As a religion Islam is under¬stood by few and misunder¬stood by many. It is indeed tragic that the intellectual con¬tent of Islamic ideology is being ignored, although Islam expects its followers to be well-informed and knowledgeable. The followers of Islam appear to be ensnared by the ritualis¬tic part of their faith rather than the ideals so beautifully expressed in the Quranic text.
Man is ultimately alone—and defeated. Through a dense particularity of circumstance this novel breathes a loneliness that imperceptibly takes the shape of universal human ex¬perience. The narrator is a Russian, exiled in India. He is without family, having lost his first wife and child in an acci¬dent and his second, an Indian, through divorce; without friends, having deliberately warded off friendship in an at-tempt to preserve his identity from being swallowed up by the land of exile.
The name of Trilochan and the sonnet form are synony¬mous in contemporary Hindi poetry. He has few peers in this realm, partly because not many have ventured there. In other Indian languages, too, there have been protagonists of the sonnet, but none of them seem to have staked their poetic career upon it.
Seventeen years ago David Werner was a 30 year old biology teacher in the United States interested in the birds and plants of mountain areas. His travels took him to the mountains of Western Mexico where he came to know and love the mountain people.
For someone sympathetic to hedonism, the cultural pro¬ducts of a society where hedone is an honoured goddess are endlessly fascinating. To me, the United States of America since the early sixties is one such society. Here the impact of hedonism has been greater than that of most other ‘isms’ which propel human lives.
Very seldom do intellectuals run ahead of political actors, particularly in the sphere of international cooperation. Problems of regional cooper¬ation among countries located in the Indian Ocean littoral have received scant scholarly attention so far, largely be¬cause the political leaders of these countries have not pro¬ceeded beyond rhetorics to put together an infrastructure of regional cooperation.