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Shahryar (1936-2012) was a name incarnate indeed; the prince perfect of modern Urdu poetry. He was a person of suave manners and a poet of soft tone and tenor who stood out as an embodiment of urbanity in life and literature. He looked at life with clinical detachment and at literature with passionate commitment. During a literary career spread over five decades (1960-2012) and an academic career spanning over three decades (1966-1996), he earned a name for himself as an academic, editor, poet, and a film lyricist while balancing all these roles against one another with great distinction…

Grief and mourning are some of the hardest emotions to write about. The ongoing experience of the pandemic has returned us to these elemental experiences of loss and reminded us that words still carry the anguish of sorrow and the power of cathartic healing. Rabindranath Tagore’s poignant lyrics in Smaran and Palataka are both personal as well as timeless; they speak to all those who have lost beloved family members and those who fear such losses…

What good can poetry do? A lot. Even for jaded sensibilities. When hype springs eternal in the human breast, poetry can be sobering. Poets have been reminding us for long that we are not all that human. Some of them fear a future when we are human. We lack the capacity, they say, to see one another as fully human, as more than ‘dreams or dots’. Some poets go a step further. They also try (almost in vain) to make us think and feel like the animals around us.

The book is an edited volume whose chapters unravel the socio-cultural and socio-economic dynamics of the development of sports in South Asia. However, as states of this region were former colonies of the British Empire, cricket has captured the bulk of the attention in the book. Alongside other genres of team and individual sports, ‘traditional sports’ have been adequately discussed. Interestingly, it has also manifested how sports have figured in myths, memories, fiction and cinema…