a narrative that, though brief, encapsulates an entire experience
In Schrodinger’s Cat, the famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics, it is postulated that if you seal a cat in a box along with poison or something that could kill it, you won’t know whether the cat is dead or alive unless you open the box.
The title story of the volume ‘Alka’draws on human bonds that turn out to be both heart-warming and heart-rending. It is about non-blood ties that become deep and intimate, while the closest mother-son blood relationship turns awry and unnatural without any provocation. The author does not moralize, he just presents the situation with poignant empathy.
Krishnagopal Mallick (1936-2003) was born and brought up in Kolkata, and the limit of his territorial domain is essentially College Square and its surrounding area in the city. In his depictions of the mundane and the ebb and flow of daily life
The genesis of the vernacular turn in Indian historical studies can be attributed to a crucial inquiry: ‘Was there history writing in India before the British colonial intervention?’ As Partha Chatterjee puts it in his Introduction to the volume History in the Vernacular