Images of India going to the polls in recent years have invariably tended to underscore the cynical lack of ideology and idealism on the part of leaders and opponents. The very real business of horse-trading and post-poll arithmetic has virtually obscured the possibility of ethico-moral politics—a potential that until the 1950s was a real one.
Annette Gordon-Reed won the 2009 Pulitzer history prize for this remarkable book, surely one of the most deserving recipients of that high honour.
Nayantara Sahgal, a prolific writer, has ben awarded the Sahitya Academy Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for other works of fiction. Two books have recently been reissued by Penguin—Storm in Chandigarh and A Situation in Delhi.
Chatura Rao’s Meanwhile, Upriver strikes us with its cryptic and yet engaging book cover. An expansive blue backdrop with a suggestive landscape, a monkey man crouching at one end, a fat woman clad in red, floating in the air at the other and both facing each other as if awaiting their meeting, duly summarizes the book.
The movie begins with a regurgitation of not just a half digested Bengali breakfast but also a foreboding of tragedy. Did I just say movie? Indrajit Hazra’s The Bioscope Man may well be a movie, which has been cinematographed in words, for such is the dexterity with which he casts his characters and rolls out his scenes.
Abha Dawesar’s Family Values is written from a perspective of the young boy ‘narrator’ whose unwitting existentialist narrative questions the essence of Indian family values.