Once in a while you come across a book that you need to mull over, savour, read in instalments in order to derive maximum pleasure and benefit, go back and forth over, and let sink into your soul. This is one such book, a born classic.
This is Imtiaz Dharker’s fourth volume of poetry. All her books carry her trade mark sketches, as aesthetic, striking, and at times as searing as her poems. One can but stand on the sidelines and admire such wealth of talent. She started sensationally with Purdah (1989), her first volume: Purdah is a kind of safety.
A surprising find, A Model House is a pot pourri, the author’s life and interests held up to a mirror for all to see. Alaknanda moves from being Al in the leafy suburbs of Wisconsin, living in a fairy-tale world of NRIs to Nanda at ABCD, a design and architecture school in Gujarat.
There is something about mandatory family jollifications that brings out the worst in one. Chris Carver, in Hari Kunzru’s third novel My Revolutions chooses Christmas lunch to tell his family that he is a Communist, that he was leaving the London School of Economics to which he had gained admission,
In 1898, when the sun never set on the British Empire, Kirparam, young and penniless, left his village on the Jhelum to end up, almost accidentally, in Kenya. (Tana is a river in Kenya.) There were thousands of men like him in India
The portrayal of same—sex relationships in 20th century Indian literature has been characterized, most frequently, by ambiguity or by an incipient homophobia. Critical responses to Ismat Chugtai’s Lihaaf and Ugra’s collection of short stories Chocolate…