Perhaps it is inevitable that anthologies on Goa always tend to sound like they are addressed and written for an ‘outside’ world, an outside that can be found close to home, on Goa’s beachfront. Any region that in popular stereotype is ‘not like India’ is in danger of being condemned to permanent ethnography,
This exotically produced hardback is the kind of book one would not wish to waste much papyrus on. Filled with large size colour pictures of erotic art, presumably done in the miniature art format of the Mughal and Rajasthani schools, the reader-spectator who wishes for more academic information is left clueless about the time of composition and the regions to which these belong (there is only a list of collections from which these have been taken on p. 189).
Chaturvedi Badrinath’s The Mahabharata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition does what it promises in that it enquires into who we are and elicits ways in which the Mahabharata suggests that we might be better or, understand ourselves and our place in this world better.
The poster, by its very definition, is an ephemeral product, and has only recently acquired the status of popular art. Tracing its history in a long essay entitled ‘Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity’, Susan Sontag differentiates between the political poster
Inspired by A.K. Ramanujan’s essay ‘Food for thought’, the present anthology of South Asian Food Writing was whipped up to respond in part to fulfil his desire for a more diachronic study of food discourse though not trying to provide ‘the social history’ that he craved for.
Samrat Upadhyay, a Nepali author who went to the US at the age of 21 and who has been living there ever since, first studying and then teaching creative writing at various universities, hit big on the international literary scene with his debut Arresting God in Kathmandu, in 2001.